Commercials as a genre on BBC and CNN 2.

Television has changed the face of communication and leisure. From roughly the middle of the twentieth century the world has undergone a dramatic transformation in the way we think and the way we engage with the world around us. Television has evolved from a way to satisfy curiosity that was only available to the world’s elite, to the world’s most dominant force of communication and entertainment. According to Cummins and Gordon (Programming Our Lives: Television and American Identity, 2006), TV has given us a radically different relationship with the information around us, what we expect from amusement, what we need, and what we want.