TV Living

Television, Culture and Everyday Life

David Gauntlett, Annette Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134667901
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

TV Living presents the findings of the BFI Audience Tracking Study in which 500 participants completed detailed questionnaire-diaries on their lives, their television watching, and the relationship between the two over a five year period.
Gauntlett and Hill use this extensive data to explore some of the most fundamental questions in media and cultural studies, focusing on issues of gender, identity, the impact of new technologies, and life changes. Opening up new areas of debate, the study sheds new light on audiences and their responses to issues such as sex and violence on television. A unique study of contemporary tv audience behaviour and attitudes, TV Living offers a fascinating insight into the complex relationship between mass media and people's lives today.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Most of us carry television with us throughout our lives — albeit not, at the time of writing, literally. As children, the authors of this book had toys based on TV favourites, and we still struggle to fit paperwork on our desks without disturbing the plastic Dalek (pull back, trundles forward) and the die-cast metal Starship Enterprise (with alarming photon torpedoes). Sipping coffee from an EastEnders mug, we contemplate the books we have read and the different ways of looking at things we have acquired because of some TV series. At the age of 10 one of our favourite publications was the BBC book Points of View — based on the long-running show which airs viewers’ letters about BBC programmes — published in 1981 (£1.50), and edited by its then presenter, the genial Barry Took. Since it involves people writing about television, it has some chilling similarities to this book, although we hope that our analysis is rather more sociological. Nevertheless, Took’s book cuts straight to many of the same issues, with children often providing some of the best quotes. Ten-year-old Helen Steel, for example, provided this insight into family life around the television set:

I like everything just like my Dad, even if he does not like the thing he still watches it. Mam says the box rules our life but i think thats stupid.

Similarly, Jonathan Chamberlain of Derby, aged 8, was beginning to get to grips with issues of sex and violence:

My brother and I think Star Trek tonight was a waste of time. Grown ups kissing each other and saying sloppy things ugh it was dreadful. Please give us more fighting.

Perhaps the most refreshing letter was this acute methodological critique, from an anonymous child, and quoted here in full:

Dear barry took. Why Do you get letters off people.

We know this feeling.

Like many other British viewers we also acquired a vague idea of what longitudinal social studies were about as we encountered programmes like 28 Up and, seven years later, 35 Up. These were part of a TV project which stems back to May 1964, when ITV broadcast a programme made by the World in Action documentary unit entitled Seven Up, which presented a group of fourteen 7-year-olds who were supposed to represent a cross-section of British children. Every seven years since then, update programmes have followed the group through their lives, with eleven of them still participating in 1998’s 42 Up. Its creator, Tim Hewat, was an Australian who had come to Britain and felt that it was ‘fascinating, and appalling, the way class seemed to stamp someone’s life from very early on’, and he has described the programmes — directed by film-maker Michael Apted since 1970 — as ‘the most remarkable documentary series in the history of television’ (O’Hagan 1998). As the follow-up programmes had not been a part of Seven Up’s original design, the sample is not ideal. Its political emphasis on class differences meant that the fourteen included a comical trio of posh boys who could name the Cambridge colleges which they would attend, and only four girls (which Apted, who put the sample together as a researcher on the first show, now regrets).

Nevertheless, the sequence of programmes is a fascinating sociological resource. Like this study, they provide no really simple and straightforward conclusions, but reflect interestingly upon class in modern Britain (often but not always confirming the original suspicion that class would circumscribe the participants’ destinies). The participants often convey sadness and regrets as they examine their lives, although they were generally satisfied with ‘their lot’, and are everyday yet remarkable examples of how people adjust to what life deals them. Through the unpredictable course of their lives, we also see their search for a place of belonging — a search which is only occasionally mucked up by the curse of being reluctant minor TV stars.

Taken together, the Points of View book and the Seven Up programmes represent the popular and rather more simple versions of what the BFI Audience Tracking Study, the major research project discussed in this book, was engaged in. Unlike Points of View, the respondents were meant to be reasonably representative, and were systematically asked to write about their lives as well as their media use and opinions, in an open diary-questionnaire, three times a year. Unlike Seven Up, our project covered five years — but involved around five hundred people. But just as the Seven Up documentaries managed to convey something of the richness and variety of the lives of different individuals in the course of relatively short TV programmes, we hope that we have also captured some of the detail and texture of the lives of our diarists, even though condensing all of that material into the confines of one book was, frankly, a struggle.

