Week Four [Seminar Notes]

Quiz and Game Shows

"Quiz and game shows depend on the display of knowledge or performance of skills, the acquisition of prizes, the display of celebrity and personality all presented in terms of fun and games" 
- Whannel 1990

- They often have celebrated hosts which have a charismatic presence, recorded with an experienced studio audience. They are as Merrill states in 1999, shows that are capable of drawing in large backgrounds of all audiences.

- 'What count is not only winning, but having fun (Mikos and Wulff 2000)

- Contestants consist of everyday people transcending class boundaries, social interaction, answering questions under pressure.

- We watch game show because it is important for the pleasurable participation of the spectator in the home, who can integrate the action into a personal world of experience.


Textual Analysis Exercise: Deal or No Deal v Mastermind

Deal or No Deal

- Small set with many lights, live audience - obviously a studio. Hidden prizes in 22 red boxes. No script? There's no structured form? Is it fair?

- Flashbacks to rags to riches stories. A communal feeling with a huge panel of friends and a live audience. There's even sob story for him before he commences the game.

- The panel are your friends, they help you and encourage you to win

- Flashy music, afternoon TV. You could win a cash reward

- Deal or No Deal contestants sit on a wooden chair

Mastermind

- Intellectual quiz, horns making it seem royal. Many lights, a dark set but the audience blacked out.

- You win pride and a mini trophy, you get public respect for your intellect

- Contestant are show to use in mugshots.

- The host is positioned as a grandmaster. Dressed in a smart suit and is elderly (interlectual)

- Its darker tones with blues and black in comparison to yellow and golds which means it's a more serious show.

- The panel are your enemy, minimal interaction with them. It's an individual competition.

- The chair: expensive, black leather office chair

- Primetime evening slot

Week Four [Reading Notes]

Fiske, J. (1987) ‘Quizzical Pleasures’, in Television Culture. Methuen. p.256-281

- Quiz shows are a major TV genre, with their roots in radio, and before that in party and community games. Their grounding in oral culture gives them a vitality and a strongly interactive relationship with the viewers.

- There is a narrative structure underlying quiz shows, their basic structure lies in the non-literary forms of game and rituals.

- Lévi-Strauss defined the difference between game and ritual
GAME --> Participants start out equal and finish differentiated into winners and losers
RITUALS --> Us differentiated groups and provide them with equalising communal meanings and identities.

- Differences of natural ability are discovered about people in game shows, and the reward is upward mobility in the real of social power which 'naturally' brings it material and economic benefits.

- The structure of quiz shows reproduces the education systems in western societies. e.g. All students start equal, take examinations that gain them qualifications where their knowledge can influence of social power and influence if 'successful'.

- Quiz shows tend to test two types of knowledge: Academic and Social/Common interactive skills.Understanding people and social interactions with the world around you politically opposes the academic, more elitist and democratic quiz shows.



This table reproduces the hierarchy of quiz shows - those at the top require academic or specialist knowledge that has a more popular inflection in 'general knowledge'. The further down the list, the shows tend to be screen ed in day-time or late afternoon broadcast slots, thus are watch by audiences that are predominantly woman or women and children. As knowledge becomes more democratised, so the popularity of the programs shifts toward those with less social power.

- In all quiz shows, whatever the knowledge that is tested, there is an element of luck. In some such as Pick a Box or Deal or No Deal, luck and choice is the force motive. Of course the law of averages and probabilities come into account in other similar luck based shows such as Play Your Cards Right. Luck is often related to gambling, it works to mitigate the harshness of judgement for luck provides an ideologically acceptable explanation of success or failure. 

- In a society that celebrates both the material rewards of wealth and the right of everyone to them, but limits the opportunities to acquire them to a minority - the appeal of gambling of easy money in risk to make more is hardly surprising.

- Huizinga (1949) suggests that games structure the tensions between chance and rules, between the predictable and unpredictable, the uncontrollable and controllable.

- Prizes in quiz shows are typically consumer goods, such as foreign tours or cruise or in some cases - money. On the other hand, sometimes the reward is public respect, personal pride and glory. Quiz shows are often charged with encouraging materialism, positioning the viewers as the consumer. Prizes are glamorised and idealised by the way the winners and audiences react towards them. Quiz shows, like advertising, are part of commodity capitalism and use many of the similar cultural strategies.

