7 - Conclusion

Summary

Across the last forty years, nostalgia and heritage have played a dominant role in shaping understandings of period drama, in both academic and wider cultural discourses. Despite extensive critiques, the 1980s heritage debate retains a lingering influence on discussions of period drama in film and television. This creates artificial divides between ‘heritage’ and ‘post-heritage’ perspectives and fails to account for the genre's hybridity, its ‘unruly diversity’ (Monk 2015: 36). This book has looked beyond the controlling borders of heritage, nostalgia, ‘quality’ and ‘authenticity’ (whether literary or historical), exploring the genre from multiple angles to identify continuities and divergences in its approaches to the past. This has given me space to consider period drama's complex and contradictory critical investments in race and nation, class and politics, space and place, gender and sexuality, and bodies and costumes. I have positioned affect, pleasure and fantasy as equal partners to the established frames of nostalgia and heritage. Looking beyond the ‘frozen’ house-museum or untouched ‘heritage’ landscapes, I have incorporated the city into understandings of period drama space and place. This book has connected television period drama to wider genre discourses, drawing on film studies approaches and those from literary and history backgrounds, whilst highlighting the genre's distinctly televisual form. Television's serialised storytelling can offer expansive encounters with the past that can last years, with programmes tracking social and cultural change along with their own shifting perspectives on the past. The industry's institutions, brand identities and funding models can delimit or open up which versions of the past are represented, whose stories get to be told.

Period drama offers affective engagements with the past. Its structuring forces are a series of dualities: realism and fantasy, prestige and pleasure, high and low cultural status, closeness and distance, intimacy and spectacle, control and release. Rather than offering a ‘nostalgic’ escape from the turmoil of contemporary society, period drama instead returns to the past to understand the present. It repeatedly traces connections between then and now, and its encounters with the past are shaped by contemporary society's investments. The past is presented as both an echo chamber and a foreign place. Programmes frequently exhibit a tension or play between distance and closeness; this world is like you but not like you.