The method used in the present study, although conducted here on an unusually large scale, is not entirely new. In his account of the development of the BBC Audience Research Unit, Robert Silvey (1974) has noted that, at first, broadcasters did not feel any need to seek out their audience’s attitudes and feelings. For ten years the BBC ignored the issue of audience research entirely: ‘When anyone suggested that [the Corporation] was out of touch with its public, it would point to its postbag. Listeners had not waited to be asked their opinions; they had volunteered them’ (1974: 28). Silvey was hired by the BBC in 1936 to set up a unit which would establish a more systematic approach to the study of BBC listeners. Silvey conducted large-scale, quantitative, longitudinal research, seeing the audience as ‘customers’ at the ‘department store’ called the BBC (Ang 1991: 142). In 1937, when Silvey decided to find out more about listeners for light entertainment radio programmes, he arranged for an announcement on the radio and in the Radio Times, the TV listings magazine published by the BBC, calling for volunteers for the study: 47,000 listeners offered their services. Throughout the second world war, the Audience Research Unit supplied important information to the BBC, and began to develop a picture of what the audience themselves liked and loathed about their radio broadcasts. Scannell and Cardiff (1991) note that Mass Observation’s survey on the occasion of the 1937 Coronation recorded people’s actions and feelings throughout the day as they listened, from their own homes, to the king being crowned. Mass observation was also used throughout the war as a means to judge the opinion of the people (Curran and Seaton 1997: 131). This early form of market research can be seen to share some similarities with survey and focus group research used today to judge the opinion of the people. There are also some similarities between mass observation and the BFI Audience Tracking Study, which also used diaries to ascertain the relationship between media and everyday life. However, before we consider the BFI study, we should take a look at the development of ethnographic audience research, a type of research which has influenced our approach to audiences and everyday life.

STUDYING TELEVISION AND EVERYDAY LIFE

In Morley’s footsteps

No study of television, the household and everyday life could get away with ignoring David Morley’s work in this area, if only because he was one of the first to do qualitative research in the domestic TV-watching environment, which means that his relatively small-scale Family Television study (1986) has been much-discussed — not least of all by Morley himself (whose 1992 book Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies recycles, but also engagingly and critically discusses, the same material). ‘My own interests,’ Morley explained, ‘have increasingly come to focus on the how of television watching — in the sense of understanding how the process of television viewing is done as an activity’ (1992: 133). Rather than examining people’s responses to the content of particular TV programmes, as his earlier Nationwide study (1980) had done, Morley turned his attention to the activity of viewing, for whole families. In doing so he emphasised, implicitly and explicitly, the need to understand individuals in the social context of their everyday domestic lives.

Morley criticises his own study of responses to Nationwide, a relatively lightweight TV current affairs show, for having assumed that ‘deep structures’ such as class positions would have direct ‘effects’ upon individuals’ responses to the material. He subsequently acknowledges that whilst factors such as class, ethnicity and gender will have some impact upon which ‘cultural codes’ a person has access to, we also have to consider that individual’s own responses to their social situation. ‘To paraphrase Sartre,’ Morley says, ‘it is a question of what we make of what history has made of us’ (1992: 136). On a more practical level, though just as importantly, he notes that the method of his Nationwide study, in which groups were shown recordings of the show, effectively caused his participants to ‘produce’ responses to a programme which they, in many cases, would not have had on, or would have ignored. This latter point indicates one of the key differences between Morley’s Family Television and a whole mass of other studies (of which his own Nationwide research was but one example): it recognised that in the domestic context, the TV set being on was not synonymous with its output being watched. (Morley was partly influenced by the work of James Lull (1982), who had studied the ways in which programmes were selected for viewing in the home environment; Lull’s work is discussed further below.)

Acting upon his arguments as outlined above, Morley sought to reject the individual-centred approach altogether and decided that ‘the basic unit of consumption of television [should] be the family/household rather than the individual viewer’ (1992: 138), although Morley himself admits that in the actual study this would often partly slip back, inevitably perhaps, into an analysis of the individuals who made up the unit (1992: 159). Even so, this would nevertheless produce an account of people’s attitudes and behaviour seen within the broader family or household context, which would still be a significant improvement over the approach which assumed that the individual viewer would be ‘making programme choices as if he or she were a rational consumer in a free and perfect market’, described by Morley quite rightly as ‘the height of absurdity when we are talking about people living in families’ (1992: 139).

The findings of the Family Television study, which involved eighteen households in South London, are discussed in chapter eight (on gendered uses of TV), and also show up briefly in chapter six (on uses of video), as Morley’s central finding was that gender was the one factor that cut across all of the other differences in the households that he studied: put simply, the men would almost always dominate the TV. It will also be seen that in the present study, we found that this was not usually the case, and we found little evidence of the polarised gender preferences (men liking realism, women loving romance) which Morley also describes. Although Morley goes to some lengths to emphasise that he does not consider his sample representative of the national population, and that his findings are the social product of a particular quarter of culture, there is nevertheless a kind of implicit claim that he is describing a more general phenomenon, and inevitably Morley’s findings have appeared in textbooks shorn of the author’s cautious qualifications. This means that Morley’s work ends up being curiously unhelpful, reinforcing rather than breaking down the gender distinctions which Morley himself is critical of. (It should be noted that Morley himself recognises that this is a problem; Morley 1992: 160.)

