The Richard & Judy Book Club Reader

Popular Texts and the Practices of Reading

Helen Cousins, Jenni Ramone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317017790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

In January 2004, daytime television presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan launched their book club and sparked debate about the way people in Britain, from the general reader to publishers to the literati, thought about books and reading. The Richard & Judy Book Club Reader brings together historians of the book, literature scholars, and specialists in media and cultural studies to examine the effect of the club on reading practices and the publishing and promotion of books. Beginning with an analysis of the book club's history and its ongoing development in relation to other reading groups worldwide including Oprah's, the editors consider issues of book marketing and genre. Further chapters explore the effects of the mass-broadcast celebrity book club on society, literature and its marketing, and popular culture. Contributors ask how readers discuss books, judge value and make choices. The collection addresses questions of authorship, authority and canon in texts connected by theme or genre including the postcolonial exotic, disability and representations of the body, food books, and domesticity. In addition, book club author Andrew Smith shares his experiences in a fascinating interview.

PART 1 The Richard & Judy Book Club readers

DOI: 10.4324/9781315553498-2

Chapter 1 Suspicious Minds: Richard & Judy's Book Club and Its Resistant Readers

Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo

DOI: 10.4324/9781315553498-3

It is a lifestyle show, but these books oversell a reduced, unimaginative notion of what people’s literary enjoyment might be.

—Andrew O’Hagan quoted in Boztas 2008)

They’re not very deep in what they say about [the books], are they? I think it’s sort of a bit surface, ‘this is fabulous, you must go out and read it, and here’s our celebrity who really, really liked it too, so if you like them then you must enjoy it’.

—Lauren, Focus Group participant, Birmingham 2007

Dismissal, condescension and suspicion are not responses that were widely represented within British media coverage of the Richard & Judy Book Club. If anything, journalists appeared to be in a state of jaw-dropping awe of their brand power and its capacity to make bestsellers of every title selected for either the general book club lists or the Summer Reads. However, as O’Hagan’s telling remarks indicate, any notion of blatant commercialization is suspect for those who associate book reading with the liberal humanist notion of a free, unfettered imagination. Combine the hard-sell with the unquestionably popular genre of the daytime magazine show, and you inevitably promote a limited version of reading pleasure, lacking in reflection and literary sophistication – so the logic of O’Hagan’s comments would seem to suggest. Made in the context of the high-profile and high-culture environment of the Edinburgh Book Festival, O’Hagan’s response to Richard & Judy’s Book Club also speaks to the media hierarchies that still structure dominant notions about cultural consumption and taste in Britain. Within this hierarchy, watching television is below reading, going to the cinema, a play or a concert, and “lifestyle” television is a low-brow genre bereft of intellectual content.

In fact, book reading is not popular when compared with the time that British people spend pursuing other leisure activities (Bennett et al. 2009, 95), but the reading of books still carries with it considerable prestige. Readers of books also constitute a niche audience, but they have disproportionate spending power. Various studies demonstrate that an intensification of the market for books took place in the late twentieth century, so that although more books were being produced than ever before, they were being read by fewer people (Finkelstein and McCleery 2005, 127). This “reading class,” as cultural sociologist Wendy Griswold has nominated those with sufficient education, income and cultural capital to engage with wider book cultures (festivals, author readings, building a personal library, belonging to book groups), is not a majority group within either the USA nor the UK (2008). But they do possess cultural and economic power and, as Lauren’s comment quoted above suggests, they are deeply invested in, and often tenacious and defensive about, their own interpretative practices of book reading. Into this arena of literary-cultural consumption came the Richard & Judy Book Club bringing with it, courtesy of its hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, cheery enthusiasm and a touch of celebrity glitz, along with a slate of marketing partnerships. As we explore below, it was a wildly successful combination in financial and televisual terms, but the process and products of its success aroused the suspicion of many committed readers.

In this essay we argue that the Richard & Judy Book Club threatened readers’ ideological investment in reading as a “high culture” activity. We begin with a consideration of the Book Club’s actual and intended audience on- and off-screen, drawing upon our own empirical investigations with readers, some of whom participated in the Club, and others who did not.¹ We then interrogate readers’ articulations of resistance to the Richard & Judy Book Club. In the third section, we turn to the content and format of the 2007 edition. Our analysis demonstrates how the television show successfully used a number of strategies that disrupted elitist notions of reading and who can be a reader. By examining the messages that the Book Club intentionally and implicitly constructed about books, reading and readers, in relation to the perceptions and attitudes held by actual readers about the show, we move towards an understanding of how the Richard & Judy Book Club phenomenon provoked a decidedly twenty-first-century version of the dance of distinction.

