Cultural Studies

Volume 8, Issue 3

Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway, Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134834853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culture populaire dans l'art

Cultural Studies is an international journal committed to exploring the relationships between cultural practices and everyday life, economic relations, the material world, the State, and historical forces and contexts. Since the inception of Cultural Studies in 1987, the journal has reflected the discipline in becoming ever more gobal in scope and perspective(s). Cultural Studies is available both on annual subscription and from bookstores. For a Free Sample Copy or further subscription details please contact: Trevina Johnson, Routledge Subscriptions, ITPS Ltd., Cheriton House, North Way, Andover SP10 5BE. UK.

ARTICLES

NEIGHBOURLY RELATIONS? CROSS-CULTURAL RECEPTION ANALYSIS AND AUSTRALIAN SOAPS IN BRITAIN

STUART CUNNINGHAM AND ELIZABETH JACKA

Neighbours is about to move to the US. Prisoner is titillating Thailand’s housewives. Richmond Hill is being resuscitated in Canada. Pat the Rat of Sons and Daughters is still conniving in Barbados. The Young Doctors is providing melodrama in Monaco while The Flying Doctors is number one in the chilly lounge rooms of the Netherlands…. A Country Practice is one of the few Australians welcome in Indonesia. And Skippy …well, Skippy has been hopping around the world for two decades and was last seen leaving Italy bound for early-morning British TV. (Macken, 1989: 25)

This excerpt, from a 1989 Sydney Morning Herald report titled ‘Invasion of the Aussie soaps’, strikes a familiar tone for many readers, and not only in Australia. It barely conceals a protonationalist delight in the reverse imperialism that such ‘invasions’ indicate—the Empire striking back and all that—while at the same time eliding the great variety of cultural acceptance or impact that Australian programmes may have achieved in world markets.

This article, part of a longer study of the increasingly international orientation of Australian television, outlines first some of the methodological issues that must be considered in cross-cultural and reception analysis of peripheral nations’ television export activity, particularly soap opera. Then we focus, as a case study, on modes of explanation of the popularity of Australian soaps on British television.

Cross-cultural reception analysis of soap opera

Studies of cross-cultural media exchange have been led for several decades by the concept of cultural and media imperialism, a major subset of political economy of the media. John Tomlinson, in the course of his careful analytical interrogation of the discourses of cultural imperialism, contends that ‘there is a definite sense of…“the moment of the cultural” being forever deferred’ (1991:40) in favour of the more solid evidence that seems to be delivered by political economy. By this he means that there has been a distinctive lacuna in the analysis of the specif ic means by which domination, resistance and negotiation work in the transfer and consumption of cultural meaning. In his wide-ranging overviews of the idea of dominance in international television culture, Michael Tracey (1985, 1988) also caustically draws attention to the

curious…way the level of analysis employed for understanding the implications of the mass media at the international, as opposed to the national and individual level, has remained frozen at the stage of intellectual development achieved by communications research in the first three or four decades of this century. (1985:44)

He submits that the inadequacy of crude transmission and abstracted political economic models for this task is patent.

We don’t wish to perpetuate this deferral, but equally we must examine what precisely it is, and how it might be possible, to do cross-cultural analysis of Australian programme reception at this relatively early stage of Australian export activity. In different markets Australian television programmes have very different levels of exposure and different potentials for audience acceptance. Thus they have a substantial profile in the UK, are less well established in continental Europe, barely emerging in Asia, and in the US there is a relatively large number of Australian programmes shown but they are lost in the contextless flood of the multichannel environment that lies outside network and syndication television.

Given this, we shall argue that both the global explanatory schemata of political economy (with its subset the cultural imperialism thesis) and microsituational audience-use models of analysis are in themselves inadequate to track the fortunes of the television export activity of a peripheral nation like Australia. Instead we posit a middle-range methodology that looks at the important role played in the acceptance of Australian television by the ‘gatekeepers’ of the television industry, such as commissioning editors and programme buyers. We also look at the context of reception set by relevant media, notably tabloid newspapers and television guides.

To illustrate our methodological approach, we evaluate briefly modes of explanation for the success of Australian serial drama in Britain. The United Kingdom is the territory where Australian material, and most spectacularly Grundy’s serial Neighbours, has achieved its greatest levels of penetration and popularity by far. But even in this case, factors other than those which are usually captured by textual and audience analysis are necessary and partially sufficient reasons for the success of Australian drama.

