‘Europudding’ or European co-production? The archaeology of the television series Eurocops (1988–94)

This chapter examines the case of Eurocops, a crime TV show produced by the European Coproduction Association – composed by one private and six public service broadcasting (PSB) channels of seven European countries – from 1988 to 1994 (71 episodes). Although it is one of the first European co-productions of its kind, Eurocops was a critical and commercial fiasco: what were its faults? Following Ib Bondebjerg’s methodology, this article aims at exploring the failure of this ‘Europudding’. The first section places Eurocops in the media landscape of the late 1980s and explains why this series can be considered as a ‘Europudding’ trying to enforce Europe’s cultural sovereignty against the North American hegemony. The second section analyses how the decentralized PSB production of Eurocops implied the use of an inconsistent narrative structure making the single episodes appear as part of a loose ‘collection’ of crime fiction. This partly explains the lukewarm critical reception of this television programme. The third section examines the cultural meaning of the series and is based on the analysis of the 48 episodes we had access to (through the INA French archives). The lack of transnational ‘encounters’ or dialogues – compared to other more recent cop shows such as The Team, The Killing and The Bridge – reveals the absence of a strong European identity at the time of production.

A game of mirrors: Western/Eastern European crime series and the struggle for recognition

Our article focuses on a corpus of crime television series reflecting upon differences between western and eastern Europe – a phenomenon that we will address as the ‘West–East slope’. The series figure as instances of the struggle for recognition at the level of the social imaginary, between western and eastern Europe. Addressing the double logic of the western narrative on eastern Europe and the eastern narrative of western Europe, one of our main findings is that the recognition aesthetics of eastern Europe produced a multi-layered representation of the West varying from country to country. On the other hand in western productions, there is still a bias towards a more politically correct image of easternness, a state of affairs that is questioned by eastern European attempts to produce their original contents.

Shadows from the past: Unstable memories and collective trauma in Black Earth Rising1

Among the many important issues addressed by contemporary European crime drama production, one can find the construction of collective and individual memory, oftentimes linked to major traumatic events of the twentieth century. This article focuses on Black Earth Rising, a UK production created by Hugo Blick. The series’ protagonist, Kate Ashby (Michaela Coel), is a legal investigator, orphaned during the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda and later adopted by a renowned British prosecutor in international criminal law. Black Earth Rising revolves around Kate’s investigations, which in turn lead her back to Rwanda, where she faces not only trauma and shadows of her childhood in Rwanda, but also the tragic violence that shaped the history of her country. Considering the relationship between memory, processing trauma and the crime genre, this article examines different aspects of Blick’s TV series. More precisely, the article explores the crime drama’s utilization of investigation as a narrative tool that guides the viewer through the history of the Rwandan genocide, the role of its female protagonist and the function of reoccurring black-and-white animated sequences. In this analysis, crime drama, in part due to its widespread popularity, is framed as an important tool that allows for the construction of shared space, in which mediated cultural encounters and collective memory can take place.

Language, European identity and stereotypical diversity in trans-European crime dramas

Interrogating two transnational television dramas – Crossing Lines (2013, 2014, 2015, the first season) and The Team (2015, 2018, the second season) – and employing critical, textual and production perspectives, this article investigates representations of national and European identity in the series. In this article, I argue that the series on the one hand picture a diverse Europe uniting when challenges arise, embodying the dominant European narrative of ‘unity in diversity’ and, seen from a certain point of view, facilitate a mediated cultural encounter. On the other hand, the diversity depicted is based on the use of a wide range of well-known cultural stereotypes that may be familiar to the audience, and which may facilitate smooth storytelling, but that does little to broaden the actual cultural knowledge and understanding of the viewer, resulting in stereotypical diversity. The series have different strategies regarding representations of nation states, cultures and languages. The implications of these strategies are analysed. Common ground is often found in ‘American’ crime drama genre tropes associated with a team of often-antagonistic specialists who are put together to solve a problem, including such iconic US series as The A-Team (1983–87), the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation franchise (2000–15) and Scorpion (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017). The contribution ultimately finds that meaningful mediated cultural encounters are a challenge to transnational television drama, and that when it comes to television, ‘European’ and ‘transnational’ means little without ‘national’.

Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity, Melanie Schiller (2018)

Review of: Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity, Melanie Schiller (2018) London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 288 pp., ISBN 978-1-78660-622-8, h/bk, £85/$125 ISBN 978-1-78661-596-1, p/bk, £29.95/$44.95

The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Donna Rifkind (2020)

Review of: The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Donna Rifkind (2020) New York: Other Press, 560 pp., ISBN 978-1-59051-721-5, h/bk, $30

The collection of a toy: Production history and collection value of the Matchbox regarding the consumer behaviours

Metal casting technology reached at a very advanced point after the Second World War. When the war was over, many companies producing metal castings suffered a huge market loss and tried to create new markets and develop new products. Some companies, inspired by the rapid development of automobile production, started to produce toy model cars with the casting technique, which were generally made with sheet metal bending until then, using the moulding techniques they had advanced. In this study, the history of Lesney company, established after the Second World War, and the development of Matchbox’s product range will be discussed in the context of collecting and a collection object. Matchbox collections are the most common model car collections in the world. The status of the designed objects as collectible objects was investigated together with the history and development process of Matchbox cars production and collecting behaviour of consumer.

Mid-century cultural tectonics: Unpacking the ‘Ying Tong Song’ core sample

The Goons’ ‘Ying Tong Song’ is an unlikely candidate for a popular music chart hit. Yet it held a place in the British top ten for six weeks in 1956. On the face of it, this novelty record presents a musical variation on eccentric Goon themes that had become familiar to British radio audiences over the preceding five years of Goon Shows: silly voices, absurd situations, non sequiturs, sound effects, chaos and seeming non-sense. On closer examination, however, the ‘Ying Tong Song’ reveals itself to be an encapsulation of defining conflicts, phobias and preoccupations of the mid-1950s, such that it takes on the character of a geological core sample. By analysing the ‘Ying Tong Song’ according to its principal operative contexts (British national history, cultural history, musical tastes, radio humour, language and humour theory), this article unpacks key layers of signification that define the Ying Tong phenomenon.

‘Dress sense of a queen’: Cecil Beaton’s queering of Britain’s royal past

The origins of camp can be traced by exploring the ways in which the past was queered during the inter-war period. Cecil Beaton was establishing himself as one of the world’s leading fashion photographers. He and many of his friends were fascinated by the styles of the period before 1914. That interest extended to cross-dressing and the construction of photographic collages that ironically juxtaposed the fashions of the past and the present. The effect of this was to make the dresses and aristocratic social mores of the fin de siècle appear amusingly excessive. In the process the image of royalty was reinvented through travesty and social life in Britain was invested with queer opportunity.