- Quiz shows produce particularly active, participatory viewers since quiz shows are not represented as enacted fictions, but as live events. The viewers of quiz shows are positioned to like that of a soap opera - they are positioned actively towards the text by its unwritteness, its sense of a time span in which the present and future are equal for both characters and viewers.

- The fact that quiz shows are typically played by adults inserts them easily into the mainstream of social values. It implies that the competitive testing of school is not confined to students, but continues into adult life. This could be seen to provide pleasure for students and children upon viewing these shows as they see adults subjected to a similar disempowering process that they'd undergo at school. Being able to compete with adults on an equal terms and seeing them make mistakes can all help improve the a child's self-esteem.


- Quiz shows are a culture product of consumer capitalism, they relentlessly address and position the woman as a housewife and consumer. In fact, on dating/gaming shows, women are free to enjoy dates in a way that is almost never shown un-judgementally elsewhere on television.

_____________________________________________________________________


Holmes, S. (2008) ‘The 'Give-Away' Shows - But Who is Really Paying?": Rethinking Quiz and Game shows on 1950s British Television’ in Entertaining television: The BBC and Popular Television culture in the 1950s. Manchester University Press: Manchester.

- ITV introduced the 'give-away' gameshow to Britain fro America. These shows were cemented by the Pilkington Report on British TV screen for it's 'triviality'.

- It's commonly perceived that on radio and early television, the BBC merely dipped its toe into the genre, providing certain types of quizzes and panel games which avoided the spectacle of prize-giving, and which mere more benefitting of a public service broadcaster.

- It has been suggested that the 'quiz show' involves the display of factual knowledge through questions and answers (Hestroni, 2004), while the game show incorporates a wider sense of competition, often involving physical performance, within the sphere of fun and games. (Hoerschelmann, 2006)

- Despite the considerable range of ITV quiz shows, they were primarily attacked by critics for fostering a morally unhealthy attitude towards money, for rewarding trivial displays of knowledge, and for engaging participants in exploitative and degrading performances.

- Many radio quiz shows from the BBC transitioned themselves into television programs during the 1950s such as Ask Me Another and The Brains Trust.

- Wether showcasing the knowledge of experts of inviting 'ordinary' people to perform, the programmes on ITV and BBC incorporated a wide variety of cultural referents. In doing so they demonstrate John Fiske's point that the genre can be read in terms of its interacting with a range of cultural domains including schooling and education, shopping and consumerism, as well as leisure and social relationships. 

- Give-away show rewards were regulated by the BBC to change the public service of game shows to reward intellect over risk and gambling. They felt that giving out large prizes would lead to accusations that they were 'using license-holders money wrongly.'

- The Charlie Chester Show of 1951, produced by the Light Entertainment department, which was categorized by the press and BBC as the first prize-giving programme on television. The outcome of this show for television was the sight of hidden prize boxed being shuttled across the screen.

Week Two [Seminar Notes]

Soap Operas

Slipping down the slippery slope of popular culture
- Why study it then 
- Soap history
- Women's culture
- Soaps and women

What is the perception of soap
- Low brow
- Low quality
- Cheap
- Brunsden 1982 'used as a awful measure of the extremely awful'
- BUT, they are highly successful and have some of the longest running narratives that tackle difficult issues

Why Study Soap?
[use website known as barb to get television ratings]
ITVs top viewed shows are soaps e.g. Emmerdale and Coronation Street

Why is Soap denigrated?
- Entertainment and popular culture = emotional/pleasure orientated (think X Factor)
- Pleasure is of the body
- Fact/news/documentaries of the mind
- The mind is reified
- Part of aspiring to intellectualism
- but we are subject to our bodies and pleasure...

