Television Personalities

Stardom and the Small Screen

James Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136907470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Television Personalities offers an exciting, engaging approach to studying and understanding the most prominent and popular performers in television and celebrity culture. It is an original, indispensable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media, television and celebrity studies, as well as those interested in digital culture more widely.

Chapter 1
The television personality system

Who are these personalities who have recently come among us in excessive numbers? How do they differ from the rest of us persons? … Television personalities … seem to be persons whose faces are instantly recognizable from exposure on television and in photographs in newspapers, but who have no other obvious talents.

(Philip Howard, The Times, 14 July, 1978: np)

Long after TV Mirror Annual opined that television fame was a ‘puzzle’ in 1956, Philip Howard’s piece for The Times suggested this puzzle remained pertinent in 1978. Equally, published long before the coming of a personality like Jade Goody or the diatribes of Ellis, Langer and Schickel discussed in this book’s introduction, his piece – ‘the making of a personality’ – resonates with the cultural value placed on television personalities’ fame: that is, famous for being famous. However, Howard poses two questions that need answering in any sustained study of the television personality: Who are they? And how are they different – to us, to other forms of celebrity? In this chapter I set out the category of the television personality as discussed throughout the book in more depth. In so doing I review a range of work from film, television and celebrity studies that have considered the specificities of television fame. In turn, drawing more widely on cultural, new media and media studies, I set out an understanding of the key discourses of ordinariness, intimacy, authenticity and skill that structure the investigation in the remainder of this book. It is the confluence of these discourses, I argue, that set television personalities apart from both ‘ordinary’ people and other forms of celebrity. A closer understanding of this challenges the diminished status of television’s forms of fame and the notion that television personalities have no ‘obvious talents’.

The association of television with the extension of fame to ordinary people such as Jade Goody seems to both exemplify Howard’s and others’ arguments about the devaluation of contemporary celebrity. But it also provides a fitting example of the difficulty in discussing television fame: variously described as a ‘celebrity’, a ‘TV star’, a ‘reality TV star’ or contestant, as well as a ‘television personality’, ¹ Goody was certainly a celebrity, but we can ask in what way is it useful to understand her celebrity as specifically configured by television? Previous academic studies of television personalities have tended to treat the television celebrity as an undifferentiated conglomerate which, as I have suggested, unhelpfully forces us to treat performers such as Goody and Oprah Winfrey as belonging to the same category. For Langer the term ‘television personality’ is applied to anyone ‘who makes regular appearances’ on television: ‘newsreaders, moderators, hosts, comperes or characters’ (Langer, 1997: 165), whilst Ellis finds that the terms ‘personality’ or ‘star’ are applied to ‘anybody who appears on its screen: even the weather forecasters’ (Ellis, 1991: 313). Arguably Goody’s celebrity exemplifies why the term ‘TV star’ has been resisted within the academy: because television can seemingly confer fame on anyone; because if manufactures what Boorstin has termed ‘pseudo-events’ (Boorstin, 1961) like Big Brother that provide a steady stream of ‘wannabes’ willing to surrender to the process of celebrity manufacture; and, ultimately, because such fame fails to conform to cinema’s ‘photo effect’, which constructs stars as paradoxical figures – at once present and absent, extraordinary and ordinary. Like so many of the celebrities television produces, Goody is simply ordinary, with no distinction or dialectic between on- and off-screen self.

This failure of television to produce paradoxical ‘star’ images of its performers has been applied to all forms of celebrity television produces – from reality TV contestants, to presenters, hosts and actors. For example, a common critique of television actors suggests they can never be understood via the parameters of stardom, by virtue of the fact they do not appear to have a separate private persona to the characters they inhabit on screen. Jeremy Butler’s analysis of the soap opera actor therefore argues that a star system is incapable of being applied to soap actors on the television screen due to the fact that the soap opera actor’s presence is largely ‘invisible, repressed by a variety of ideological, economic and aesthetic factors’ that ensures such performers are ‘practically treated as ciphers’ for the character (Butler, 1991: 81). Consequently, television actors are often subsumed within the characters that they play, an illusion reinforced by their intertextual appearances in other media that emphasise a compare/contrast approach to the performer and their character. The elision of on-/off-screen self by television appears further confirmed by both non-fiction programming, in which presenters play themselves with no dramatic role or narrative conceit to mask the authentic self, and reality TV’s emphasis on ordinariness and authenticity that requires self-revelation as a prerequisite to celebrity. As a result, all forms of television celebrity have tended to be amalgamated in order to draw a ‘well caught distinction’ between film and television’s mode of celebrity, in which television’s emphasis on the continuity of its performers’ image, its ordinariness and intimate connection to the audience is underscored (Turner, 2004: 15). However, we cannot simply conflate the range of performers appearing on television within this easy binary between film and television – recognising the different forms of celebrity television circulates helps us understand the way in which key discourses of authenticity, ordinariness, intimacy and skill function very specifically in the construction of television personality fame.

