What role do we expect television to play in our understanding of death and dying experiences? 

How might we hope that television will handle death for us, prepare us for death’s inevitable arrival, help us to anticipate our own deaths and those of the people we love? How can television help us to see and hear those who have died?

Professor Helen Wheatley, Warwick University, explores these and other questions in a talk about her new book Television/Death (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).

Please note, tickets cost £5.

About Television/Death:

The book intertwines the study of death, dying and bereavement on television with discussion of the ways that television (and the TV archive) provides access to the dead.

The first part of the book looks at death and dying in historical and contemporary documentary from around the world.

The second part focuses on dramas of grief, bereavement and the afterlife on TV and discusses how television drama helps us to explore death and dying.

Finally, the last part of the book proposes that television has been overlooked in critical analyses of recorded sounds’ and images’ ability to ‘bring back the dead’. It argues that television is the posthumous medium par excellence and looks at how the dead return via incorporation into new television programmes or through projects to bring historical television out of the archive.

This event is recommend for those age 18+ and anyone who is interested in media history, thinking about death and dying, and people who are interested in the history of Coventry.