Reacting to Reality Television

Performance, Audience and Value

Beverley Skeggs, Helen Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136502446
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.

The zeal with which television executives seize on the easily replicated formats is matched equally by the eagerness of audiences to offer themselves up as television participants for others to watch and criticise. But how do we react to so many people breaking down, fronting up, tearing apart, dominating, empathising, humiliating, and seemingly laying bare their raw emotion for our entertainment? Do we feel sad when others are sad? Or are we relieved by the knowledge that our circumstances might be better? As reality television extends into the experiences of the everyday, it makes dramatic and often shocking the mundane aspects of our intimate relations, inviting us as viewers into a volatile arena of mediated morality.

This book addresses the impact of this endless opening out of intimacy as an entertainment trend that erodes the traditional boundaries between spectator and performer demanding new tools for capturing television's relationships with audiences. Rather than asking how the reality television genre is interpreted as 'text' or representation the authors investigate the politics of viewer encounters as interventions, evocations, and more generally mediated social relations.

The authors show how different reactions can involve viewers in tournaments of value, as women viewers empathise and struggle to validate their own lives. The authors use these detailed responses to challenge theories of the self, governmentality and ideology.

A must read for both students and researchers in audience studies, television studies and media and communication studies.

Chapter 1

Reality television

From representation to intervention

Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity and The X Factor are components of the most rigorously moral genre on modern television. It gives people in general, and children in particular, absolutely the right idea about what is acceptable behaviour … This is how it works. A bunch of people go into a house, a music studio, or a jungle. They are filmed so intensively, over such a long period, that (despite occasional prejudicial editing) their true characters cannot be hidden from view. At that point the British nation’s moral spine goes rigid. The bad characters are punished and the good rewarded … the sermon of right and wrong is as simple as that of Enid Blyton, Harry Potter or Superman.

(The Observer 2005)

Introduction

As Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (2004) point out in the introduction to their collection Understanding Reality Television, the broader debates about ‘cultural value’ which surround reality television programmes are often shaped by notions of ‘quality’ which are themselves couched in discourses of social hierarchy and class. With appropriate pomposity Salman Rushdie (2001) called reality television an ‘inverted ethical universe where worse is better’ as he confidently announced its existence as heralding the ‘death of morality’. Other commentators were quick to point out how so many ordinary people laying themselves bare on television persistently relay hackneyed myths about social difference and conventional morality. For instance, Zoe Williams (2003) in The Guardian newspaper argued that Wife Swap is ‘an old school morality tale that starts off with how frightful the working classes are, then winds us round to the inevitable conclusion that, they may be poor, but they’re good and happy’. This quote cues us into two things about the relationship between reality television and social distinction: first, the genre supplies theatrical performances of ethics; and second there is nothing inherently ‘new’ about such tales of morality. This chapter will outline many (though not all) of the extensive debates about how reality television has effected a significant shift in the form of contemporary television and media culture. It will also hold in tension arguments about the consistencies the form has with older (gendered and classed) cultural traditions. By keeping both the push of change and the pull of continuity in view, we use this chapter to set up our analytic framework in which reality television enters into established forms of sociality through a reorganized set of principles around the performance of a mediated ethical self.

Reality, sensation and politics

A great deal of research maps how reality television is a product of political economy, where the commercial pressure to chase exportable ‘formats’ (ideally with increased interactive potential and alternative revenue streams) determines programme content (Moran 2005). Chad Raphael (2004) discusses the US context where the restructuring of television distribution, the growth of cable, and the dilution of advertising spending in the face of increased audience fragmentation, meant that reality television was the solution to an economic crisis. The explosion of reality television can be traced to its commercial success in generating audiences through low production costs. As long as networks need to fill the hours around expensive dramas and sitcoms, reality television will always survive in the service of televisions’ more worthy assets. This registers the inferiority of the genre in terms of financial investment and its location in cultural hierarchies. In the European context reality television has provided the solution to previously expensive public service commitments to ‘factual programming’. Its relatively high ratings are used to justify ‘public interest’. Annette Hill (2007) charts how in the UK, for some public service channels ‘general factual’ was the dominant genre for peak-time schedules (46% for BBC2 and 35% for Channel 4 according to a 2005 Ofcom Report). One of the grave fears is that the spread of ‘factual entertainment’ is driving out the space for traditional documentary output. Hill thus charts a more general trend towards the ‘restyling of factuality’ in the face of changing relations of television and democracy in public culture.

Fears around reality television’s challenge to accepted notions of a ‘proper’ public culture in liberal democracies, often revolve around the relationship of reality television to the traditional project of documentary television. Although acknowledged as experimental, documentary was oriented around a particular expository mode related to a world-view with a strong sense of social responsibility, subscribing to what Bill Nichols (1991b) refers to as a discourse of sobriety. Although the relationship between documentary as art form and its commitment to social realism has always meant a set of uneasy tensions between the factual and the fictional, the public project of documentary was generally seen to work in the interests of informing the citizen rather than entertaining the consumer (Corner 1996). Interpreted in this vein, the entrance of reality television comes to represent not just the restyling, but rather for some, the bastardizing and denigration of the documentary form.

