Impact

This network offers a unique space for comparative analysis and exchange between TV scholars, producers, broadcasters and intermediaries in small nations. It provides both for the identification of those opportunities and problems that are specific to television in small nations, and for insights into how best these challenges have been exploited for cultural and commercial success. It addresses the gap in academic research on television in small nations and establish an agenda for future collaborative research and publications in the field.

The Centre for Media and Culture in Small Nations has substantial multidisciplinary expertise in the field, evident in works such as Steve Blandford (ed) Theatre and Performance in Small Nations (Intellect, 2013) and Richard Hand & Mary Traynor (ed) Radio in Small Nations (UWP, 2012). It has a proven track-record of collaboration with arts and industry partners including BBC and National Theatre Wales. McElroy (co-director of the Centre), leads the network, working closely with Dr Anne-Marit Waade and her team at Aarhus University (Denmark), delivering an international analysis of the recipes for commercial and cultural success.

The network is geared towards supporting exchanges across national and disciplinary borders in order better to understand how television in small nations can build its economic capacity (e.g. via international exports of drama) whilst also maintaining vital cultural and linguistic commitments to the audiences it serves (e.g. via enhancing digital content, subtitling and multiplatform delivery). It stems for our enthusiasm for television in small nations and our commitment to sharing our expertise with colleagues within and beyond higher education.

The network aims to make an impact on our understanding of what makes for successful and sustainable television production in small nations. We are engaging with broadcasters, producers and policy-makers in order to bridge the work happening in these domains.

We believe that TV industry partners and participants will benefit directly through the access our workshops provide to original scholarship in the field and as a space for open, critical dialogue. Through the development of case studies, industry partners will share knowledge of what works in making television from small nations successful, culturally and commercially.

Cultural and linguistic impact

A vital way that TV producers in small nations make a cultural and linguistic impact is through their diversity of content and stories told by them. For us as audiences, it is precisely this content that can enrich our lives, our imaginations, and our understandings of one another both at home and abroad. The export of crime dramas from Scandinavia and Wales testifies to audiences’ appetites for different voices, landscapes and imaginative horizons. The network aims to deliver improved awareness of best practice by sharing the different strategies that have been used successfully by TV producers in small nations, including those adopted by minority language media.

Economic impact

Achieving commercial success is vital to ensuring the sustainability of cultural production in small nations. We aim to achieve economic impact by identifying digital innovation and skills strategies that help small nations build domestic and international markets. By making best practice the focus of our workshops, strategies for success will be shared across national borders and further collaborative possibilities identified.

Policy impact

Television brings audiences together, legitimates the public value of minority-languages as modes of modern communication, and helps deliver a democratic public sphere to small nations, including those undergoing processes of political change including devolution. This network aims to enhance the evidence-base of international best practice, providing a clear sense of the main barriers to success, and strategies for overcoming them. We will address policy concerns to support a highly-skilled creative industries workforce by examining how collaboration between small nations can enhance talent development and how strategies for managing skills can retain precious human resources within small nations.