Broadcasting the New Navy: The BBC-TV Series Warship (1973-1977)

摘要

Over the past dozen years or so it has become as commonplace for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in Great Britain to cooperate in the making of television drama series featuring one of the branches of the armed forces as it has been for the Department of Defense in America. At the same time as Paramount Television was receiving technical and material assistance from the Pentagon in the making of 'JAG' in the late 1990s, for instance, Central Television was being provided with men and equipment for Soldier, Soldier at various junctures through the MoD. The basic calculus underlying such cooperation has also been the same on each side of the Atlantic: favourable publicity for the armed forces in return for greater physical authenticity for the TV producers. In the United States the resulting symbiosis can be seen in many ways simply as a natural extension of the century-old relationship between the armed services and the movie moguls of Hollywood. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, the link between sanctioned representations of the forces on the big and small screen is less obvious. For while the American studios survived and learned to adapt to the television boom of the second half of the twentieth century, their weaker British counterparts largely succumbed to the rival medium and were driven out of business. Yet the MoD did establish an important precedent for the future as far back as the 1970s in its pioneering involvement in the BBC-TV drama series Warship.