Soap's History
- Soap had its beginnings in the 1930s
- Radio advertisers looking for programming for women
- Advertisers and radio producers created soap as a new way of generating interest from women

Mass and Women's Culture
- Women's pages? women's hours?
- Women's magazines
- Men's magazines in a minority
- Chick flick? what is the chick flick's status?
- Where is the man's film? Exist's but not designated
- Why? is it taken for granted/central
- Gender in culture is invisible
- Central values in social claim universal status 

Feminists and the Women's genre
- Feminists have different conceptions of the women's genre
- Modelski broadly criticized women's culture or those producing it by suggesting it was vacuous

British Soaps/Realism
- Grittier, more 'urban' contexts
- Working-class in focus
- Films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
- Soap opera is drama but its is also positioned as 'realism'

Soaps as Liberating Texts
- Mis-carriages
- AIDs narrative
- Straight women with HIV
- Rape
- Post-natal depression

Analysing Soap
- If soap is a female genre, in what way is this evident in the text?
- Geraghty suggests that we look at the structure of oppositions and difference in soap
- What 'binaries' exists and what does this tell us about gender in soap opera
WOMEN
- personal/home
MEN
- Work, social

Narrative Structure for Women
- Soaps were there to keep women busy, they could iron and do the house work whilst watching

Never Ending Story
- Soap is a continous narrative
- Unlink popular drama having a beginning, middle and an end
- Narrative resolution is not possible

The Changing Soap
- Geraghty - Soaps are no longer a women's genre
- Brunsden - Suggests soaps are being corrupted, it should remain women orientated
- Soapy hybridisation - means less 'female' forms becoming soapy e.g. Dr Who, TOWIE
- No longer depict the nuclear traditional family




WEEK 7 PRESENTATION - CHILDREN'S TELEVISION 

Week Two [Reading Notes]

1. Allen, Robert C. (1985) Speaking of Soap Operas, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Introduction Notes

- Within nine years after the debut of the first network radio soap opera in 1932, the soap opera form consisted of 90% of all sponsored network radio programming broadcast during daylight hours.

- Not only does the soap opera continue to enjoy undiminished constituency, working and middle classes, but new groups have "discovered" soap operas, including millions of teens and young adults.

- Due to technical advancements in television and the demand for more choice with the introduction of cable television there have been a spread of the types of soap operas produced to attract a wider array of viewers. For example, there are now adult-rated soaps, christian soaps, teen soaps, and, in the offing, a soap for deaf viewers.

- Soaps have a narrative form which produce national, cultural products, they're advertising vehicles, and a source of aesthetic pleasure for tens of millions of viewers.

- The "soap" in soap opera derives from the sponsorship of daytime serials by manufacturers of household cleaning products: Procter and Gamble, Palmolive, Colgate. They were a solution to advertising problems that radio couldn't carry out.

- Soap operas are a fictional world constructed by writers, articulated by actors, and governed by principles of dramatic logic and narrative progression. Not only do soap operas lack any resemblance of dramatic unity, but their lack of ultimate closure renders them narratively anomalous.

- There is no denying that many working-class woman enjoy soap operas or to rule out the possibility of "learning' occurring as a result of watching soaps or to regard as aesthetically deficient anyone who does not enjoy watching soap operas. 

2. John Corner (1991) Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History, : BFI Publishing.

- During the early 50-60s, television acted as the chief agency of domestic recreation, and, directly and indirectly, as a key promoter of increased consumption in other spheres - which began to hold a central place. TV Licensing in the UK raised from just under 5 million in 1955 to 16 million in the late 60s.

- Culturally, this period is one in which there occur a number of radical shifts in the class, gender, and generational character both of culture in its broadest sense of the popular arts.

- By 1990 which put forth other academic reasons for coming to terms more fully with the culture of television in Britain, with its often subtly interactive relationship between 'official' and 'popular' discourses, its unparalleled mixing of 'high' and 'low' forms of play-off between its democratising accessibility and its vulnerability to abuse by the powerful.

- The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, the viewing figures for this moment in British television are hugely impressive in their indication of a society united in national public ceremony via the means of live 'secondary participation'. Over 8 million people watched it in their own homes with over 10 million watching it at their friends homes. 

- With the introduction of Commercial Television through the Television Act of 1954, by 1956, TV was on the way to becoming a standard feature of every home, re-structuring domestic patterns and social habits in a way which in some aspects resembled, but in others significantly departed from, the shaping influence which radio had exerted upon everyday life and household activities in an early period.

- The BBC had national cultural responsibilities that with the introduction of ITV, it feared it would lose some sections of it audience to ITV with its new-style entertainment attractions.

BBC Director Gerald Beadle said that television competition "is lowering the proportion of intelligent programmes in main viewing hours below the level of one's competitor." He named it as the 'Hydrogen bomb of television competition'.