1 Our study of Richard & Judy’s Book Club forms part of a wider investigation into contemporary cultures of reading, more specifically into shared reading as a social practice (www.beyondthebookproject.org). We are interested in why people come together to share reading, especially through large-scale public reading events that mimic aspects of book groups through the selection of one or more books. Our primary research for “Beyond the Book” was funded by AHRC grant no. 112166. Other key team members were Dr Anouk Lang (Postdoctoral Research Fellow) and Anna Burrells (Administrative Assistant).

In Search of the Book Club's Audience

Amanda Ross, the joint managing director of Cactus TV, was the initiator of the Book Club. Her company produced Richard & Judy for eight years, a period that included the entire tenure of the televised Book Club (2004–2009). In an interview in June 2006, Ross spoke about the popularity of the Book Club segment:

Fuller: Do your ratings alter at all when you’ve got the Book Club or the Summer Read …?

Ross: Yes they do … that segment of the show’s always the highest rated of the show. It does go up, it’s incredible. In year two we experimented with moving it around to different parts of the show, to see if the audience followed, and they did.

By contrast, only 16 per cent of the 1,549 respondents in our survey of UK readers actually watched the Book Club on television. At first sight, this statistic appears nonsensical when considered in relation to audience ratings for the show, which, during its heyday on the UK’s terrestrial Channel 4, regularly garnered 1.5 million viewers and was sometimes viewed by nearly three million people according to media reports (Jeffries 2009; Tivnan 2008). More accurately, the low frequency of television viewers for the Richard & Judy Book Club within our study suggests that the majority of readers who participated in our online questionnaire during January and February 2007 were not the target demographic for the show.

Ross was hesitant about articulating the actual constitution of Richard & Judy’s audience to us, indicating perhaps, that she was anxious not to under-estimate the potential reach of the show, but also suggesting that she took pride in what she termed as Richard & Judy’s “inclusive,” “broad appeal”:

Fuller: What actually is your audience demographic?

Ross: That’s a very good question. We have no idea!

Fuller: Really?

Ross: It changes all the time. I’m told it’s 46 percent ABC1, so we are the most intelligent daytime show, supposedly. We have a lot of students watching us, and we have a lot of people over 55 watching us, we have a lot of mums in between, it really is something for everyone.

Fuller: And that’s a big range actually isn’t it?

Ross: It is. And it’s very – yeah, it’s very challenging. And when I think of our 55-year-old-plus audience, I don’t think of them as people who’re gonna be interested in Stena Stairlifts, I think of them as people who think that they’re Mick Jagger. They’re sort of young at heart and will try things, and are very adventurous. (Fuller 2006)

Notable here is Ross’s lively characterization of the older sector of the audience, the generation born during the Second World War, who became adults in the 1960s and are now retirement age. If this was a key age group for the show, the information that the majority of the audience is “ABC1,” suggests that the audience was rather more heterogeneous in class terms. “ABC1” is often used by market researchers and statisticians to refer to a “middle class” demographic but, rather ambiguously, combines upper- (A), middle-(B), and lower-middle, white-collar workers (C1).

What Ross did not say was that the show was watched primarily by women. Yet the magazine format of the television show, which positions it within the genre of lifestyle broadcasting, suggests that it was aimed at female viewers (Bell and Hollows 2005, 9–14). The content of the afternoon television program, however, did not necessarily adhere rigidly to topics that might be deemed interesting only to women. The eclectic features could range from strife in the Middle East, to a case of stolen undergarments showing up in public places, with an interview with a famous actor sandwiched in-between (Richard & Judy 2007a). The Book Club segment always occurred during the Wednesday broadcast of Richard & Judy, the day particularly associated by UK television industry insiders with “lifestyle” programming aimed primarily at female viewers (Vernall 2007). Audiences can also be inferred to some extent from the types of products promoted during the advertisement breaks (Meehan 2002). During the 2007 Winter series of the Book Club, cleaning solutions, prepared foods and nappies, were among the products frequently featured, implying that many of the viewers were likely to be homemakers or part-time workers with young children. In twenty-first-century Britain, these roles are still predominantly undertaken by women (Office for National Statistics 2009). The scheduling of the series, on weekdays between 5pm and 6pm, on the cusp of afternoon and evening programming, also meant that many potential viewers of both sexes under the age of 65 would still be at work or commuting during the live broadcasts – an inference that was confirmed by many participants in our Richard & Judy focus groups.

