Week Five [Lecture Notes]

Reality + Lifestyle Television

Focus on Our Lives...

Reality TV - Performance, surveillance, disciplining society, class...

Lifestyle TV - From citizen to consumer, from cooks to life experts, gendered expectations and lifestyle TV 

THERE'S A CROSS OVER


Real Lives?

- Unpacking the notion of reality TV

- The paradox of being 'sold' a version of our reality...

- Gender and class politics in reality/lifestyle shows --> How does the 'reality' format change what is acceptable in terms of representation.

- Which 'realities' are reified


The Reality Bomb

- Exploded at the end of the 1990s

- But not new...it's grown considerably

- Candid camera started in the US in 1949

- This genre also continued in docu-soaps such as Airport [1949]

- Birth of Big Brother which started in the Netherlands in 1999 came to the UK in 2000, which had it's peak viewers on average at 5.8million by season 3



Reality Bites

- I'm A Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here
- Survivor
- X Factor
- Britain's Got Talent
- Sun, Sea and Suspicious Parents
- Benefits Street
- Geordie Shore
- The Only Way is Essex
- America's Next Top Model
- The Apprentice [Work Place Reality]


Performance

Is the performance in the Big Brother house different to performing in everyday life? No 

- The moment the camera is switched on, the 'hermetic seal' of reality is broken
- What we are watching is a 'performance' of reality
- It's arguably a new version of reality, but one we want to consume
- It's cut/constructed by producers
- First element of Big Brother to go was the late night 'live-feeds', people preferred the condensed hour-long show made by the producers as they preferred to consume this constructed reality.


Appearance and Surveillance

Intensified our interest in our images
- Big Brother is basically CCTV
- The legitimisation of CCTV/surveillance

CrimeWatch
- TV as a surveyor not for the public good, for the public's own good.

TV experts as your best friend (but they still tell you how to look better)


Commodified Intimacy

- Big Brother was originally pitched as a 'social experiment'. It was us watching human behaviour.

- Our desire for 'people like us'... so called 'politics of the popular'.

- Andrejevic (2004) "Voyeurism on offer is yet another form of submission" (p. 173)

- Those watching make a tacit acknowledgment of the dominance....


The Disciplinary Society

- Can be seen as part of Foucault's (1979) 'Disciplinary Society'.
- He used the metaphor of the panopticon prison of the direction in which reality TV was heading.

- The panopticon is a prison that places a guard tower at the centre and positions it's prisoners in a circle around it.


Disciplining Class

Benefits Street [2004] 
- Producers want to show life for those on benefits but why might this seem circumspect?

Secret Shopper [2014]
- Mary Portas helps small businesses improve...business or class?

Seminars

- Questions of genre --> does reality TV have a narrative/what do they have in common?

TOWIE, Made in Chelsea


_______________________________________________________

What is Lifestyle TV

- Home DIY
- Property
- Fashion
- Cookery
- Makeovers


Why Lifestyle, Why Now?

- Lifestyle TV is not new, it was instructional TV, but it has morphed and changed in the last 20 years.

- Roberts [2007] suggested that Lifestyle TV is a result of deregulation...

- PSB (BBC) has to compete with the private sector, so they had to keep up with the increasingly competitive TV markets

- Race for global TV products.


Citizen/Consumer

- BBC was traditionally about 'education and information' for the public.

- 80/90s, Neo-liberalism, Thatcherism/Blairism

- Lifestylification

- Lifestyle about improvement through good

-Lifestyle TV, a new public service which the BBC followed.


The Consumer Citizens

- Not a simple shift from citizen to consumer
- Mosely suggests that today's lifestyle shows "represent a complex conjunction of the two, in which the personal and the private are figured in significant spaces in which citizens can, on a small local scale, learn to make changes, make a difference, improve the person for the national good" Roberts [2007]


GOV Discourse

- How does TV operate as a way of training and guiding citizens, and how does this knowledge and these skills pertain to a governmental rationality which encourages privatisation and personalisation of welfare
Ouellette and Hay 2006


Post-Feminism and Lifestyle TV

- Feminism --> Mostly marxist critique of society, capital was controlled by men and there it was another part of patriarchy 

- Post-feminism is inextricably bound up in consumption


Part of Disciplinary Society

- Experts are judging what is 'normal'.

- The boundaries of femininity/class are being defined by lifestyle experts.

- Acceptable forms of behaviour are reified by psychologist/quasi experts.

But what are their expertise based upon?

Snog, Marry, Avoid [2008]
- Power by the 'transformation' trope... why has this become so dominant in lifestyle TV? How has lifestylification generically changed instructional TV?