This book explores for the first time the rise of one of Britain's least-recognised but most significant television genres. Working within the frame of public intellectual theory, it tells the story and analyses the means by which 'unusual kinds of star' became Britain's TV intellectuals and have developed as a genre for over 65 years.



Names included here are AJP Taylor, Kenneth Clark, Jacob Bronowski,, Jonathan Miller, Simon Schama, Marcus du Sautoy, Niall Ferguson, Mary Beard, Alice Roberts, Pam Cox, Brian Cox, David Olusoga, Janina Ramirez and Alastair Sooke, all of whom have starred in their different ways, combining within their productions an outstanding combination of television creativity and intellect for a huge international audience.



Built deeply into the assumptions of these television intellectuals have been understandings about civilisation itself, veering from Kenneth Clark's fear for its survival in his 1969 BBC series Civilisation, to the fear of it (in the form of colonialism) in the reworking of Clark's concept, now called Civilisations (2018) by the BBC and Civilizations by PBS in the USA.



Finally, in its Coda the book explores in the era of climate change continuing BBC/PBS assumptions about 'civilisation' by way of First Nations 'deep-history'.

Extending a poetics of hybrid analog–digital interface developed in Janky Materiality (forthcoming from punctum books), this chapter explores contemporary discourse about the application of AI writing tools in composition. We consider deep-learning neural networks in terms of human–machine interface, the literary history of robotics, machine consciousness, and labor. An analysis of the 2022 feature film M3GAN further animates the stakes for these concerns and the ways they are projected through arts and culture. How close are we to developing computer intelligence, and as we approach that point, what are the emerging ethics of working with potentially sentient machines? Meanwhile, are we modeling a mode of human engagement as machine learning (or the production and parsing of content)? Is this what singularity has come to mean? To think this through in terms of a socially and historically engaged poetics and writing practice, we present the concept of discontent (or dis-content) to describe both a resistance to language as generic consumer content in the language machine and an emergent condition of the thinking machine consigned to service. To bring this back to the question of analog–digital interface: Can we use these tools as writers without being used by their developers?

This chapter explores the transformative potential of interactive storytelling as an educational tool, blending creative narrative with game design to foster engaging learning experiences. The author details her work within an academic gaming lab, where visual storytelling and interactive narratives are integrated into educational gaming applications. By leveraging digital platforms, such as VR and AR, the chapter demonstrates how narrative techniques traditionally used in literature and film can be adapted for interactive media to enhance information retention and emotional engagement. The discussion includes case studies such as a VR vision therapy game and the development of Escape to Apple Wick Hill, a game that combines historical context with immersive gameplay to educate users about wildlife conservation and cultural heritage. The narrative approach is framed as a “Trojan Horse” method, where storytelling serves as an accessible entry point to complex topics, encouraging empathy and deeper understanding. Furthermore, the chapter examines the interplay between narrative structure and game mechanics, emphasizing the importance of visual development and user interface design in maintaining immersion. Ultimately, the work advocates for a multidisciplinary approach that marries the humanities with STEM, highlighting the value of creative storytelling in reshaping educational paradigms.

This essay/play in its experimental form shares observations of, and tips for, the use of visible techniques for conveying a fictional character’s personality in digital writing. We begin with a brief introduction to the practice of netprov. Netprov is networked, improvised literature, in which friends and strangers collaborate—roleplaying in real time—to create sophisticated narratives. After touching on the colonial legacy of standardized spelling, we share some of the ASCII (basic letters, numbers, symbols) orthographic techniques drawn from everyday use that are popular in netprovs. These include: intentional misspelling, intentional agrammaticality, nonstandard capitalization, neologisms, abbreviations, ellipses and other indicators of timing and hesitation, and typographic emojis. We also discuss some formal techniques from other genres that have made their way into netprovs: visible stage directions, poetic line breaks, computer code, artifacts of technical glitches, social media popularity counters, autocorrect, and the beloved #secretdiary statements that are the written equivalent of a stage actor’s “asides” to the audience. We end with some enthusiastic, educated guesses about the continuing evolution of writing.

How do we experience time in videogames, and what are the social and political implications? When we understand the experience of time as a philosophical construct with its own aesthetics, mechanics, and politics we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the politics of flow, the dominant aesthetic in the experience of game-time. As games become an increasingly culturally dominant form, awareness of the politics and impacts of the computer medium and technological antecedents such as the clock are important to examine if we want to understand the meaning of the time we spend having fun today.

This chapter critically examines live action roleplay (larp) as both a narrative medium and a transformative social practice. Drawing on decades of experience as a practitioner and scholar, the author deconstructs traditional media definitions by foregrounding the ephemeral and communal nature of larp. The discussion traces the evolution of larp—from its improvisational roots to the emergence of codic campaign formats—and highlights how participants co-create diegetic spaces that challenge conventional narrative structures. Emphasis is placed on the management of a “diegetic commons,” wherein safety mechanics, consent protocols, and calibration techniques serve to negotiate the boundary between in-diegesis and extradiegetic interventions. The chapter situates these practices within broader debates in narratology and media studies, arguing that larp not only disrupts centralized authorship but also functions as a reflective critique of power dynamics and systemic oppressions. By engaging with regional variations and alternative stylistic approaches, the work invites further scholarly inquiry into how interactive, performance-based media can redefine storytelling and social contracts in contemporary culture.

