John Cable is a graduate of the University of Portsmouth, where he studied BA (Hons) Film Studies and MA Media and Communication.
John is passionate about Film and Television, and has a special interest in British comedy and Science Fiction. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is a particular favorite; he has the words DON’T PANiC! tattooed in large, friendly letters on his lower arm.
As you will read, John is particularly interested in investigating British comedies such as Blackadder and Red Dwarf and would like to develop his ideas into PhD research. He expects to do this within the realm of British comedy.
Growing up with Film and Television
John has fond memories of the Warner Bros. cinema in Basingstoke. The venue is to blame for a light-hearted bias: The Phantom Menace and Pierce Brosnan as Bond. TPM and Die Another Day were John’s first Star Wars and Bond films, which he saw at that cinema.
Whilst studying for Film and Media A-Levels, John was involved in the early stages of what would become Motto and Scrawl.
Higher Education
In 2018, John returned to education as a mature student by taking an Access to Higher Education course in Science. The following year he started his first year of BSc (Hons) Biology at the University of Portsmouth.
John will always remember Professor Joy Watts, just before the Christmas break, telling the class to “keep an eye on what’s happening in China”. Fast-forward a few months to the second COVID lockdown and John decided Biology was not the right course choice. It interests him, but he is not passionate about it.
John is phenomenally grateful to those at the University who allowed him to change courses to Film Studies. Particularly, Dr Emma Austin, who was instrumental to John’s development as an academic. Dr Austin was John’s dissertation supervisor and personal tutor for both his undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Dr Austin helped John to develop his academic skills, confidence, and realise his potential.
Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, Red Dwarf, and other classic British sitcoms were regular viewing in the Cable household, so John was excited to take a deeper look into Blackadder for his undergraduate dissertation An examination of superiority theory and power relations within the British sitcom Blackadder and Red Dwarf for his postgraduate dissertation An examination of the comic fool within the British situational comedy Red Dwarf.
Academic Achievements
- MA Media and Communication with Distinction
- First Class BA (Hons) Film Studies
- No. 6 film prize for academic excellence, sponsored by the No. 6 Cinema.
- Letter of recognition for second-year work.
Projects
In John’s second year in Portsmouth, he started the website TwoLinePush which was dedicated to sharing news and leaked development secrets for the game World of Tanks. He published several stages of a statistical analysis of the game, with crowd-sourced data from the World of Tanks community, and had a good working relationship with a Wargaming content manager.
Heading into his final year of undergraduate study, John stepped away from the project to focus on his studies. The experience provided an personal insight in fan studies, which was part of his studies led by Professor Lincoln Geraghty. (An interesting insight, alas not particularly helpful for his essays!)
Having returned to playing the game EVE Online, which is fondly nicknamed Spreadsheets in Space by many of it’s players, John has been slowly working through some mammoth spreadsheets. These are available at nosympathy.space (named after John’s EVE Online character name).