Populist Nostalgia in Post-2008 British Film and Television

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Since the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, there has been an intensification in the nostalgic character of British film and television. Period pieces, historical subject matters, and nostalgic inflections in reality television - whilst not unique to the post-GFC period - have taken centre stage commercially, being of particular interest to audiences and scholars alike. This phenomenon is not unique to commercial media either, as non-mainstream and more radical productions have likewise turned towards nostalgic sentiment. As an affective force, nostalgia encourages us to look backwards in search of answers to the insufficiencies of the present. This search for answers is not exclusive to British film and television but is something felt throughout the neoliberal world. This is exemplified by what Mark Fisher (2014) has called "lost futures" or what Svetlana Boym refers to as "the off-modern" ( 2017), whereby the temporal inertia of neoliberalism - understood more broadly as "the End of History" (Fukuyama, 1992) - forces us to consult with our relationships to the past. Yet whilst this nostalgia has been and remains a ubiquitous topic of academic and intellectual interest, and some strides have taken place towards understanding this post-GFC upswell, its significance in the context of British film and television remains underexplored.As such, this thesis seeks to examine this nostalgic upswell in British film and television in the context of the sociocultural and philosophical dimensions of this post-GFC nostalgic intensification. It reads the intensification as a result of neoliberal crisis, as the contradictions of "capitalist realism" - the rationale that capitalism is the only logical system of socioeconomic governance - are exacerbated through a legacy of recurring crises; of which the GFC is one. It also looks to challenge the idea that nostalgia is fundamentally conservative, as evidenced by radical approaches to nostalgia, but also by arguing how anti-nostalgia only serves to fuel neoliberal crises whilst also existing as a contradictory position. Consequently, this thesis offers three lenses for navigating what I call post-GFC nostalgia: conservative nostalgia, anti-nostalgia, and radical nostalgia. It will engage in three primary case studies - focusing on Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010-2015), The Great British Bake Off (2010-present), and Bait (dir. Mark Jenkin, 2019) - and demonstrate the respective conservative, anti-nostalgic, and radical qualities of their nostalgic utterances. These case studies will also compare the texts both to other examples in post-GFC British film and television and to the pre-GFC - and where appropriate pre-neoliberal - media texts that provide a foundation to this intensification. This thesis' research philosophy is grounded in post-structuralist and anti-neoliberal discourses, taking cues from writers on philosophy and culture such as Mark Fisher, Svetlana Boym, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson; nostalgia/emotion scholars such as Alistair Bonnett and Sara Ahmed, and media scholars such as Andrew Higson, Pam Cook, and Thomas Elsaesser.