Introduction

This book is a contribution to the growing international and interdisciplinary research on media, communication and politics. Its particular interest is in the ways that politics is dramatized, joked about and expressed within the world of entertainment, understanding that these make an important contribution to the way that political ideas, feelings and values are circulated in society. Forms of storytelling, fantasy, farce and satire provide powerful and rich indicators of the relationship between a national political system and a national political culture, acting both as expressions of, and as resources for, the wider play of imagination. Our own focus is primarily on Britain, though the scholarly context for research of this kind is an international one. The recent increase in the range and scale of media output, extending to the culture of the internet, has added to the significance of media use as an everyday practice of people acting as consumers and also as national citizens, and has deepened and broadened transnational aspects of mediated politics as well.