In sum, the on-screen Book Club may have been framed through the genre and schedule positioning of Richard & Judy as primarily “for women,” but, as we argue in the last section of this essay, considerable effort was made by the producers and by the hosts themselves to recode the segment as gender neutral. An important incentive for doing so was the commercial and cultural power of the hosts’ brand, and the extension of their audience into other media. As our own research demonstrates, viewers of the televised Book Club and/or watchers of Richard & Judy’s regular show, do not account for or necessarily coincide with the wider off-screen users of the Book Club.

The profile of our self-declared Book Club participants differs in terms of gender and age distribution from the expected demographic for the television show, or, at least, from the producer’s understanding of who was watching it. Among our questionnaire respondents who identified as participants of the Book Club (81 per cent), the overwhelming majority were female (90 per cent) and just over a third of them (34 per cent) were aged 45–64. Only 12 per cent of respondents were in the 18–24 age range (the student demographic) and a mere 1 per cent aged 65 or over (the age group most likely to contain a high proportion of retired people) defined themselves as participants, that is, as a viewer of the Book Club, or reader of the selected titles, or visitor to the Book Club’s website or online forum. In other words, our questionnaire reached readers who were not directly aligned with the television audience for the Book Club but who were nevertheless familiar with it via other media. Since we used judgment, or convenience, sampling to recruit participants for this survey, advertising through our social and professional networks and Google advertising, not all readers in the UK had equal access to our questionnaire. Our data thus suggest or indicate conclusions about reading habits and attitudes to popular culture, rather than providing definitive statistical evidence of them and we cannot generalize our findings to apply to all readers in the UK.

Among the Richard & Judy participants who responded to our online survey, visiting the website and reading the selected titles were the top two activities (21 and 24 per cent, respectively). This result suggests that readers were using the Book Club brand, or more pragmatically, the stickers, clearly signposted in many high street bookstores and public libraries through posters and book bins, as a recognizable, trusted and reliable “badge” to help them select books to read. As Viv, a 63-year-old retired teacher and participant in one of our focus groups, commented,

I was told about [Richard & Judy’s Book Club] by a friend and I thought ‘what a good idea’. I’ve never managed to watch it very often, because of the time it is and maybe not wanting to watch it enough to record it, … having said that, when I go into Waterstone’s I look for the Richard & Judy recommendations and I’ve read Arthur and George, which I thoroughly enjoyed, … So, yes I’m aware of it but haven’t seen the programme very much, but am always aware of the books. (FG Participants, 30 January 2007, Birmingham)²

2 In this essay we use the following format to label our focus groups: FG = focus group; “participants” or “non-participants” indicates whether the group consisted of those who did or did not participate in the Book Club; date on which the focus group took place; location. First names of respondents and selected demographic details are used with the participants’ permission, but in some cases details have been edited to prevent identification. Eight focus groups focusing on “Richard & Judy’s Book Club” were undertaken in Birmingham, UK, but the Book Club was also discussed within focus groups held in other UK locations as part of our wider investigations into mass reading events and contemporary reading cultures.

As we have argued elsewhere, some readers used the Book Club area of the Richard & Judy show’s website in a similar fashion to Viv’s bookstore practice, that is, as a resource to assist them in their selection of books to read (Rehberg Sedo 2008). Among the readers in our questionnaire who identified as visitors to the Book Club website, for example, 49 per cent selected “to learn about the books” as their main aim. Significantly, Ross’s model for the Book Club was influenced not only by her own identity as an enthusiastic and committed reader, “I’ve always been really passionate about books myself,” she told us, but also by her experience of feeling disoriented by the overwhelming choice on offer in large bookstores and online:

We’ve taken the hard work out of choosing books for people in that, when you get to the end of that book, hopefully you won’t come up to me and say ‘I’ve wasted my £6.99,’ that you’ll see that there was something in it for you, and th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: On Readers and Reading
• Part 1 The Richard & Judy Book Club Readers
• Part 2 Reading The Richard & Judy Book Club Selections
• Part 3 After The Richard & Judy Book Club
• Appendix: The Richard & Judy Book Club and Summer Reads Lists by Year
• Index