A ‘well caught distinction’? Celebrities, stars and television personalities

Television has always constructed its own ‘personalities’ while simultaneously circulating personae from other domains, and these categories cannot simply be conflated.

(Holmes, 2007a: 429)

Television has often been depicted as a mere relayer of other forms of celebrity, with televisual fame always-already positioned as both facilitating the presence of other ‘stars’ on the small screen and, in so doing, producing a form of celebrity that is inferior to other realms: from ‘hosting’ the presence of stars on chat shows (Marshall, 1997), through to mass producing ‘celetoids’ (Rojek, 2001), through to reality TV programming whose fame is ephemeral (Turner, 2004). However, a growing body of work has emerged that attempts to pay greater attention to the specificities of televisual fame. Su Holmes’s work is crucial here, particularly in a British context, where her analysis of a range of contemporary and historical examples has done much to unpick the way in which ordinariness and authenticity functions in relationship to a range of performers on television. Whilst Holmes offers compelling arguments in relationship to the way these concepts function in the construction of television fame that I shall return to below, she also points to the way in which television produces its own form of celebrity as well as circulates personas from other media. In so doing, she has questioned the way terminology has constructed television fame, suggesting it is within the relationship between popular and academic discourse that the cultural value and interpretations of ‘different forms of media fame are fought out’ (Bennett and Holmes, 2010: 67). Whilst Holmes has demonstrated the term ‘television star’ has had currency at particular historical junctures (Holmes, 2001), a significant body of work has more directly challenged film studies’ mantra about the impossibility of television stardom.

Primarily this work has considered the historical forms of early television stardom in the USA, such as Susan Murray’s (2005) work on early US television and broadcast stardom, Diane Negra’s study of Hedy Lamarr (Negra, 2002), Lola Bratten’s examination of Dinah Shore (Bratten, 2002), Christine Becker’s investigation of the interplay between film and television fame (Becker, 2009), and Denise Mann’s analysis of the recycling of Hollywood stars on 1950s television (Mann, 1991). Whilst Murray convincingly argues that ‘television used its stars to define itself’ during the 1950s, Mary Desjardins has examined the circulation of film star images by television during the same period. She argues that performers such as Gloria Swanson developed a televisual image that drew on their cinematic star image, but was distinctly informed by television’s production and reception contexts (Desjardins, 2009). Like the work of Negra, Mann and Bratten therefore, the study by Desjardins is illustrative of the way in which such work has tended to focus on the way in which television circulates film stars’ images. More directly, Deborah Jermyn’s analysis of Sex & The City’s (HBO, 1998–2004) Sarah Jessica Parker has argued that with the growth of American quality television it now ‘seems indisputable that this status [of stardom’s presence absence] has been conferred by television’ (Jermyn, 2006: 81).

Nevertheless, despite the useful interventions that each of these authors have made in terms of understanding and establishing a distinctly televisual regime of stardom, I do not wish to treat the performers under discussion across this book as ‘TV stars’ for a number of reasons. Primarily, this is because the term ‘star’ is too loaded – and well theorised in film studies – to be helpful in this context. For example, Murray’s otherwise excellent history of early US television does not interrogate the use of the term ‘star’ in relation to television – preferring simply to adopt it as the most prevalent term used to describe prominent performers on television in the popular press of the time. Whilst Murray makes it clear that, what she terms, ‘TV stars’ were pivotal in the formation of the televisual, understood as an aesthetic as well as a set of production and reception practices, the performers she discusses come primarily from light entertainment and variety and do not conform to the regime of stardom as discussed in film studies. Moreover, although she suggests that the multiple roles a television star had to maintain ‘required the star to simultaneously remain extraordinary whilst asserting his or her ordinariness’ (Murray, 2005: 132), this argument is made without reference to Ellis’s extraordinary/ordinary paradox of stardom. Indeed, her discussion of Arthur Godfry’s fall from grace, brought about by revealing a disjuncture between the likeable on-screen persona and a hard-nosed off-screen self, underscores the way in which television’s personality system tends to emphasise the continuity of performers’ on- and off-screen image. As she suggests, this was connected to ‘broadcasting’s economic goals and its presumed aesthetics’, which:

encouraged intimacy in television performance style along with an enhanced conflation of a star’s ‘real life’ with that of his or her character’s textual history and personality in order to promote viewer identification with both a program’s star and products.

(Ibid.: 129)

As I shall discuss across this book, the lack of such a distinction is no barrier to considering television personalities’ on-screen personas as worthy of attention nor any less constructed; indeed, arguably it is more appropriate to think of television personalities as ‘extraordinarily ordinary’. Whilst an invaluable study of broadcasting history and fame, clearly the use of the term ‘star’ in Murray’s work is not conceptually theorised here.