Explanations for the popularity and success of imported television drama range from arguments about textual form and content to their fortuitous placement in the schedules. There is also the approach, most closely associated with John Fiske, which focuses on the use to which particular programmes might be put by audiences—the pleasures they might gain and the cognitive, intersubjective and intersocial experiences that might be generated around particular programmes (Fiske, 1987). In all these approaches the programmes which have attracted the most attention have been those which have had the greatest success in terms of ratings, high industrial or critical regard, or volume of territories sold. This is not a necessary precondition for studying programme use by audiences although in practice the two have gone together—it is far more likely that it is more feasible and perhaps of more significance to study cross-cultural audience use of programmes with high and lasting international visibility. For these reasons, American programmes, virtually uniformly, have been the object of critical or ethnographic audience-use study; while there are many speculations about the success (or indeed lack of success) of particular Australian programmes internationally, audience-use studies of them are a rarity.

There are also methodological protocols central to audience use studies that are not central to our approach. Researchers have often been most interested in the atypical or subculturally specific response to programmes, and to achieve the depth of qualitative analysis desired, they have had to sacrifice breadth of audience coverage. Such studies rarely weigh the relative importance of nontextual factors in explaining the impact and use of programmes by audiences. By limiting themselves to the reporting and analysis of the self-understanding of selected audience respondents, wider factors impinging on the impact of programmes are often bracketed out or treated more superficially.

Liebes and Katz’s The Export of Meaning is arguably the best-known study of cross-cultural audience response. It is an account of audience decodings of Dallas on three continents and in it the authors argue that the key reasons for the international popularity of US prime-time television, and especially serial/soap formats like Dallas, lie in

(1) the universality, or primordiality, of some of its themes and formulae, which makes programs psychologically accessible; (2) the polyvalent or open potential of many of the stories, and thus their value as projective mechanisms and as material for negotiation and play in the families of man; and (3) the sheer availability of American programs in a market-place where national producers—however zealous—cannot fill more than a fraction of the hours they feel they must provide. (1990:5)

However, it is clear that universality and primordiality are more features of the genre as a whole rather than peculiar to US soap opera; even a cursory examination of telenovelas or, for example Malaysian soap opera, makes this clear. Thus they cannot account for the international success of US serials. The third reason that Liebes and Katz adduce to account for global popularity is the one they least explore, yet it is far more significant than they allow. Indeed, there is something strangely decontextualized about the detailed recounting and elegant analyses of the selected group respondents in Israel, Japan and the US in their study. ‘Vigorous marketing’, they say, is certainly a reason for the international success of Dallas (1990:4), but there is almost no attention paid to this level in the book.

The intriguing chapter on the reasons for the failure of the programme in Japan—that Japanese viewers had a broader prime-time range from which to choose compared to especially the Israelis, that they had and preferred their own soap tradition, the ‘home’ drama, that social modernization has led the Japanese away from imported US models of entertainment, and, most importantly, that Dallas may simply have been incompatible with indigenous tastes and values—includes no discussion of the scheduling, promotional, marketing and purchase practices involved in the (short-lived) introduction of Dallas into the Japanese market.

This should be compared to the analyses of the introduction of Dallas into foreign markets as presented by Jean Bianchi (1984) and the East of Dallas research team led by Alessandro Silj (1988:36–8) which indicate that factors like scheduling, programme philosophy and cultural environment prior to programme reception militated against its success in countries such as Peru or, for unexpected and surprising reasons, enhanced it in countries such as Algeria. In the latter, a one-party, one-television station (state owned) nation, Dallas was a popular success. ‘One wonders’, says Silj, ‘why the television of an antiimperialist, anticapitalist state, the guardian of a social and family morality deeply marked by the Islamic religion, a pioneer of collective values…should wish to put out a programme so imbued with antagonistic, “American” values’ (1988:36).

The mode of explanation offered is an amalgam of the social-text methodology developed by Bennett and Woollacott (1987) and others and arguments of a more directly political contextual nature. In the Peruvian case, where Dallas was not successful—it ran for less than a year—the mode of explanation is industrial and cultural. Dallas became the losing card in a ratings battle between the two leading commercial channels when it was pitted against a local comedy programme. This seems to bear out the maxim of international television, that successful local programming will tend to relegate US material to second or lower place. However, Silj is careful to remind us that the situation was a contingent one—had the local programme been of lesser quality, the situation may well have been reversed. Bianchi’s and Silj’s conclusions are that reception is a dynamic process governed by the cultural identities of audiences and the ‘sedimentation of other social practices’ (Silj, 1988:40), which we can take to mean, amongst other factors, the industrial and institutional conditions obtaining prior to any audience seeing any foreign programme.

