Three of Alexander Kluge's 1988 videos, made for the German television programme '10 vor 11', were screened last month at Whitechapel Gallery. Here, Marina Vishmidt unravels their tangled collage of wartime imagery, advertising and philosophy, in relation to Kluge's conception of an 'oppositional public sphere'

France's Ondes Sans Frontieres puts the Public back into Broadcasting

French TV never experienced the burgeoning freedom that FM radio thrived on after its liberalisation in the 80s. It was born old, conservative and buckled up, worshipping the American industrialisation process while choosing to retire somewhere between status quo anaesthetic and cynical provider of disposable trash. This nauseating formula made TF1 the most successful channel in geographic Europe and a model that even state-owned France 2 and 3 are eager to emulate.

In the BBC’s latest spy-series-cum-M15-promo 'Spooks', the spies have come in from the cold and are lounging about on designer sofas. Mark Fisher investigates their passage from ghosts to yuppies

Benedict Seymour on the evolution in televisual aesthetics in the UK’s Party Election Broadcasts.

When Stewart Home appeared in The Falconer, the second of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s strangely convoluted film trilogy about hidden cultural memory and its avatars, he found himself sucked into an underworld of allusion, repetition and false trails. He resurfaced seriously damaged, but no sooner had he done so than Mute hired him to go back and solve the still uncracked enigma of the project.

In the 60s, Andy Warhol’s Factory manufactured celebrities out of self-obsessed nobodies but did so at a jaundiced distance from Burbank. Big Brother takes Warhol’s model and, in a surveillance-rigged encampment, creates Factory 2000. At a dispassionate level, it’s intriguing to see how media and technology seemlessly converge around the rhetoric of celebrity. Wanna be famous?

After banishment to R1, where he perfected the ketamine-dosed trip-hop ambience of Blue Jam, Chris Morris’s return to TV is definitive comic-horror for the surveillance generation. Trading less in punchlines than straight-faced, drip-fed panic, Jam is truly experimental cross-media comedown comedy. Written, directed and produced by Morris, this is auteur-TV. Someone give the man a movie.

Chris Darke

Television is the new assembly zone in which the avatars of Russia’s ruling party are built and refined. Ivan Zassoursky, TV-smasher extraordinaire, lays the plot bare.