Week Six [Reading Notes]

Powell, H. & Prasad, S. (2010) ‘"As Seen on TV." The Celebrity Expert- How Taste is Shaped by Lifestyle Media’ in Cultural Politics 6 (1). 111 -124

Lifestyle templates are available primarily through multiple media channels, where lifestyle is an example of a new “social form” based on specific patterns of consumer choice.

Television, print, and advertising play a role in constructing media stars who transfer particular lifestyle knowledge through to the lived experience of ordinary people. 

The genre of D.I.Y. programs has always been popular on British television. However, of specific interest here is both the shift in style of these programs and their sheer volume internationally. Therefore, the questions this article considers are: Why have celebrity experts grown to such prominence and how do they seek to function as the conduit through which mediated lifestyle becomes lived experience?

Within the “new economy,” information and the symbolic are highly valued and they allow for those who specialise in such culturally specific materials to increase their standing based not on their education but rather on their knowledge of the aesthetic in all its forms. In this way, the sign value of goods creates a new social order whereby increasingly a sense of collective identification is informed by market choices and guided by the rhetoric of advertising, design, and the television celebrity expert.

Celebrity experts/hosts become role models through highly performative, mediated interaction. They offer a lifestyle template located within a setting of familiarity and trust accrued through a weekly slot on television (Chaney 2001; Powell and Prasad 2007).

How Not to Decorate 
Operates on the basis of transformation, set against a backdrop of a race against the clock leading up to the final reveal. However, the discourse of the two presenters throughout the program makes it clear that transformation takes place within a context: the transposition or implementation of one taste culture over another. Colin and Justin reinforce each other’s values and, from a position of authority as presenters of the show, are allowed their choices to be legitimised and implemented. Interestingly, these celebrity experts are not involved in the actual transformation: they show no skill in painting, carpentry, plastering. Rather they remain firmly rooted in the world of the aesthetic and knowledge of the communicative value of objects and styles. Their own value and status is therefore located in the decision-making process made apparent on television which legitimises their own particular cultural tastes and preferences.

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Linda Barker and DFS

If lifestyle is manifested in the choices we make in relation to interior design or the food that we cook and serve and if such choices make statements concerning our sense of self and social positioning, then celebrity experts become important by providing, through the media, templates of possibilities. 

If we trace the DFS furniture campaign from 2003 to the present (2009), a series of “designers” reinforce the idea that taste is important for the ordinary homemaker, but more significantly it can be bought with the right guidance. Linda Barker has played a key role in promoting the brand and her latest “Why I love DFS” advertisements guide the public to examine particular features of a sofa which her expertise can validate. [www.dfs.co.uk/linda-and-dfs]

Experts like Barker are there, we suggest, to facilitate the decision-making process. In turn, they reduce the anxiety that, in a consumer driven culture, might come with seemingly limitless choice. She provides reassurance and practical guidance but ultimately her function is one of cultural intermediary and tastemaker (Philips 2005). 

The success of Barker in this was to present good taste in a form that was palatable for mass consumption and to appear to reflect the sensibilities of ordinary people; what some social commentators have described as a democratisation of taste. But this notion of the ordinary is problematic as Taylor suggests:
Lifestyle never floats free of class. The “ordinary” people of terrestrial lifestyle television for example, are usually at least lower middle-class; the embrace of working class people is extremely rare in lifestyle programming. (2005: 115) 

Tastemakers and, by extension, celebrity experts have seized the opportunity to legitimise their role as bearers of aesthetic knowledge, as function is replaced by the expressive qualities of any object in terms of what it says about a sense of self or aspirational standing. Knowledge thus becomes a currency that allows for distinctions and judgments to be made, played out through the format of makeover television (Lury 1996: 88).

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Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver broke the mould of the traditional cookery show format through The Naked Chef (beginning in 1999) by positioning food at the center of his lifestyle construction and placing family and friends at the heart of program content. This format enabled the genre to develop away from its traditional didacticism and into the realm of narrative story telling with a culinary theme.

In addition to his known culinary expertise, Oliver’s appeal derived from his youthful appearance and enthusiastic manner of presentation, which struck a chord with a younger and indeed more masculine demographic. Therefore, the emphasis placed within Oliver’s television program on the choosing and acquiring of suitable quality ingredients was transferred to Sainsbury’s with a knowing consumer believing and trusting that the products must indeed be of high quality if a celebrity chef uses them.

The celebrity expert:
A cultural intermediary emerging from the growth of the communications and pro- motional industries and shifts in patterns of social organisation. Such celebrities have found their niche in contemporary culture through the development of a particular genre of reality television, namely lifestyle.

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Lifestyle television becomes important, according to Skeggs (2004: 97), “for recognition of difference is a lot more difficult to maintain, to know and to see; boundaries are far more permeable than in the past”. In this context, it becomes a site where the taste of the expert can gain mass appeal and confirms their status as a celebrity. It makes those with symbolic power visible and provides a medium whereby their judgments and classifications can be legitimised. This strengthens their market value and brand extensions can follow.

 

Bibliography

Chaney D. 2001. “From Ways of Life to Lifestyle: Rethinking Culture as Ideology and Sensibility.” In J. Lull (ed.) Culture in the Communica­tion Age, pp. 75–88. London: Routledge. 

Lury, C. 1996. Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Philips, D. 2005. “Transformation Scenes: The Television Interior Makeover.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8(2): 213–29.

Powell, H. and S. Prasad. 2007. “Life Swap: Celebrity expert as lifestyle adviser.” In D. Heller (ed.) Reading Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled, pp. 56–66. London: I.B. Tauris. 

Skeggs, B. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge. 

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Brunsdon, C. (2004) ‘Taste and Time on Television’ in Screen 45(2) p115 – 129.