Fifty years of British music video

The dedicated scholarship on music video has been dominated by US perspectives, just as popular perceptions of the medium have been shaped by MTV. Yet the British story followed its own arc: its talent educated at art schools, its industry differently organised and its shop windows - until the arrival of MTV Europe in 1987 - represented primarily by Top of the Pops (BBC, 1964-2006) and The Chart Show (Channel 4 and ITV, 1986-98). This special issue features new research which explores aspects of music video culture in the UK for the first time, and adopts fresh approaches to its analysis. The contributors are members of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Fifty Years of British Music Video project team, and their partners at the BFI who will curate a ‘British Landmark Video’ collection as one of the project’s key archival outputs.