We would like to thank staff at the BFI Library and at Roehampton University TV Services, Eugene Doyen and Caroline Bainbridge for helping to locate videos and other materials. Thanks too to Caroline for her supportive comments on some of the earlier drafts of chapters and conference papers which eventually found their way into this book. Heather Nunn would also like to thank the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University for teaching remission during 2002/03 which provided much needed time for research.
Parts of chapter 4 also appear in different forms in two short articles for a dossier on trauma for the journal Screen, vol. 45, issue 4 (2004). An early version of chapter 7 was presented at the Media Studies Research Group at Sussex University and we are grateful to them for receiving it with interest. An extended version of chapter 7 was also originally published as ‘Video justice: crimes of violence in social/media space’ in Space and Culture, vol. 6, issue 3 (2003). A version of chapter 8 was published in the Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 8, issue 3 (2004). Parts of the Conclusion were published in a different form as ‘The especially remarkable: celebrity and social mobility in reality TV’, in Mediactive, issue 2 (2003). We wish to thank these journals for permission to reproduce some of the material here.
We would also like to express our appreciation to Bert Nunn, Kathryn White, Berni O’Dea and Miri Forster as their tireless support and enthusiasm sustained us through the hard times. Thanks too to the anonymous reader commissioned by Wallflower Press who read the entire manuscript with diligence and offered constructive criticism.