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Between the 1950s and 1970s, Nigel Kneale—one of the BBC’s first staff writers—glimpsed a chilling future for British television. Through Gothic-inflected dramas, he foresaw the substitution of televisual mediation for reality, the rise of reality TV as both spectacle and social control, and the prioritisation of technological innovation over art, ethics, and even human life.

Half a century on, his predictions feel unnervingly realised. Reality television has been linked to dozens of participant suicides. Figures like Jimmy Savile continue to haunt the medium’s reputation long after their deaths. Working-class viewers, despite being television’s most devoted audience, remain the demographic most likely to distrust and feel misrepresented by public service broadcasters. And during the COVID-19 lockdowns, television briefly became what Kneale imagined: a substitute for reality itself.
Yet, alongside these dystopian trajectories, British broadcasting has also produced a countercurrent of dramas that reclaim the Gothic as a radical force—works that critique television’s exploitative structures and expose its ideological agendas. This lecture surveys seventy years of such texts, grouped under the term Televisual Gothic.
We begin with Kneale’s own The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59), The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), and The Stone Tape (1972), before tracing the genre’s revival through Doctor Who, the infamous Ghostwatch (1992), and more recent works like Red Rose (2022) and Inside No. 9.
In exploring these texts, we ask how the Televisual Gothic has imagined television as both a site of horror and a means of resistance—revealing the medium’s power to distort reality, exploit its subjects, and reinforce class hierarchies, but also to challenge and subvert them.

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