In contrast to Murray’s use of the term ‘star’, Jermyn more purposefully sets out to establish that television can confer ‘stardom proper’, in producing forms of fame that correspond to cinema’s regime of the paradoxical film star image: extraordinary/ordinary. Jermyn’s analysis perhaps most pertinently challenges Butler’s, Langer’s and Ellis’s arguments regarding the television actor, whereby, as Jermyn goes on to argue, we can understand recent ‘quality’ American television drama as having potentially extended the paradoxical ordinary/extraordinary terms of stardom to television. Insofar as this is accurate, Jermyn is correct to argue that these performers might be perceived as formulating a category of television stardom. Whether this is as new as Jermyn suggests is something of a moot point as far as my argument here is concerned, but it is worth noting that the work of US scholars listed above, as well as Alexander Doty’s study of Lucille Ball (Doty, 1990), have pointed to a similar form of televisual stardom apparent in the movement of performers between film and television screens during the 1940s and 1950s. However, in thinking about this category of television star, I do not think that it is insignificant that Sarah Jessica Parker’s, Hedy Lamarr’s, Gloria Swanson’s and Lucille Ball’s careers started in film, and then moved back and forth between film and television. Indeed, whilst it might no longer be necessary for a career to start on film in order for stardom to be achieved or conferred on a performer, the examples of George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston and Gillian Anderson that Jermyn lists do suggest that the (successful) film appearance does remain pivotal to ‘stardom proper’.

However, what remains apparent from this analysis is that the term ‘television star’ has remained problematic and its use has tended to start from the presupposition that television’s regime of stardom should conform to that of film. This is not to say we should now simply discard the term ‘television star’ and adopt the moniker ‘television personality’. Indeed to propose one catch-all term for television fame would be erroneous: television produces actors, presenters, contestants, celebrities, stars and personalities. Without creating a rigid typology we need to separate forms of fame, televisual or otherwise, circulated and produced by television. The term ‘television personality’, as I am using it across this book, is therefore restricted in three important senses: relative fame; work, which I will discuss across the book as ‘skill’, ‘knowledge’ or ‘expertise’, and ‘labour’; and, finally, performance mode.

First, in relation to the distinctions that frame studies of stardom in film and television, the category of the television personality is necessarily limited to those performers whose image enters into subsidiary circulation, such as appearances in magazines, newspapers, adverts and books (for example, ‘how to’ merchandising surrounding a vocational skill, such as gardening, DIY or cookery; or autobiographies and biographies; or more rarely, exploits into fiction). Of course, such subsidiary circulation should also include television appearances, such as David Attenborough’s guesting as a celebrity on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (BBC, 2001–2010), or in turn when Ross himself appears as a celebrity panellist on The Apprentice: You’re Fired (BBC, 2006– ongoing). Moreover, increasingly this intertextual circulation of the television personality persona includes its multiplatform dissemination across digital media formats such as Internet television, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites; which, in turn, offer spaces for the construction of various forms of ‘DIY celebrity’ discussed in Chapter 7 (Turner, 2004). In turn, such publicity, promotion and coverage should clearly feed back into their on-screen appearances. In this sense, the television personality can be defined as those who develop a ‘televisual image’, which distinguishes them from the mere ‘presenter’, akin to the ‘star image’ of film theory that Richard Dyer proposes separates stars from actors (Dyer, 2001).

Second, as Christine Geraghty has noted, a television personality’s fame remains distinct from that of the ‘celebrity’, which ‘indicates someone whose fame rests overwhelmingly on what happens outside the sphere of their work and who is famous for having a lifestyle’. Whilst reality TV contestants might be readily subsumed within this category, Geraghty goes on to suggest that television personalities belong to a category of ‘professionals’, ‘whose fame rests on their work in such a way that there is very little sense of a private life and the emphasis is on the seamlessness of the public persona’ (Geraghty, 2000: 187). This notion of work is an important category for my delineation of television personalities from other forms of fame – televisual and otherwise. By invoking an understanding of work in the form of different kinds of skill across the book – discussed as televisual skill, vocational skill and vernacular skill – I want to suggest that far from the simple presentation of an authentic, ordinary self, the construction of a television personality’s fame involves both labour and achievement, often taking the form of promotion, publicity and performance. I will return to this question of achievement in Chapter 5. But for now it is worth noting how this category of skill again delimits the category of the television personality from both television actor and television celebrity.

This point about performance leads me to the final distinction I want to make in terms of the use of the term ‘television personality’: that is, between the television celebrity, actor or star, and the television personality. Understanding the presentation of the authentic, ordinary self as a performance, worked at over time, intertwines with Geraghty’s assessment of the professional’s fame and persona being characterised by the seamlessness of their public persona. The television personality as a category, therefore, consists of those performers who play themselves, making little distinction between on-screen and private persona: Jamie Oliver as ‘Jamie Oliver’, etc. In this sense, the category of the television personality is essentially comprised of pr...