- The Pilkington Report can be seen to mark the last serious attempt to bridge the gap between the terms of parliamentary and public debate on national culture and the terms of a more analytically thorough-going cultural critique developing within the arts and social science disciplines of the universities.

- Under Lord Reith, the first Director-General, the BBC was quickly regarded both by itself and members of the politically and artistic establishment, as an 'embassy of the national culture'.

- The combined advantages over radio (vision) and cinema (liveness) gave a uniquely high level of 'co-presence' to television programming, the viewer often being put in the position of a witness, alongside the broadcasters, to the anterior realities depicted on their screens.

Television Autobiography

1. Television Autobiography

Word limit: 1200 words

Horrifying, isn’t it, to be asked to submit written work so soon, but for one time only you will be writing an essay that requires no reading.

You will be writing your television-viewing autobiography. One of the main themes of the course is a critical self-reflection about television viewing, so to get you thinking about this immediately, use this first essay as a chance to think about your own relationship with TV-watching, how it has changed over time, and what your attitudes towards television say about the kind of person you are.

We don’t want to be too prescriptive about what you include in the essay, but some of the points you might want to cover are:

·      Your early memories of watching TV

·      Family attitudes towards TV:  did your family approve/disapprove of TV-watching?  Did they encourage you to watch only certain kinds of programmes and discourage (or even forbid) others?  Did they steer you towards particular channels or genres, and away from others?  Have any or all of those attitudes stayed with you, consciously or otherwise?

·      Ways of watching:  when young, did you watch alone, with family, with friends?  Did these circumstances vary according to the type of programme or the time it was broadcast?   Have there been periods when you watched little or no TV, and if so, why? How do you generally watch TV in your current household?

·      Peer-pressures, fashions, guilty secrets, etc: have there been times when your TV choices were strongly influenced, even dictated, by the need to conform to the tastes of your peer group(s)?   Have there been series or genres you felt you had to watch in order to ‘fit in’?  Are there shows or series you love but don’t admit to watching  - and are you able to do so in this essay ?   (Would your friends stop talking to you if you told them you never missed BBC South Today or Midsomer Murders?)   And are there texts so taken-for-granted as popular in your peer-group(s), past or present, that you feel uneasy criticising them?  Or do none of these apply  - are you a lifelong individualist in terms of TV viewing?

·      Technology:  did you grow up in a single-set or multi-set household, and how did that situation affect how TV was used?  What role have video recorders played in your TV consumption?   What about satellite/cable channels?   What is your relationship with that most sacred and fought-over totem, the remote control? Do you watch TV programmes now mostly online and/or via streaming services rather than actually ‘watching television’?

·      Changing tastes: how have your TV preferences changed over the years?   To what would you attribute those changes? Are you nostalgic or embarrassed (or, through some strategy of smart-arse student irony, both) about once-favourite programmes? How do you negotiate taste conflicts if you are obliged to watch TV in communal contexts (families or other shared households).

·      Watching TV as a Media student:  has studying the media affected your everyday consumption of TV? Can you be an ‘innocent’ viewer any more, and if not, would you like to be?

·      TV and identity:  do you have any sense in which your own sense of cultural/social identity (your gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, etc) shapes or determines your TV consumption?   Are there shows, genres or performers that you follow in a way that you can relate to the identities that you inhabit?  Or is this something that does not enter into your calculations when consuming TV?

That list is offered as a set of guidelines  -  you are not obliged to cover all those points or only those points. 

Television has always been a big part of my life. We had a tiny old tube TV in the lounge and regularly watched educational programmes together as a family in the evenings, such as nature series and films. I remember as a very young child watching television every day after school, at my child-minders until 6pm when I would be collected. Annoyingly, this was when my favourite programme called The Simpsons would start on BBC Two! I watched a lot of children’s television shows back, cosuming games shows, animations and adventure themed programmes.

My parents never worried about what my sister and I watched at our child-minders because the child minder was an excellent carer with old-fashioned standards. For example, if we hadn’t done our homework we weren’t allowed to watch TV till it was all done. I can remember my parents disapproved of me watching any wrestling-related TV shows when I was a child as they thought I would be influenced by the behaviour of what I saw on screen and get myself into trouble. Any violent cartoons were also frowned upon and they didn’t allow me to have a TV in my room till I was 14 [and had saved up for half of it myself, doing jobs!] Once I had my TV, I started buying PS games and watching DVDs we borrowed from the library, bought in charity shops, or borrowed, or rented.

