Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This introductory chapter provides readers of the collection with a basic framework through which to understand the sudden flowering of camp on American and British television in the mid-1960s. No style, movement, or genre emerges from a vacuum and Camp TV is no exception. Reviewing the longer history of camp, including its association with cultural resistance, its correlation with strategies of dual address, and its groundswell in the decade leading up to Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” this chapter prepares readers to engage with the range of television programs and analytical approaches that are found in the book’s chapters. Moreover, this introduction sets the stage for the work of the book in tracing Camp’s move, during the 1960s, from the margins to the mainstream. In the process, individual chapters and the collection as a whole serve to reevaluate American television’s “vast wasteland”—Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow’s 1961 descriptive phrase—before its well-documented turn toward “relevance” in the early 1970s. In addition, this chapter also offers a brief survey of the scholarly work on Camp and, more recently, on Camp television. The final section of this chapter summarizes each of the thirteen body chapters and the Afterword so readers may see how the entire collection fits together, more easily find the chapters that most interest them, and consider new directions in scholarship suggested by the works collected here.