Television and New Broadcasting Media
There are three key subject strands running through the First, Second and Final Years of the Television and New Broadcasting Media programme at Kingston.
Practical
The Television and New Broadcasting Media degree includes a significant practical component; one module out of four, or 25% of the half-field as a whole. Live and Direct, in your First Year, provides an introduction to mobile digital television production - including image and sound recording and editing. These skills are further developed in the Second Year module Streaming the Media and the Final Year module, Web TV. While they will provide you with useful experience and skills, these modules are not designed to produce fully-fledged TV producers intending to make a career in production. Rather, the practical modules are designed to complement and overlap with the more 'academic' modules in the rest of the programme, encouraging you to apply the knowledge, insights and ideas you gain from studying television to the practice of creating it, and vice versa.
Practical work on this degree means more than just television production. Many other modules, such as Heard Not Seen, Days of Hope and Big Ideas for the Small Screen, give you further opportunities to work creatively and learn professional skills - by writing a brief screenplay, making a pitch for a new TV programme, submitting a synopsis for a crime drama or constructing an advertising strategy. Practical work is not a separate aspect of the degree - it is closely integrated with theory and criticism.
Genre
On The Box, in the First Year, introduces you to the study of television programmes within genres. Options in the Second and Final Years invite you to explore a specific genre of television and broadcast media in greater depth: you can choose to study police and crime series in Watching the Detectives, British television drama in Days of Hope, sports broadcasting in We Are The Champions, and television comedy in What's So Funny.
Convergence
Options modules also pick up on the theme of convergence, or media texts that work across several media platforms. The parallels and overlap between television and related broadcasting media are introduced in the First Year with TV Times and Watch Carefully, and developed in the Second Year by Press The Red Button.
In the Second Year, Heard Not Seen focuses specifically on writing for radio, while What's So Funny explores the relationship between television and radio comedy. Final Year students can opt for Advertising, Lifestyle and Consumerism, which looks at the influence of digital technology on specialist niche broadcasting and podcasting, and We Are The Champions, which studies the representation of sport and its participants across a range of broadcasting media and distribution platforms.
