Seasonality, Nostalgia, Heritage and History

As noted at the end of the last chapter, the seasonal tale of the supernatural or Gothic has a number of connections to ideas of time, which this chapter will explore. It is not just the Gothic that we have to consider, but specifically television Gothic, and so the relationship more broadly between television (and, to a certain extent, radio) and time. As Roger Silverstone has emphasised, ‘Television is very much part of the taken for granted seriality and spatiality of everyday life’ (1994, p. 20), its daily, weekly and annual schedules both reproducing and shaping the temporal structures of everyday life. By examining broadcasting schedules, then, we can see a more codified, and simplistic, version of how society is generally temporally structured.