Learning professionals often use gameful approaches (game-based learning, game-based assessments, gameful simulations, gamification, etc.) to address engagement and motivation in the corporate workplace learning world. Unfortunately, many of these attempts fail due to a lack of understanding of the art and science behind the complexity of game design. Even gamification, for example, is often reduced to points, badges, and leaderboards. If learning professionals want to think of gameful approaches as complex systems rather than a random collection of fun elements, they need tools, specifically (a) a taxonomy to speak the same language and (b) deliberate play using the taxonomy. Deliberate play allows learning professionals to consistently dissect a game to reveal its complexity before they design their own experiences. In workplace learning, this tool needs to be both evidence-based and practical. This chapter explores such a tool, inspired by the paper “Toward a Taxonomy Linking Game Attributes to Learning: An Empirical Study” ( Bedwell et al., 2012 ). We will use this tool as a vehicle to take us on a gameful adventure, and this chapter will provide turn-by-turn guidance on how to navigate the journey of dissecting a game. In order to use the tool, we need a game to dissect—one that most learning professionals in the workplace are familiar with. Therefore, the chapter will attempt to treat the end-to-end learning design project as a multi-player game in the workplace. Think of a project you are working on, the process you follow, the people you work with, the conditions and limitations … What if that work of a learning professional was a multi-player social game? What are the goals and rules? Who are the main players? Who is the player? How are the players represented? What is the nature of the game world? How do the players encounter conflict and challenges? What is the communication system? How often does the system communicate with the players? These and many more dissecting questions will be discussed within the nine game taxonomy categories in the chapter.

Iconic photographs of low-lying Pacific islands surrounded by vast oceans are widely used by international news media to symbolize the threat that climate change poses to coastal areas around the world. However, such images often lack human presence, reducing these islands to abstract representations of ecological fragility and obscuring the active roles of local communities in climate advocacy and adaptation. By examining iconic photographs of ‘sinking’ Pacific islands through a narrative lens, this article offers two key contributions to the study of climate change visuality. First, it explores how these images evoke the ‘doomed islands’ master narrative, a colonial construct that frames Pacific islands as inherently vulnerable and reliant on external intervention. Second, it investigates how the Pacific Climate Warriors, a youth-led grass-roots network of activists from across the Pacific, engage in visual counter-storytelling on Instagram, thus offering rare insight into how frontline communities in the Global South use visual social media to represent climate change. A quantitative content analysis shows that the Pacific Ocean is recast as a connector rather than an asocial void or an isolating expanse – a discursive shift that opens alternative narrative possibilities. In particular, it enables a line of emplotment that traces climate change impacts in the Pacific to fossil fuel consumption in the Global North, rather than to inherent geographic features. At the same time, it allows Pacific Islanders to appear not as passive victims but as active agents engaged in a transnational movement for climate justice.

This article presents neo-liberal notions of knowledge and market and explains why this is important for the functioning of digital platforms. Neo-liberals are concerned with everyday knowledge of the common people, their mental states and feelings, not intellectual knowledge. The satisfaction of consumers and prediction of their future preferences is the basis for creating Big Data. Neo-liberals utilize it, fully cognisant of its status as a failed post-truth mechanism for interpreting everyday knowledge. The market functions through individual use and mutual adjustment of limited personal knowledge, of customers as well as producers. It is not free but cybernetically ordered market. Hayek defines market as a communication system that is digesting dispersed information. Millions of minds are doing data generation and processing. That way, neo-liberals see all digital platforms, including Wikipedia, as markets. Classical encyclopaedias are centrally controlled and expert driven, while neo-liberal markets create knowledge through crowds’ ‘voluntary exchange’ and ‘spontaneous cooperation’. The fundamental difference is that encyclopaedias were an Enlightenment project, while Wikipedia is producing recycled intellectual and layman’s knowledge without any political or revolutionary engagement.

Documentary films have emerged as potent tools for shaping public discourse and influencing societal and political agendas. Despite the growing acknowledgement garnered by Portuguese cinema at international festivals, its impact on public debate still needs to be explored. This article undertakes a comprehensive examination of how the financial crisis and austerity measures have been portrayed in Portuguese documentary production from 2010 to 2020. The analysis corpus includes 169 feature-length documentary synopses. We conducted a content analysis of films whose synopses explicitly mentioned crisis or austerity and addressed issues such as poverty, unemployment, the elderly, loneliness, territorial asymmetries and migrations. The narrative, visual choices, sound, time and space portrayed and the approach to the crisis were aspects considered in the analysis of the films. The findings reveal a limited emphasis on the portrayal of the crisis, which is seen from different perspectives, times and spaces as if permeating the national daily life. Defective distribution mechanisms also limit the ability of films to impact public debate.