TV Scholar #4: Professor Amy Holdsworth

On The Traitors, television as a technology of care, and autobiographical academic writing.

The TV Scholar interview series brings real-life television scholars to my newsletter to discuss their journey to television studies, share nuggets of wisdom from their research, and obviously, chit-chat about television itself. This time I interviewed Amy Holdsworth, Professor of Television, Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Glasgow about her 2021 book, On Living with Television.

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I just got back from in Mexico where I escaped into your book by the pool on most days while sipping margaritas, which was wonderful. My friends were all reading beachy fiction books and I’m here reading an academic text — but I loved it.

That's commitment, reading it by the pool!

What are you watching lately and enjoying on TV?

Well, I just finished watching the adaptation of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the third book that they made into the series. It just reminded me how much I love period drama and how little of it there is on television. There was an interesting piece in the press here about how the stars and the director all had to take pay cuts in order to get it made because the BBC couldn't find someone to co-fund it. It’s just…there's so many feelings. A lot of the time I'm watching it and I'm thinking, I have no idea what's going on, and I've no idea who this person is, or that person. But I am here for the feelings and for Mark Rylance as Cromwell, which is a beautiful thing to watch. That's my highbrow choice. The other thing that we finished watching is the most recent series of Traitors in the UK. The first two series of the UK Traitors, in my mind, were the best reality television ever made. This was still good, it was just a B rather than an A.

Traitors has become such a phenomenon on this side of the pond too, and any time the American version is brought up into conversation, someone has to interrupt to say the UK version is so much better.

Of course! I mean, they're fascinating to watch together and just to see the difference in the kind of conventions and performance modes of US and UK reality TV. I watched some of the Australian one as well. That was really interesting because I think all the contestants think that they're on Australian Survivor so the game is played in a very different way. They forget that it's a game of deception rather than allyship.

The Traitors US (Peacock, S2)

Interesting. When did you realize that researching TV and working in TV studies could become a legitimate thing that you could do in this life?

I started off doing film studies and English literature, but I watched a lot of television. I’ve always watched a lot of television since I was a kid, but I only really discovered it as a discipline when I started my PhD. I had never really studied it before, so it wasn't really until I started my project that I discovered all this writing on television, and particularly feminist scholarship on television which I absolutely loved straight away. It really spoke to me and my experience of the medium and the questions I was interested in around the domestic, family, and memory.

It was so much more exciting than film studies because there was so much more that hadn't been said or theorized. It felt like there was a real opportunity within the discipline to bring your own voice to it and your own ideas. I also loved that there was a very small band of scholars, and we were all very tight. It's been a very welcoming and inclusive discipline for me.

I love asking that question, because so rarely do you hear that the starting point was television studies itself. Like there's always a different route, you know?

It's funny because when we teach our television studies students here at Glasgow, you spend what must seem to them like weeks and weeks going on about legitimation, that television is a legitimate object of study. A couple of our students a few years ago were like, Why do you spend so much time doing that? We're all such anxious scholars who feel like we constantly need to validate ourselves and explain ourselves. Maybe there's been a generational shift, but I think it’s a thing that bonds people together within the discipline as well.

What are your foundational TV shows?

Outside of children’s television on the BBC and ITV, it would be the Australian soaps like Neighbours and Home that played a really big role in my after school routines. I remember being the first of all my friends to watch Neighbours in the mid to late 80s because I'd been off ill with mumps, and going back to the kids in the playground like Oh my god, there’s this amazing new show. And then as I got a bit older, it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Big Brother. Your whole summer would be taken up by watching Big Brother and watching the live feed, or watching the spin-off shows and talking about it, and we'd throw Big Brother parties where you had to dress up as the various housemates and drink excessive amounts of alcohol. There have been periods of my life when I've had a really difficult time, and an episode of Big Brother every night would just be something that would keep me going.

I love that. Do you have any feelings about the recently announced Buffy reboot with Chloé Zhao attached to direct?

I guess…I’m willing to give it a go. As much as I’d really love to be back in that world again, there is always those risks of going back, isn't there? Things not working out the same way, not producing that same set of feelings. There's so much really good YA fantasy writing, why not do something new? I’d love to see an adaptation of Naomi Novik’s work or something.

Agreed. Speaking of books, my experience of reading On Living with Television was that I was pleasantly surprised by the vulnerability for an academic text. What inspired the more autobiographic nature of your writing, and bringing in memories like of your late sister?

It was something I'd experimented with in my first book about memory. There were a few occasions in that book where I shared little moments about my own memories of television in small vignettes peppered across the book. I was interested in doing that in a more sustained way. What I wanted to explore was ideas about intimacy, duration, familiarity, and repetition, and how those characteristics of television are mapped across a life course. One way to do that would obviously be a longitudinal audience study. But I don't have the money to do that, don't have the time to do that. So instead, I used my own life to explore those lifelong relationships with television. I was also inspired by the work of feminist writers and reader response theory, and thinking about how that might work in the context of television.

My Brilliant Friend (HBO, S4)

The project really began with the chapter about my younger sister and her use of Disney videos; this is where my interest in memory and television and family and domesticity and care all comes from. It was kind of like the origin story for my academic career, really. There was that political point as well of paying attention to different kinds of spectatorship. The scholarship on disability studies there was really important for me to begin to explore Alice's life and how important television was in her life, but how it also revealed so much about television as a technology of care.

In your chapter on TV Dinners, I was really absorbed by all your references to watching television as someone living alone, and your experience of TV as a solitary experience. It's something I reflect on a lot as someone chronically single and on my own a lot. What's the role of television in your life these days?

It's very different now. Part of the message of the book, and it may seem simple and obvious, was that we watch in different ways at different times. I'm now married and live with a partner and a cat and it’s really different experience again and we have to make compromises about what we watch, which I hate having to do. Or we'll start watching something and then my husband will be like, No, I didn't like that, I don't want to carry on watching. So then I have to find a different time of day to watch it. I definitely don't watch as much television as I used to. I watch more sport than I've ever watched in my life, because my my partner likes watching sport. I've discovered a love of snooker — watching it, not playing it.

I just think there are so many ways in which, when we face different things in our lives, that relationship with television shifts again. I was ill last year for a long period of time and I really struggled to watch any television. Alongside the illness I was very anxious and I just couldn't watch any TV. It was quite distressing, I literally couldn’t sit down and watch or concentrate on anything. I actually ended up playing computer games. I found them more immersive and I could completely lose myself from the world, whereas in that push and pull of television your mind can wander a bit, it just wasn't cutting it for me. I'm happy to report I've gotten over that, and I'm catching up on a lot of things.

I’m so glad you’re out of that! As a final closing question, what's a show that you recently abandoned, and why?

My husband and I tried to watch Gangs of London. We watched the first episode, and he was like, no. But I'm here for the violence and the silliness. Another show we tried to watch was a Harlan Coben adaptation on Netflix. It was just so terrible. I don't have time to waste. I tend to be the sort of person that, if I've started it, I'm going to finish it. But there are definitely shows I haven't returned to after a season. I never returned to Yellowjackets. I'm just going pretend the second season of Bad Sisters doesn't exist because it was perfect as one season.

I regret watching Agatha All Along, though. I was just like, why am I watching this? That was a waste of six hours of my life or whatever. But it's a bit like the experience of waiting for a bus, isn't it? At what point do you abandon it? At what point do you go, Nah, I'm out.

Or as soon as you leave the bus stop, the bus arrives and you miss it.