Many cross-cultural studies promote the variability and specificity of international audience response and are imbued with a sense of the viability and integrity of the cultures of peripheral or ‘small’ nations. So, it is somewhat ironic, because of the structured dominance of American programmes at highly visible though only contingently premium places in schedules, that such studies should focus on US programmes almost exclusively. As Ellen Seiter argues strongly with regard to the theoretical field from which this position draws, ‘in our concern for audiences’ pleasures…we run the risk of continually validating Hollywood’s domination of the worldwide television market’ (Seiter et al., 1989: 5). Some studies which treat the international popularity of US programmes like Dallas and Kojak are animated by the concern to display the gender-specific and cognitively and lucidly active audience in operation (e.g., Ang, 1985). Others like Schroder (1993) and Schou (1992) are concerned to embrace a wider social purview, taking account of the historical preconditions of modernization in peripheral European nations like Denmark, preconditions which decisively included the widespread consumption of US television.

However, by this stage in the development of both media theory and the processes of globalization, each of these animating motivations can now be regarded as established. It can be assumed that viewing audiences will interact with popular programmes from a range of foreign sources in culturally complex and dynamic ways, provided there is sufficient opportunity to do so, given the prior contingencies of production, purchasing, programming and promotion. And it is now sufficiently the case that cultural modernization (a process the effects of which Tomlinson [1991: ch. 5 and Conclusion] regards as of more fundamental explanatory valence than the discourses of cultural imperialism) has placed virtually all societies within the sphere of globalizing trends at once social, cultural and economic.

The success or otherwise of peripheral export nations (like Australia) is far more contingent than for the US, which explains why so little reception research has been able to be conducted on their product in international markets, and equally why such analysis must take the middle range course outlined here. It is because of our concern with this wider industrial environment that our attention is directed toward what we shall call the ‘primary audience’ for Australian material—producers and (often international) co-producers of the material itself, regulatory officials and trade papers and newspaper and journal commentary overseas and in Australia and, most crucially, buyers, programmers and schedulers. These are the prime sources of expert or informed ‘gatekeeping’ which regulate (in the widest sense) the flow of Australian programming in international markets. For these reasons, our approach can be understood as a close analysis of the industrial and cultural preconditions for the success or failure of Australian programmes internationally. All these factors embody legitimate, indeed central, aspects of cultural exchange, as virtually all the significant research on non-dominant nations’ television production and reception highlights (Lee 1980; Hjort 1985; Silj 1988; de la Garde et al., 1993).

The nature and structure of major international television trade markets have to be considered. There is an ever wider variety of modes of contracting for international programme exchange: off-shore, co-production, official coproduction, co-venture, including predominantly presales, and straight purchase of territorial rights for completed programmes in the major trade markets (MIP-TV, etc) which run on annual cycles suited to the programming and scheduling patterns of the major northern hemisphere territories. Here, programming is bought or not bought often sight unseen, in job lots, and based on company reputation or distributor clout. Very broad, rough and ready, horizons of expectation are in play. This leads to strangely inconsistent judgements on the part of programme buyers, with, for example, Dutch buyers praising the production values of Australian programmes and the Germans disparaging the very same ones as being ‘poorly lit’ etc. Decisions to purchase programmes not central to the schedule are made on grounds like this all the time, even though they seem highly ‘subjective’ and arbitrary.

This study traverses a wide range of cross-cultural scenarios and the methodology of the analysis must reflect this variety. At one extreme, there is the North American market. While the US market is by far the biggest in the world, it is also the most resistant to foreign programming, particularly in the commercial broadcast sector. About 98 per cent of commercial broadcast television is American; while Australian programming ranks with Mexican, Latin American and Canadian imports on a second tier behind British imports in the US market, this still represents an extremely marginal fraction of total overall programme content. The reasons usually given by US programmers, schedulers and purchasers for the inappropriateness of foreign, including Australian, material on commercial broadcast television are to do with unfamiliar accents and language use, slow pacing of narrative-based programmes, and low production values. While these (ultimately cultural) reasons don’t necessarily indicate an especial level of US ethnocentrism or narrowness (they are reasons sometimes voiced by gatekeepers in other countries), the fact that there is relatively little incentive to find foreign material ...