American Television on British Screens: A Story of Cultural Interaction

Rixon, Paul. American Television on British Screens: A Story of Cultural Interaction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 211 pp. $74.95. As America became more and more embroiled in the quagmire of Southeast Asia in the late 1960s, it began to attract critics who became more and more vocal about American adventures beyond its borders. As the Summer of Love flower children gathered in San Francisco in their quest to make a new and more peaceful world, academics from both sides of the ideological pole began to look at the world in a far more global sense than singularly focusing on issues of war and peace. One such observer was the late Andre Gunder Frank, a German-born academic who literally extracted some of the ideas of the Canadian communications founder Harold Innis and shaped them as his own. Central to Frank's argument was the belief that third-world countries could never prosper until they solved the question of their dependent relationships on developed countries. Echoing Innis, he referred to the concept as the metropolitan-hinterland theory. Although his work took him close to the international world of left wing politics, he, Innis and later Marshall McLuhan were not Marxists, and it would remain for the political left to seize upon this concept as its own. Vietnam was making America as close as it could get to being an international bad boy. And from the economic analysis offered by Frank and his followers, there emerged a second level of critique in the debates on first-world imperialism, namely the role of media and, in particular, television. The first thrust came from Herbert Schiller in his 1969 work, Mass Communications and American Empire. Central to his Marxist approach was the argument that media was an imperialist power base, along with corporate capitalism, that was designed to bring the reluctant, the weak, and the developing into the American sphere of influence. This was not the old British and European kind of territorial imperialism. In his mind, it was just as sinister since the invasion of the developing world by American television could only lead to the destruction of local economies and local culture and create precisely the same kind of situation that Frank analyzed in emerging nations in South America and Asia. By now, you must be asking: what has this got to do with Paul Rixon's book? The answer is plenty. If nothing else, and this is a big nothing, his careful analysis of the role of American media on British television screens shows that although some of these programs are accepted to some degree and tolerated in others, British viewers have yet to throw up the white flag of surrender and turn over their picture tubes to New York and Hollywood. …

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