*CANCELLED* “They didn’t think somebody my age was still sexually active…” – Ageing, sexuality and gender on British television from the 1970s to 1990s

Please note that this session has been postponed.

With heightened media attention to the life worlds of the elderly as well as more liberal attitudes towards sexuality, British public television since the 1970s set out to address a topic deemed laden with stigma and taboo: sex in the later years. By the use of factual programmes from the 1970s to the 1990s, this paper aims to explore how audiovisual mass media produced imagery which intertwined understandings of a ‘healthy’ sex life with contemporary ideas of ‘active ageing’. It argues that, while dependent on social and economic currents as well as changes in media trends, televisual imagery of the elderly remained largely bound to a specific set of (hetero-)normative concepts of the ageing body, gender, and sexuality.

Lukas Herde holds an undergraduate degree in Cultural Studies at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) and a Masters’ degree in Global History from the Free University Berlin and Humbuldt University Berlin, with study visits in Paris and London. In 2019 and as part of the ERC BodyCapital project at the University of Strasbourg and the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Lukas began preparing a PhD thesis on representations of sexuality in later life on British and French television from c. 1970 to the mid-2000s. In 2023, Lukas left academia with an unfinished dissertation in order to train as a media archivist/information specialist at the German regional public service broadcaster Südwestrundfunk (SWR) and Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. His historical research is still ongoing.