This workshop brought together scholars interested in how war has been broadcast to the public in the 20th and 21st centuries. From the early use of radio, through to newsreel, television, 24-hour news, and now social media, the ways in which war has been broadcast has constantly evolved. Not only has the media changed, the sources of broadcasts now include state broadcasters, international corporations and citizen journalists. This workshop sought to understand the forces driving changes in the way war has been broadcast, and how it is remediated and remembered via the media, and how the public have both received and participated in those developments.

The programme for the workshop was as follows:

10.00-10.00 Registration and Coffee

10.30-12 Session 1 Radio brings war into the home

Tim Lockley (Warwick) ‘Our American Way of Living’: American radio on the eve of World War II

Kay Chadwick (Liverpool) Home truths? Domestic space and radio propaganda in occupied France

Alban Webb (Sussex) Domestic Services: international broadcasting and the Home Front

12-1 Lunch

1-2.30 Session 2 Remembering and remediating war

Andrew Hoskins (Glasgow) War, Memory and the Fallen Image.

James Chapman (Leicester) Foyle’s War and revisionist narratives of the home front during the Second World War

Christine Geraghty (Glasgow) “We sent boys to die”: sentiment and melodrama in the BBC’s The Passing Bells (2014)

2.30-3 Tea/Coffee Break

3-4.30 Session 3 War and the young audience

Faye Woods (Reading) The Squaddies of BBC Three: Televising Conflict for a Youth Audience in Our War

Cindy Carter (Cardiff) Watching children, watching news in times of war and conflict

Maya Goetz (Prix Jeunesse International) How children imagine war: Inner pictures of children without war experience and the role of media

4.30-5 Final thoughts

The workshop was a collaboration between the School of Comparative American Studies and the Centre for Television Histories and sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre.