"Television bigots and transitional audiences in the sixties cultural revolution"
Open Lectures Winter 2013/14
- Date: Dec 19, 2013
- Time: 02:15 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Christina von Hodenberg (Queen Mary University of London)
- Christina von Hodenberg is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. She has written widely on the social and cultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. She has taught at the universities of Berkeley and Freiburg and held fellowships at Harvard, Université de Montréal and the Zentrum für Zeitgeschichtliche Forschung in Potsdam. Her PhD is from Bielefeld and her MA from Munich.
- Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
- Room: Library Hall
For more details please contact buethe(at)mmg.mpg.de.
The 1960s and 1970s were a time of heightened conflict about race and sexual norms in the United States, Britain and West Germany. The same decades saw a television comedy format with a racist, bigoted anti-hero (known as Archie Bunker, Alf Garnett or ‘Ekel Alfred’) come to be extremely successful with audiences. Everywhere the sitcom was broadcast, it triggered extensive public discussion of television’s responsibilities in regard to racism and homosexuality. Producers sold the shows as a tool to undermine prejudice. But many observers worried about inflammatory effects and viewers taking the satire at face value. This paper looks at actual audience responses: Was it possible to combat prejudice with TV comedy?