Television Drama

Agency, Audience and Myth

John Tulloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134979615
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

First published in 1990. This book is the first specifically about television drama from within a cultural studies perspective and as such examines the active agency of both viewers and media practitioners. The author examines dominant and counter-myths as they circulate in popular culture, discussing soap opera, science fiction, sitcom, cop series and 'authored' drama among its examples. It works within an ethnographic framework, he looks in detail at both the production and reception of TV drama. The overall aim of the book is to examine television representation as part of an historically positioned and differentiated social formation in which knowledgeable actors work in every institutional arena (whether media industry, academia or domestic household) to make their meanings.

Part One
Popular TV drama:
ideology and myth

1 ‘Soft’ news: the space of TV drama

There in the middle of the news bulletins, the ads, the sports, entertainments and party politicals, there in virtually every home in the land, seen with the social guard down and the texture of the modern world all around it, is a precious space for drama.

Dennis Potter¹

In the Introduction I discussed my criteria of relevance and significance in positioning ‘television drama’ in this book. Clearly, though, ‘TV drama’ is situated differently in other discourses: those of other media academics, TV critics, fans, television controllers, and so on. The ‘precious space for drama’ that Dennis Potter speaks about will have shifting configurations and boundaries in those different discourses. It is ‘precious’ in different ways for different social groups. But in each of those discourses it is positioned in terms of its margins, in relations of similarity to and difference from the other genres that surround it. In this chapter I want to begin by examining that ‘space for drama’ in the context of its relationship to other TV forms – particularly as it impinges on the working practices and daily routines of TV practitioners and audiences, as well as in the theoretical ‘knowledgeability’ of media analysts and critics. Finally I will consider the spaces and margins of TV drama in terms of the particular critical theory I am adopting.

Regulating discourses: the ‘important’ and the ‘trivial’

In his book, Speaking of Soap Operas, Robert Allen tells a cautionary tale:

In the 1950s my mother occasionally talked with my Aunt Helen about the soap operas they both watched, while at the same time writers and editors at Time magazine also occasionally ‘spoke’ totheir readers about the same soap operas. However, the discourse of professional journalism could impose itself upon the meaning of soap opera in other discourses in a way and on a scale my mother’s discourse could not.²

Allen’s point is that ‘serious’ media voices that discuss ‘important’ political and world events, like Time magazine, have a greater regulatory power in speaking to us about our culture than his or any other average mother. In setting this ‘importance’ agenda, news media and politicians relate symbiotically. As the Sydney Morning Herald said of the history of Australia’s most prestigious current affairs programme, Four Corners: ‘Every politician had to watch it’, and ‘Practically anybody who’s anybody in Australian television today has worked there at some time.’³

On the same day, there was an article by Peter Luck on the history of Australian soap opera, which he likened to ‘swimming through slowly setting cement’.⁴ Popular TV drama does not generally attract politicians to watch or appear in it; nor is it normally the career goal of ‘anybody who’s anybody’ in television. So, rather grudgingly excepting ‘issues’ dramas like A Country Practice (which was seen as sufficiently ‘serious’ to attract an appearance by the Australian Prime Minister in an antinuclear story) or The Flying Doctors (first in the soap field in Australia to tackle AIDS), Luck only found soaps interesting if they sent themselves up (‘No. 96 was a very funny spoof’).

Luck’s history of soap operas was dismissive (he called Certain Women ‘Cretin Women’), in marked contrast to the high-tone respect in the Sydney Morning Herald’s other television history that day (‘anything that was talked about was talked about on Four Corners’). This kind of positioning of ‘trivial’ drama in the context of ‘politically serious’ news and current affairs is quite typical, and itself has a long history. As Allen says, our current response to soaps comes ‘always-already-read’ as a result of fifty years of dismissive criticism. Social scientific research beginning in the 1940s has left the lasting idea that whereas the appeal of news is self-evident, the typical soap opera listener has been ‘an intellectually and imaginatively impoverished “lower-class housewife” whose interests extended only as far as her own front door’.⁵

In the light of this, it is probably not surprising that Elliott, Murdock and Schlesinger point in 1983 to the ‘orthodoxy’ of media sociology that it is news and current affairs rather than popular drama which provide analysts with ‘crucial social maps’ of the national culture.⁶ Recent work in media theory has begun to demand a greater centrality for TV drama study. But even inside the academic community resistance to ‘studying soap operas’ is strong; and certainly beyond it the ‘seriousness’of news/current affairs and the ‘triviality’ of soap opera still represent widely held generic margins of the ‘always-already-read’ aspect of television drama. TV drama is ‘serious’ if it handles AIDS or nuclear current affairs, ‘trivial’ if it is about gossip and (as Luck says of ‘Cretin Women’) ‘people drinking tea’.

Not everyone would agree, of course, either within the TV industry or the TV audience. To the extent that this book is ethnographic in approach, I will be examining the ‘meaning’ and positioning of TV drama within the organizational culture of programme makers and within audience sub-cultures. These are embedded in the flow of television as industry on the one hand, television as reception on the other. In particular I want to bring out from behind journalistic and other (male-dominated) regulatory discourses, the ‘mother’s’ discourse that Robert Allen recalls. In so doing I will underline Elliott et al. ’s contention that neither news/ current affairs nor TV drama can be (nor are taken to be by audiences) ‘virtually self-contained areas’, either in relation to each other as TV genres, or in relation to the commercials which are inserted within them.

