Sensing National Spaces: Representing the Mundane in English Film and Television

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue that the development of a sense of European belonging is highly uneven, and is variously impacted upon by different media in different national contexts. In particular, I maintain that in most popular British TV programmes and in certain films set in England, an emergent sense of European belonging is hindered by the dense evocation of a mundane Englishness. These banal representations align with the mundane experience of everyday life, and more specifically , in the cases discussed, with the familiar, unreflexive belonging that is induced through dwelling and acting in banal kinds of quotidian spaces. This pervasive and reiterative mediatization of ordinary national space does not exemplify some kind of strategy to inculcate a sense of national belonging in contradistinction to a wider sense of European identity. However, I contend that it is precisely in these unremarkable depictions that an unreflexive sense of belonging to England is consolidated to constitute a kind of common sense that forms the fertile ground on which discursive nationalist sentiments can prosper. There is no doubt that certain programmes such as for instance the Danish Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007-2012) and Borgen (2010-2013) have made a significant impression in coverage of British media, in addition to a plethora of American imports that have always constituted a large proportion of the terrestrial television diet. However, such programmes become domesticated through their contextualized positioning within the schedules of most British broadcasters, and they are consumed by varied audiences that subject them to particular cultural interpretations and situate them within the routinized schedules of their everyday lives. Moreover, such 'quality' programmes, often primarily appealing to a 'cosmopolitan', sophisticated middle-class audience , stand out as alluring 'exotic' foreign imports in contradistinction I. Bondebjerg et al. (eds.), European Cinema and Television