Exotic Locales: Representations of Place and the Use of Colour in the British Transatlantic Telefilm

Abstract

The use of place and colour in the action adventure articulates not only an emerging aesthetic genre in the 1960s but also a system of production organisation that depended on a complex set of economic and technological circumstances. The purpose of this article is to examine how certain types of image within the telefilm were able to represent televisual space that relied on the technology of 35mm film and on shooting either on location or in a studio backlot. The article also explores how the use of colour in certain transatlantic dramas became a metonym for the epic and was used to devise new ways of presenting action on television.