Stand Up to Cancer 2012 and 2014: The medical telethon as UK public service broadcasting in a neo-liberal age

In a fragmenting attention economy, the stakes for television (TV) and for the public service broadcaster are particularly high. This article looks at the different strategies at play in the British broadcaster C4’s adaptation of the US-originated Stand Up to Cancer telethon format to present its particular voice and brand in this ecology. This intervention into the politics of medicine is analysed in relation to the discourses of neoliberalism which, it is argued, have increasingly become part of the mode of address of British factual TV content and have increasingly defined the working of the country’s national health system.