A great deal of early work on reality television was concerned with its claims on the ‘real’. This led John Corner (2002) to suggest that new forms of reality television and their various morphings with game-shows, soaps, lifestyle makeovers, etc., are indicative of a ‘post-documentary culture’ where the entertainment drive towards diversion and a performative playfulness upset the categories of the ‘real’, the ‘social’ or even the ‘public’ which were once hard-fastened to the documentary form. His position resonates with writers like Richard Kilborn (2003) who suggest that rather than a commitment to represent the world ‘out there’, these lucrative genres put increasing pressure upon programme makers to ‘stage the real’ through formulaic contrived situations. Paul Watson, the British documentary film-maker responsible in the 1970s for the observational documentary The Family, has vehemently resisted responsibility for spawning reality television in the UK, suggesting instead that the rise of reality docu-soaps using observational filming techniques is an entirely different beast, offering a flood of cheap series that merely ‘[point] a camera at someone wanting self-promotion’ (Watson 1998 cited in Bruzzi 2006).

Here, the implication is that any documentary should have at its core, some purchase or claim on ‘truth’ as a relatively objective, observable phenomenon, notwithstanding the variation in the presence of the voice of the film-maker. This preserves a clear distinction between what constitutes fact and fiction. Critics of the staging of reality television, its emphasis upon narrative editing, the selection of participants, the prominence of personalities and plot, suggest that the ‘fakeness’ of the reality which it purports to represent is the problem. Importantly for the democratic polity, this intervenes in questions of ‘trust’ between the audience and programme-makers. The more audiences become used to the idea of the constructedness of reality, the less credible genuine attempts at social intervention become and the less film-makers will be attached to a sense of social responsibility, since it is simply no longer expected of them. These arguments are at the root of those where reality television straightforwardly represents the tabloidization and therefore debasement of contemporary culture which abound in both academic and journalistic accounts.

The problem with this reading is that documentary’s grasp on the ‘real’ as authentic ‘truth’ has always been more fragile and ambiguous than these accounts tend to suggest – as John Grierson’s (the father of UK social-realist documentary) description of documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ betrays. Bill Nichols (1991a) offers us the now almost normative evolutionary framing of documentary developments from expository to performative modes as a series of historical shifts – away from a grasp upon the objective truth towards a subjective ‘less real’ emphasis upon sensation and performance. Here ‘spectacles of particularity’ run directly counter to any socio-political project, replacing the rational exploration of macro socio-economic issues, with emotive instances of the micro, the particular and the personal. But, for Stella Bruzzi (2006) Nichols’ ideals hinge on a utopian myth (particularly via the observational mode of documentary) whereby representation can easily map onto reality. It is far more honest, she claims, to reveal the various modes of construction and acknowledge the elements of performance, as in some contemporary documentary and ‘formatted’ reality television, in order to enter into a dialogue with audiences over what constitutes the real.

Commentators on reality television must therefore also concentrate their attention on these fictional elements. The intermingling of performance with naturalism is part of Corner’s (2002) formulation of a ‘post-documentary context’ which he is keen to be interpreted as a call for broadening out notions of what we accept as factual programming, rather than heralding the demise of the documentary form completely. For him the post-documentary context is a contradictory cultural environment, where viewers, participants and producers are less invested in absolute truth and representational ethics and more interested in the space that exists between reality and fiction, in which new levels of representational play and reflexivity are visualized.

However, the issue here is that the discussion of performance is still rendered as separate from, and potentially as impairing, elements of the ‘real’. Whereas for Bruzzi, these shifts must instead force us to interrogate the performative further and not dismiss its presence as ‘only’ entertainment. This is especially the case since there is a more complicated history of performance in documentary than can be accessed via Nichols’ genealogy. Bruzzi cites UK drama documentaries such as Cathy Come Home and Who Bombed Birmingham? that brought about social change, but she also points to a more fundamental critique of the function of documentary. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s (1993) notions of performativity, she argues that we can apply those concepts to documentary. Butler’s notion relies on Austin’s separation of an utterance into its constative and performative elements. To understand meaning in language we should consider not just the content of language but what is performed in its expression such as ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ which institutionalizes and brings into view the structural relationship of the organization of gendered property interests. For Bruzzi documentary, like language, works as an act:

A parallel is to be found between these linguistic examples and the performative documentary which – whether built around the intrusive presence of the film-maker or self-conscious performances by its subjects – is the enactment of the notion that a documentary only comes into being as it is performed because it is given meaning by the interaction between performance and reality.

(2006:186)

Helen Wood (2009a) has previously argued that a great deal of broadcasting works in a similar way, where meaning is generated in the establishment of communicative acts between programmes and audiences, as well as through traditional models of representation and semiotics, a point from which our methodological debate departs in Chapter 4.

To draw our attention to elements of drama and performance as having a purchase on reality in terms of what they enact is to register the latent gendering of these debates around what constitutes the political. There is a longer history of feminist writing around the politics of melodrama where the emphasis upon the personal and subjective world is always both an intervention and a constitution of what we know as ‘real’ lived social experience. This calls into view the well established arguments around the distinction between fact and fiction as inherently gendered fields, where mass culture is coded as feminine against the modernist project of masculine rationality (Huyssen 1986). It also registers the continuity with discussions of the talk show whereby subjective accounts of experience with their own truth claims are prioritized over the more abstract notion of institutional evidence offered via a Habermasian account of public debate (Shattuc 1997). Lisbet Van Zoonen (2001) writing about Big Brother discusses how original critiques of the programme were embedded within bourgeois notions of the distinction between the private and public sphere, attacking BB in favour of keeping the distinction intact, whilst the huge audiences t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reacting to reality television
• 1. Reality television: From representation to intervention
• 2. Performance and the value of personhood
• 3. Textual intimacies
• 4. Reacting to reality television: Methodology
• 5. Affect and ambiguity, not governmentality
• 6. From affect to authority: The making of the moral person
• 7. The productive person: Recognizing labour and value
• 8. Conclusions: Intimacy, ideology, value and politics
• Index