1)

• Three sets of signs are potentially useful (but this is only 8 marks of work): the signs that constitute the Father Christmas, the signs that combine as words to provide anchorage and the signs that draw significance from this anchored context. 

 • The Father Christmas is fairly crudely constituted (being iconic with low motivation) by colour, styling, positioning to offer instant recognition, reassurance, benevolence, a warm welcome and a clear focus.  

• Here is signification at four levels: reference (denotation), association (connotation), myth and ideology. 

 • The setting suggests an urban, business-oriented, consumerist Christmas. There is warmth here but nothing particularly spiritual unless the audience identifies a star in the east among the white spots in the sky (which may be stars or snow and add either way to the manufactured ‘magic’).  

• The words provide anchorage through a tag-line (“when it comes to Christmas, there’s no place like…Manchester”).  

• This stating of Christmas then sharpens up the snow-covered iconic buildings which add relevance and a familiar Christmas aesthetic.  

• It also draws focus to the pretty lights which draw attention to what most will recognise as a German or continental or merely generic Christmas market. 

• There is a semiotic vocabulary for those who want to use it: paradigm, syntagm, icon/index/symbol, denotation/connotation/myth/ideology. Equally it is appropriate to respond out of the language of composition and framing (size of shot, camera angle). 

2)

• media products and the representations in them can be seen as a product of the economic and political contexts in which they are created  

• issues such as censorship and stereotyping may impact on the creation of products and the way in which representations of power are created and received  

• products must reflect the cultural values of their target audiences in order to be successful but these may be diverse and can explain the differences in representation  

• products may take up particular economic and political standpoints from which to address their intended audiences and ‘the world’. 

• both products inhabit an urban setting that is both realistic and mythic 

 • these products both have political content reinforced by significant economic and political contexts 

 • they are both essentially iconic: what you see, they proclaim, is what you get but this is part of an economic and political discourse which revolves around what can be seen and what can be said about it: the advert operates as if there is nothing to say and nothing to be done: this is how it is, the video wants to be seen as an active challenge to this 

 • in both cases representation is a political act. The advertisement for Manchester: 

 • the appeal here is to a general audience and a particular understanding of the function of Manchester which is predicated on consumerism (no knowledge of Manchester is required)  

• this city scape is The Public Sphere, iconic buildings, the central shopping area, an economic centre: the commercial heart: it is dark and mysterious also ‘promising’ 

 • the representation here may be seen as dangerously bland, as if we are observing a ‘natural’ scene, a kind of Capitalist Realism. Equally it may be seen as ‘gorgeous’: glamour and spectacle 

• this is a classic Barthesian myth, a deliberate confusion of History and Nature: we are to imagine this is what cities are like rather than this is how cities have developed  

• this is a representation of the city as a ‘resort’: a location for consumerist adventure: Christmas as a spending spree with Manchester as a temporary materialist theme park  

• the political here is disguised as if its meaning came from just how things are. Ghost Town:  

• this is more overtly political, a conscious reproach to Thatcher’s Britain 

 • a booming City and South East juxtaposed with the post-industrial collapse of the economy everywhere else drew up lines of opposition across the 1980s 

 • the video provides a guided tour of deprivation anchored by a literate protest lyric 

 • there is also a political message in the multi-racial composition of the band in a Britain beset by the mobilisation of the hard right  

• punk had provided access to expression to the disenfranchised and prompted a new kind of political pop that was articulate and working class. 

6)

• the significance of economic factors, including commercial and not-for-profit public funding, to media industries and their products 

 • how media organisations maintain, including through marketing, varieties of audiences nationally and globally  

• the impact of ‘new’ digital technologies on media regulation, including the role of individual producers  

• how processes of production, distribution and circulation shape media products  

• the impact of digitally convergent media platforms on media production, distribution and circulation, including individual producers.  

 • in the context of declining print sales for all newspapers, the Daily Mail has been relatively successful  

• it has embraced the opportunities of digital technology, adjusting its style to an evolving target readership 

 • the online version has a distinctively different identity which allows the print version to maintain the more ‘serious’ agenda. Shape: 

 • the Daily Mail is a national daily tabloid newspaper that has social and cultural significance. It is a national institution with widely recognised positions on social, cultural and political issues 

 • this style, address and ideological viewpoint sets an agenda for its target audience and is influential in the wider ‘territories’ of public opinion  

• the paper’s position on Brexit, perhaps the most significant social and cultural issue of our time, is a case in point.