MEDIA EXAM QUESTION – 30 MINS

Media Exam Question – 30 Mins

In this question you will be rewarded for drawing together elements from your full course of study, including different area of the theoretical framework and media contexts.

How far does Cuffs adapt police drama genre conventions to fit its family audience at 8pm on BBC1?

In your answers you must:

•          Analyse the extract’s use of genre conventions
•          Make judgments and draw conclusions about how far the extract adapts the conventions of police drama to fit its scheduling and audience.

The show Cuffs airs on BBC1 at 8:00pm. This means it is a ‘pre-watershed’ show which is a programme which is shown before 9:00pm on tv; after 9:00pm television channels are allowed to show more mature content as most young children have gone to bed. Because Cuffs is shown before 9pm, it is restricted to what it can show on screen. This could have been particularly difficult as Cuffs is an action-heavy police programme, so the directors, producers, and editors had to be careful when making the series and had to make sure that each episode fit the conventions of family-friendly shows.

I believe Cuffs does well in keeping its content family-friendly throughout the whole show, especially in the scene shown in the extract. Ryan has been called to sort out a fight on a nudist beach. There is a group of men on a stag do, dressed up as Vikings tormenting a bare couple at the beach. Even though the scene is set in such an unusual place and there is a group of (most-likely) drunk men, the show surprisingly manages to keep everything quite clean. There is no inappropriate nudity or explicit language. There is barely any violence and any scenes that include it, manage to hide any blood or gruesome images.