Being the younger sibling in my family, I never had much of a choice over what we would watch together. At weekends, my sister and me were allowed to get up early and go and watch cartoons till they got up and made breakfast and took us out for the day. When I finally had my own TV with a built in VHS recorder, my sister had moved out of my bedroom, this was a time in my life where I’d consume far more shows of my own choice and went to watch TV downstairs as a family less and less.

My friends and school peers have continuously had an influence over what TV shows I would watch.

I remember when I first started working full-time as a Film Technician when I was 18 years old, at my former secondary school, I asked my head of department to recommend a TV show he liked. I believed he would have an elite taste in TV due to his extensive knowledge and understanding of media, film and television. He recommended I watched a show called Suits. I realised whilst watching the first couple episodes that the scriptwriting in the first season of the show was of amazingly high quality and the cinematography was superb. This was a seminal moment as these were things I would’ve never looked out for in the past, had he not pointed them out.

Another show that I have watched without fail all my life from secondary school is Match of the Day. This was because all my male friends at school watched it and it was the topic of conversation most of the time. I never used to enjoy watching football, as I just loved playing the sport back then. However, I started to watch it to in order to ‘fit in’ to their conversations. Now that I’ve stopped playing football, I find myself watching it all the time and reading up about it too. It’s a show that will continue to be an important part of my television viewing in the future. Arsenal is my team and I am obsessed with them.

The advancements in technology in my lifetime not only have had a major impact on the television industry, but also in the way I now consume television. My house in London became a multi-set household when my parents bought me a second hand tube TV when I was about 9, so I could play on my PlayStation One. I was finally allowed a TV set in my bedroom and not hog the family TV in the lounge. This gave me a lot more freedom about the choice of TV shows I could watch. As I mentioned earlier, this resulted in me watching TV a lot more, and without my family. We became segregated as a family and spoke less and less, apart from family meal times, days out, going to the theatre and cinema, and holidays.

Mum always held the remote control. She would read the Radio Times every Wednesday [and still does] and set up the shows to record all week. She would decide what would be good to record. Now that VHS recorders are a thing of the past, at home we now use a hard-drive recorder as these have a far superior storage size, space and shows can be burned onto DVDs.

Another technological advancement in the television industry was the invention of satellite TV. I love satellite channels as they have such a broad range of shows available to watch compared to just the terrestrial.  It wasn’t until Sky+ was available that my sister and I were able to convince my parents to convert from terrestrial TV into the digital age. When our household installed Sky TV, the amount of time I spent watching TV rapidly increased as well as my tastes since we had a far more extensive range of programmes available to watch.

I now live in time where we no longer I need a TV to watch TV shows. There are multiple ways by which audiences can digest their favourite programmes away from their television at home. For instance, I can now watch Match of the Day on my phone or computer screen on any journey, as long as I have Internet connection. The evolution of the Internet and online streaming has completely changed my viewing experience on the go. By having more methods of screening TV, the demands and consumption of TV as a mode of entertainment has dramatically increased globally.

Since I started studying film at A-level my tastes for television shows have altered. I still love animation series such as The Simpson, Futurama and more recently Rick and Morty. I have broadened the range of genres that I watch on TV but I’ve also become more selective about the shows that I watch. I have a strong passion for crime themed shows such as The Wire, Sherlock, Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. I love the way the narratives are constructed as well as the way they are produced with their big budgets. Nowadays, I look more at who produced the shows and films and who stars in a shows than anything else or ask my fellow media students what they’d recommend.

I can now appreciate a TV show a lot more of late for its visual aesthetic than I could when I was younger and I’m hoping that by taking this module, it will expand my knowledge about television even further.

I can no longer watch TV as an ‘innocent viewer’ any more. I am always thinking about the mise-en scene, camera angles and the manipulation of sound and lighting. I’m more critical of the overall production and I pick holes in shows and films, that I would never have done in the past, although I don’t mind this progression in my consumption of film and television as it means I am watching even more closely and its far more engaging.

Week One [Seminar Notes]

Group Presentation - Week Seven with Shirley

Weiran wz73@sussex.ac.uk