Browsing by Author "Ball, Vicky"

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    Blurred Lines: The Queer World of Bad Girls
    (Intellect, 2017) Ball, Vicky
    Bad Girls is a British women-in-prison drama which ran for 8 series between 1999 and 2006. Produced by Shed Productions for ITV, Britain’s largest commercial network, the series offered an insider’s view of prison life from the perspective of its female inmates and their managers. By the time of the third season in 2001, Bad Girls was attracting over eight million viewers each week of its 16-week run (BARB 2001). In the United Kingdom, Bad Girls video sales stood at number seven in the chart during 2000, ahead of Friends and Buffy, and just behind Star Trek and The Simpson’s (BARB 2001 as quoted in Herman 2003:142). The series has subsequently been sold to 17 countries. FX, HBO and NBC have all been in talks with producing their own version of the series in North America. A central and popular narrative of the first three series of Bad Girls, was the love affair between lesbian inmate Nikki Wade and the Prison’s ‘straight’ Manager, Helen Stewart. Differing from the familiar tropes of the women-in prison genre, wherein constructions of lesbian characters are usually marginalized, pathologized, face grim futures or suffer violent deaths, Didi Herman has argued that that the Wade/Stewart storyline signaled Bad Girls’ displacement of heteronormativity in favor of homonormativity; in which lesbian sexuality is constructed as ‘normal, desirable and possible’ (Herman 2003:141). Extending Herman’s analysis, this chapter explores the homonormative constructions of gender and sexuality in Bad Girls but considers how and why it should do so in the British context at the turn of the millennium. As such, this chapter historicizes and contextualizes the constructions of gender and sexuality in Bad Girls in relation to other film and televisual examples of the women-in-prison genre, including Within These Walls (LWT 1974-1978) and Prisoner: Cell Block H (Grundy Television Productions and Network 10, 1979-1986) as well as in relation to the shifting social, economic and broadcasting cultures of this period; namely New Labour, ‘girl power’ and the more competitive and de-regulated system of broadcasting in the United Kingdom. It is in relation to these overlapping contexts, that this analysis will situate Shed Productions’ particular queering of ITV prime time schedules via its production of Bad Girls and Footballers Wives (Shed Productions 2002-2006).
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    The Feminization of British Television and the Re-traditionalization of Gender
    (Taylor and Francis, 2011-08-11) Ball, Vicky
    This article explores shifts that have taken place in British television and British forms of feminine- gendered fiction from the late 1990s. These shifts will be discussed with reference to discourses of the “feminization of television” circulating in British culture during this period. This article contests the suggestion that discourses of the “feminization of television” and texts such as the female ensemble drama produced in this postfeminist period represent unproblematic “narratives of progress” for women (Georgina Harris 2006, Beyond Representation: Television Drama and the Politics of Identity, Manchester University Press, Manchester, p. 1). Rather, this article will suggest that accounts of the “feminization of television” found in the popular press along with contemporary examples of the female ensemble drama re-traditionalize women in relation to the spaces and discourses associated with twentieth-century femininity.
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    Forgotten Sisters: The Female Ensemble Drama
    (Oxford University Press, 2013-06) Ball, Vicky
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    Gendered Patterns of Discrimination in the Creative Industries
    (University of California Press, 2018) Ball, Vicky; Porter, Laraine
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    Genre and Gender
    (Sage, 2013-05-15) Gledhill, C.; Ball, Vicky
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    Sex, class and consumerism: British sitcom’s negotiation of the single girl
    (Routledge, 2016) Ball, Vicky
    This chapter explores the representation of working-class femininities in the cycle of female ensemble sitcoms that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the UK. Drawing parallels with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, it will examine how The Liver Birds’ construction of and address to women drew upon the consumerist template of femininity made popular by Helen Gurley Brown in Sex and the Single Girl (1962). However given the historical propensity for working-class women to be marginalised or romanticised as long suffering matriarchs across both quality and popular television genres, it will demonstrate how the consumer logic of The Liver Birds constructs and addresses aspirational templates of working-class femininity that dare to dream of identities other than those based around maternity and the realist kitchen sink.
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    Structures of Feeling: Contemporary Research in Women's Film and Broadcasting History
    (Routledge, 2019-12-23) Porter, Laraine; Ball, Vicky; Kirkham, Pat
    This special issue is the second volume originaing from the 'Doing Women's Film and TV Histories III' International conference held at the Phoenix Cinema, Leicester, England in May 2016. It connects with concerns and questions of women's production histories related to the constructed nature of history and how we write a 'history from below' to foreground the hidden, marginalised or forgotten histories of our women ancestors. This collection captures something of the dominant 'structures of feeling' of womens' film and broadcasting history scholarship in the contemporary period ranging from consideration of women working in both above and below-the-line roles in film, television and radio, to those whose labour fell outside of mainstream cinema production, as in the instance of the amateur film in the UK between the 1930s and 1980. Together, these case studies span from 1926 to the contemporary period, providing particular flashpoints of women's history across the UK, North America, Italy and Australia.
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    Women writers and writing women into histories of Play for Today
    (Edinburgh University Press, 2022-04-01) Ball, Vicky
    This article emerges from a research project which explores the contribution women writers have made to Play for Today. The project seeks to use the flagship series as a case study, to highlight the significance of the single play in the histories of women’s work in television drama; identify the attendant gender politics of television production which have contributed to the high levels of inequality therein and to critically analyse women’s creative contributions to the television play. There has been very little sustained research of these issues, to a great extent because of the association of single play with masculinity. This sphere of drama production has, as this flagship series illustrates, been male-dominated; only 13% of the Play for Today series were written by women, 23% produced by women and only 4% directed by women. The critical neglect of women’s contributions to the single play has largely been attributed to the male-dominance of the industry and the attendant invisibility of women in archives (Moseley and Wheatley, 2008) and television drama histories (Caughie, 2000; Cooke, 2003, 2015). The aim of this article is to use Play for Today as a case study to cast new light on the contributions women have made to the single play, and concomitantly, the significance of Play for Today and the single play in historiographies of women writers and British television drama.
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    Working Women, Womens Work: Production, History and Gender
    (Edinburgh University Press, 2013-07) Ball, Vicky; Bell, M.