This lively and ground-breaking collection brings together work on forms of popular television within the authoritarian regimes of Europe after World War Two. Ten chapters based on new and original research examine approaches to programming and individual programmes in Spain, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the USSR and the GDR at a time when they were governed as dictatorships or one-party states. Drawing on surviving archives, scripts and production records, contemporary publications, YouTube clips and interviews with producers and performers, its chapters recover examples of television programming history unknown beyond national borders and often preserved largely in the memories of the audiences who lived with them. The introduction examines how television can be considered ‘popular’ in circumstances where audience appeal is often secondary to the need for state control. Published in English, Popular television in authoritarian Europe represents a significant intervention in transnational television studies, making these histories available to scholars for the first time, encouraging comparative enquiry and extending the reach – intellectually and geographically – of European television history. There is a foreword by John Corner and an informative timeline of events in the history of television in the countries covered.

Like its companion volume, Telecommunications in Europe, this book deals with the evolution of powerful monopoly institutions in the communications field--the public broadcasters--and the dramatic changes that took place in the late 1980s throughout Europe, and transformed the media landscape. It provides a comprehensive view of European broadcasting systems, using the perspective of economics and policy analysis. The introductory part offers a framework for understanding media and the forces of change affecting them. The main section is a unique series of chapters covering the broadcast and cable television systems of almost thirty European countries.

Proposes an original framework for comparative media research, and uses it to provide fascinating insights into television under communist rule.

From the mid-1950s onwards, the rise of television as a mass medium took place in many East and West European countries. As the most influential mass medium of the Cold War, television triggered new practices of consumption and media production, and of communication and exchange on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This volume leans on the long-neglected fact that, even during the Cold War era, television could easily become a cross-border matter. As such, it brings together transnational perspectives on convergence zones, observations, collaborations, circulations and interdependencies between Eastern and Western television. In particular, the authors provide empirical ground to include socialist television within a European and global media history. Historians and media, cultural and literary scholars take interdisciplinary perspectives to focus on structures, actors, flow, contents or the reception of cross-border television. Their contributions cover Albania, the CSSR, the GDR, Russia and the Soviet Union, Serbia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia, thus complementing Western-dominated perspectives on Cold War mass media with a specific focus on the spaces and actors of East European communication. Last but not least, the volume takes a long-term perspective crossing the fall of the Iron Curtain, as many trends of the post-socialist period are linked to, or pick up, socialist traditions.

This book discusses transformations in the construction of culinary taste, lifestyle and class through cookbook language style in post-socialist Slovenia. Using a critical discourse studies approach it demonstrates how the representation of culinary advice in standard and celebrity cookbooks has changed in recent decades as a result of general social transformations such as postmodernity and globalization. It argues that compared to the standard cookbooks, where nutritionist ideology is at the forefront, the celebrity cookbooks reflect the conversational, hybrid nature of the genre, through which they promote global foodie discourse, while at the same time localizing the global trends to the Slovene context. The book lays at the intersection of discourse analysis, sociology, food, cultural, communication and media studies and (post-) socialism and should be of interest to those interested in celebrities, food media, socialism and post-socialism, cookbooks, globalization and discourse change.

Was migration to Germany a blessing or a curse? The main argument of this book is that the Greek state conceived labor migration as a traineeship into Europeanization with its shiny varnish of progress. Jumping on a fully packed train to West Germany meant leaving the past behind. However, the tensed Cold War realities left no space for illusions; specters of the Nazi past and the Greek Civil War still haunted them all. Adopting a transnational approach, this monograph retargets attention to the sending state by exploring how the Greek Gastarbeiter’s welfare was intrinsically connected with their homeland through its exercise of long-distance nationalism. Apart from its fresh take in postwar migration, the book also addresses methodological challenges in creative ways. The narrative alternates between the macro- and the micro-level, including subnational and transnational actors and integrating a diverse set of primary sources and voices. Avoiding the trap of exceptionalism, it contextualizes the Greek case in the Mediterranean and Southeast European experience.

In the first full-length study of Soviet Central Television to draw extensively on archival sources, interviews, and television recordings, Evans challenges the idea that Soviet mass culture in the Brezhnev era was dull and formulaic. Tracing the emergence of play, conflict, and competition on Soviet news programs, serial films, and variety and game shows, Evans shows that Soviet Central Television’s most popular shows were experimental and creative, laying the groundwork for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and the post-Soviet media system.