LAUSR

It is an accident of history – and of very mundane history at that – that the two articles that follow are able to be published in this issue of Cultural Studies. They are both reprints of mimeographed papers that had long sat forgotten on my bookshelves, and would still be there had I not, at the beginning of the year, set about clearing out my study in order to decorate it. And there they were, buried beneath a pile of Open University (OU) course texts, unloved and unread for far too long. For it was clear, on re-reading them, that they offer, in their informality, a distinctive insight into the quite different ways in which two of the key founding figures of cultural studies engaged with questions of the popular and popular culture at a particular historical moment. Both of the articles derive from seminar presentations that Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall gave at the Open University a month apart from one another: Williams in August 1978 and Hall in September. The seminars were ones I convened as part of the process of planning the OU’s Popular Culture course, a course to which both Williams and Hall contributed, albeit in different capacities: Williams as the external assessor for the course, and Hall as a new member of the team responsible for producing the course. OU courses at that time were somewhat unique in both their form and the manner of their production. They comprised, in the case of the Popular Culture course, 32 weekly study guides, produced in glossy print format and posted direct to the thousand or so students who enrolled in the course for each of the ten years it was presented. These were accompanied by weekly broadcasts of television and radio programs, jointly produced by the OU and the BBC and transmitted by the latter, and three commercially published readers presenting the course’s students with collections of essays on popular film and television (Bennett et al. 1981b), on key contemporary debates in cultural theory (Bennett et al. 1981a), and on different moments in the historical development of popular culture in Britain (Waites et al. 1982). There was, in addition, a one week’s summer school focused on the seaside town Blackpool that had to be planned, prepared and run for all students enrolled in the course.