The ‘space’ for TV drama, then, is a shifting one, in so far as what counts as ‘significant’ drama is constituted by the various organizational, sub-cultural and critical discourses which represent it. Some of these discourses are more powerful than others. So, necessarily, this chapter will raise questions of both structure and agency; structures of commercial scheduling and domestic routine, and the agency of both ‘authors’ and ‘audiences’ within those. On the one hand, I will look at the commercially ordered flow of television, the predominance within it of the dominant culture’s discourse, and TV drama’s potential for releasing ‘authorial’ voices which challenge the orthodoxies of the powerful. On the other hand, I will be concerned with domestic habit, and with audience definitions of drama deriving in particular from the traditionally less powerful definers of media significance and ‘reality’: like homemakers and the elderly.

Ideological spaces: official, alternative and oppositional discourses

TV drama has been typed and differentiated by media academics in a number of ways,⁷ but seldom in ways helpful in considering it as Dennis Potter’s ‘precious space’ in the field of other TV forms like news/ current affairs. One typology which does contextualize TV fiction in terms of TV ‘actuality’ has been outlined by Elliott et al. Like Allen, Elliott et al. are concerned with the work of regulatory discourses (and the concomitant suppression of less powerful voices) in defining the agenda for debate and the definition of significance. Their focus is on the representation of violence and terrorism in news and drama since these pose ‘a fundamental threat to the stability of society’ and raise in an acute way questions about access to a media voice. Elliott et al. compare these representations as between series, serials and single plays, making the important point that television drama ‘is able to depict two key groups of political actors who almost never appear in current affairs and documentary programmes – the terrorists themselves and the members of the military and intelligence service’.⁸

Figure 1

Intended audience
	Maximum		Restricted
Actuality programmes	news magazines, e. g. Nationwide	current affairs e. g. Panorama	'authored' documentaries, e. g. Heroes
Fiction programmes	action-adventure series, e. g. The Professionals	serials, e. g. Blood Money, A Spy at Evening	single plays, e. g. Psy- Warriors
programmes structure	relatively 'closed'		relatively 'open'

Series

It is not only the discourses of the weak but also the ‘secret state’ that are generally denied direct access to television production. However, the battle for mass audiences (via ‘ideological themes that are most familiar and endorsed by the widest range of potential viewers’⁹ ) leads to the ‘official’ discourse of the powerful being represented anyway, especially in the drama series.

A series like The Professionals (with a stable set of characters over different self-contained episodes), aims at an international market drawing heavily ‘on elements from the official discourse, since these are the most pervasive and best publicized’.¹⁰ This ‘ensures a product that is readily intelligible in any culture familiar with American shows, and because it centres on action (chases, fights, escapes) rather than dialogue, it saves the buyer the cost of extensive dubbing or subtitling.’¹¹ ‘Alternative’ discourses – just because they are not ‘common sense’ or part of the dominant myths in a culture – require space for elaboration and dialogue. But this is denied them in the action-adventure series where ‘the upholders of order and theagents of disruption are always unequally represented. . . . Usually we know next to nothing about the villains.’¹²

Serials

Because the plot develops over several weeks ‘the more relaxed pace of the serial provides opportunities to develop more complex characterizations of terrorists and their motivations and space to interrogate the nature and operations of the “secret state’”.¹³ Alternative discourses do appear in drama serials, but here the ‘contrast between the depiction of terrorists as fanatical and inhuman on the one hand and as human but politically motivated on the other is never resolved and remains a permanent tension within the text’.¹⁴ Still larger and ‘more significant fissures open up around the presentation of the forces of law and order’.

The single play

Here, because of less pressure from ratings, ‘authors’ are expected to ‘express their own particular viewpoints and commitments in their own distinctive voice and style’.¹⁵ Because they are ‘not in the front line of the battle for audiences or programme exports and so . . . are not under the same pressure to work with the most prevalent ideological themes’, and because the transmitting institution distances itself from the play by signifying its individual authorship, this kind of drama is ‘given a licence to raise awkward political questions and to do so in forms that may disturb or even overturn the audience’s expectations’.¹⁶

These distinctions between series, serials and single play, Elliott et al. similarly make between mass audience oriented news magazines, ‘quality’ current affairs programmes, and ‘authored’ documentaries, such as Pilger’s critiques of US imperialism in Latin America. Thus:

1. The official discourse is most familiar on news and action-adventure series, with stereotyped character types (the terrorist as extremist or psychopath) and standard narrative resolutions (gunning down of terrorists by state agents).
2. An alternative perspective (surfacing in ‘serious’ current affairs programmes like Panorama and Four Corners, and some drama serials) derives from civil libertarians, critical academics, opposition politicians and the like. This discourse questions the use by the state of violent means even against violent opponents, reminds viewers that some of the worst world violence is committed by the state, and calls for social engineering to deal with the oppressive conditions that engender the fanaticism of terrorism.

Because of the ambiguity and tension generated for the narrative where this discourse enters the popular drama serial, Elliott et al. make a further distinction:

A ‘tight’ format is one in which the evidence and argument is organized to converge upon a single preferred interpretation and to close off other possible readings. A ‘loose’ format, in contrast, is one where the ambiguities, contradictions and loose ends are not fully resolved within the programme, leaving the audience with a choice of available interpretations.¹⁷

The ‘tight/loose’ distinction cuts across the dichotomy between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ presentations, since a programme can be ‘open’ in providing space for anti-official elements, but ‘tight’ in the way the material is mobilized on behalf of a particular reading.

(c) Oppositional discourse. An ‘authored’ serial like Ken Loach’s Days of Hope which adopts an oppositional discourse (to the degree that it advocates the complete overthrow of the state and its political and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction: Theories of Myth, Agency and Audience
• Part One: Popular TV Drama: Ideology and Myth
• Part Two: Authored Drama: Agency As ‘Strategic Penetration’
• Part Three: Reading Drama: Audience Use, Exchange and Play
• Part Four: Conclusion: Comedies of ‘Myth’ and ‘Resistance’
• Notes
• Bibliography