Look Here: Ulster Television in the 1960s

Ulster Television launched in October 1959 as the first indigenous broadcaster on the island of Ireland. As part of the ITV network, it arrived into a unique broadcast media landscape dominated by the BBC and scrutinised by both the Unionist government and more moralist elements of the wider population. Taking UTV’s own listings magazine TV Post and surviving archive materials as key sources, television history combines with social and political histories to analyse what kinds of programming UTV produced in its first decade, how it communicated to its audience and established its own singular identity apart from and alongside the BBC. Northern Ireland is situated within the Global Sixties, as UTV reflects and promotes modernity, aspiration and changing social norms, particularly for women, through advertising, light entertainment, British and American TV programmes, films and wider pop culture brought by the ITV network, while still retaining and developing a distinct local identity and catering to a complex, divided and opinionated Northern Irish audience. UTV’s topical panel discussion programme, Look Here! and its in-house documentary production around significant 50th anniversary events in 1966 - The Orange and the Green about the Easter Rising’s legacy in the North, and With Heart and Hand, about the 36th (Ulster) Division’s role during the Battle of the Somme - is discussed in relation to how UTV catered to both sides of the Northern Irish community. This is situated within UTV’s wider documentary production with discussion of other films such as Endurance, one of the few UTV films of the decade to exist in its entirety. The surviving archive and the author’s explorative exhibition of digitised material is explained and utilised to capture the hauntological aspects of active viewing pre-1968 Northern Irish television archive, the ethics of recontextualisation and how the archive serves as a fragile site of shared history for a post-conflict audience.