Nevertheless, Morley’s work was important because of its household-centred methodology, an approach reflected (in a somewhat different way) in the Audience Tracking Study presented in this book. And despite what we have said above, Morley did well to bring the important sociological issue of gender into a field which was dominated by awful pseudo-scientific, individualistic, psychological approaches to media audiences. (The shame is that his polarised report of gender differences sat all too easily with the deterministic work on gender in the self-styled psychological ‘sciences’.)

Some other studies of media and everyday life

Morley has perhaps received a disproportionate amount of coverage in the literature on this area, given that a number of other researchers were conducting other interesting qualitative studies of people’s uses of the media within everyday life at around the same time. Ann Gray (1987, 1992) conducted in-depth interviews in West Yorkshire with thirty mostly working-class women, in 1985–86. Gray explored their everyday lives and their feelings about domestic technology, with a particular focus on the video cassette recorder (VCR). Like Morley, Gray found that ‘Gender is the key determinant in the use of and expertise in specific pieces of domestic equipment’ (1992: 187), and identifies quite different gendered attitudes to the VCR, with men considering the watching of an action movie on video a welcome leisure event, whilst women are less interested in the VCR generally, and since the home is not a site of leisure for them, would rather go out. At the same time, again like Morley, Gray finds that some of these women like to steal moments of guilty pleasure from romantic love stories on video (see chapter eight). The detailed and rich interviews which Gray draws upon make this study an important contribution to our more detailed understanding of television and video in the home, and by focusing on women, the research was also valuable for bringing these often marginalised voices to light.

In fact, Gray was not the first to put women at the centre of her ethnographic audience research: Dorothy Hobson had also conducted two ethnographic research projects that are relevant to this study. In the late 1970s, Hobson (1980) undertook a study of the relationship between housewives and the mass media. She found that radio broadcasts provided a series of marker points in the day; housewives used the radio to alleviate stress and feelings of loneliness, and would often have it on in the background whilst they completed household chores. Hobson also discovered that women clearly saw a difference between the type of programmes they liked to watch on television (comedy series, or soap operas) and the programmes their husbands watched (news and current affairs programmes). In her subsequent research on viewers of Crossroads, an early-evening soap opera about life in a motel, Hobson (1982) made an important contribution to ethnographic audience research. She interviewed women in their homes and observed the domestic environment, often noting that women were engaged in a complex series of activities, such as cooking the evening meal, whilst at the same time attempting to watch their favourite soap on the television. Hobson found that: ‘watching television is part of the everyday life of viewers’ and many of the programmes that her respondents enjoyed were transmitted in ‘a period of frantic activity in their daily lives’ (1982: 110). She also found that in response to this, many women developed interesting ways of half-watching or listening to the programme while they were organising the evening meal. She described the difference between watching Crossroads with an elderly woman, who served tea, and put her knitting aside to watch the programme uninterrupted, and watching it with a woman who was ‘serving the evening meal, feeding her five- and three-year-old daughters and attempting to watch the programme on a black and white television situated on top of the freezer opposite the kitchen table’ (1982: 112). Hobson’s research clearly showed that television programmes were incorporated into the framework of everyday life and that people watched television in a variety of different ways.

James Lull has conducted several important ethnographic studies in television viewing, focusing on families in America and China (1980, 1982, 1990). Lull was one of the first American sociologists to apply ethnography to family viewing practices, and he used anthropology and ethnomethodology (observation of routine behaviours) to consider the social uses of television in the home. In the 1970s, over a three-year period, Lull conducted a research project that focused on 200 families living in California and Wisconsin. The researchers lived with the families for two to seven days, making sure that they took part in the day-to-day routine of the household, and these periods of observation in the field meant that Lull had a well-grounded account of television and everyday life. From this research, he concluded that ‘the social uses of television are of two primary types: structural and relational’ (1990: 35). Television can act as an ‘environmental source’, or background noise; and it can act as a ‘regulative source’, a punctuation of time and activity: these are the structural uses of television. The relational uses are more complex: television can act to facilitate communication, or as a means to open up conversation; it can act as an ‘affiliation or avoidance’, a means to bring the family together and also to create conflict; it can encourage ‘social learning’, such as providing information or problem-solving sk...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Television and everyday life
• Chapter 3: News consumption and everyday life
• Chapter 4: Transitions and change
• Chapter 5: Television’s personal meanings: Companionship, guilt and social interaction
• Chapter 6: Video and technology in the home
• Chapter 7: The retired and elderly audiences
• Chapter 8: Gender and Television
• Chapter 9: Television violence and other controversies
• Chapter 10: Conclusions
• Appendix: Further methodological details
• References