Freakshow

Jon Dovey

Description

True confessions, fake films and docu-soaps - in the last ten years factual television has been transformed by an explosion of new genres. Freakshow offers a serious look at 'reality TV' in an attempt to understand the mass media’s fascination with intimacy, deviancy, and horror.



Jon Dovey analyses reality TV in terms of the political economy of the mass media. He investigates the relationship between confessional television and our modern understanding of culture and identity. Is our fascination with the personal the only meaningful response to the complexity of our own lives? Are the politics of the self the only alternative to the defunct grand narratives of yesterday?



In concentrating not on the reception of these new television forms but on the choices, models and agendas which inform their production, Dovey reveals the relationships between social anxieties, economic pressures and their specific inflections in media texts. In a critical analysis of media industry practice, Dovey asks why directors can't stay out of range of their own cameras - and what is the role of the television of intimacy within broadcasting.
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Show me the Money

2. Klutz Films

3. Camcorder Cults

4. Firestarters – Re-viewing Reality TV

5. The Confessing Nation

6. McDox ‘R Us – Docu-soap and the Triumph of Trivia

7. Squaring Circles

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Television
• Media studies
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849645171
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Freakshow

First Person Media and Factual Television

Jon Dovey

Pluto

Press

First published 2000 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Jon Dovey 2000

The right of Jon Dovey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1455 4 hbk ISBN 0 7453 1450 3 pbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dovey, Jon. Freakshow : first person media and factual television / Jon Dovey. p. cm. ISBN 0–7453–1455–4 (hbk) 1. Reality television programs. 2. Talk shows. 3. Documentary television programs. I. Title.

PN1992.8.R43 D68 2000 791.45'6—dc21

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services Typeset from disk by Marina, Minsk, Belarus Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow

00–026030

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

DEDICATION

For My Mother

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Show me the Money Klutz Films Camcorder Cults Firestarters – Re-viewing Reality TV The Confessing Nation McDox ‘R’ Us – Docu-soap and the Triumph of Trivia Squaring Circles

Notes Bibliography Index

vii

viii

1

5 27 55 78 103 133 154

175 185 189

Acknowledgements

First of all, to Sherryl Wilson, not only for providing valuable intellectual support throughout but also for coming on board as a research assistant at the end of the process to finalise the manuscript. To my colleagues in the School of Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England for the research leave that made the writing possible and for their support through- out, especially to Anne Beezer who allowed me to invade her course and test these ideas with students. To Colin Thomas for spending his summer ploughing through the manuscript. To Cathy Poole at the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol for first creating the space for these ideas to see the light of day. To Shafeeq Vellani for invaluable late-night conversations along the way. And of course to Carol, Max and Ella for putting up with my numerous absences whilst completing this project.

viii

Introduction

This book is about the changing nature of factual television brought about by the action of ‘first person media’ in our ever-mutating experience of the private and the public. Subjective, autobiographical and confessional modes of expression have proliferated during the 1990s – across print jour- nalism, literature, factual TV programming and digital media. The book emerges directly from my own attempts, as a producer and teacher of media, to make sense of a number of questions that emerged forcibly when con- fronted by developments in the factual television of the 1990s. What is it about our first person experience of deviance, crime, inti- mate revelation, sickness, and accident that the global media industries find so compelling? From cops to paramedics, from fire-fighters to sur- geons ‘Flashing Blue Light TV’ has never been hotter – why does TV want to make heroes from the emergency services? Why are programmes based upon ordinary people’s disasters so successful? What are the implications of watching real-life crime as entertainment? This new form of popular factual programming has been accompanied by a marked turn toward reflexivity in the documentary film tradition. Why are more and more documentary film-makers appearing in their own films? Why can’t they stay behind the camera any more? This intrusion of individual identity takes a more overt form in ‘video diaries’ and the TV chat show, ‘confes- sion’ has become a central part of media cultures. Why has intimate revelation become such a key part of the public performance of identity? Will the camcorder take over TV? In turn the tradition of observational documentary on television has exploded in the UK through the irresist- ible rise of the ‘docu soap’. Another new genre that foregrounds the performance of individual identities. How is it that the pre-digested detail of banal every day life has become the ratings phenomenon of late nineties UK primetime?

1

2

Freakshow

In setting about trying to investigate such questions I found that a sea change had occurred in the nature of television documentary and nobody seemed to be addressing its totality. I first heard the phrase ‘first person media’ at the ‘Visible Evidence’ conference in Cardiff in 1996 in a paper given by Ramona Lyons, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. It rapidly became a concept around which many of the questions above crystallised. However in the inquiry that follows I have found myself needing to adopt an eclectic mix of approaches. I hope that this is a book which squarely occupies a zone at once con- cerned with practice but grounded in theory. Rather than viewing television as the inevitable production of the forces of economics and culture I want to re-establish the idea of television as a material process in which real people make real decisions within particular and precise contexts. I hope, therefore, that the book will find an audience amongst producers as well as teachers and students of media. The problems facing any TV producer are ones first of all of political economy – how do I raise the money, secure a commission, etc.? – and secondly problems of form – how do I construct my material, within which conventions and limits? The economics and the form are of course finally related. Producers are constrained by the formal expectations of those who commission them, which are in turn determined by the broadcasters’ idea of the audience, or their ‘public address’. Understanding these day-to-day processes of TV production necessitates putting them into a more general- ised cultural context. Although I have tried to approach the problems of understanding the contemporary TV industries with some empathy for programme-makers, getting beyond superficial judgements about contem- porary factual TV requires some theoretical tools that allow the overview to emerge. An approach based in critical theory is what might help us to look over the horizon of the merely possible towards a future that is desirable. This point of view is also reflected in my attempts to span two distinct areas of academic inquiry, namely documentary studies and popular TV studies. Because documentary was formed in a film tradition it has its own distinctive history and theoretical framework. However since by far the biggest site for the production and viewing of documentary is now televi- sion I have made this the main site of my inquiry. The distinctions between documentary and factual television have anyway been largely broken down for schedulers and viewers alike. Television is awash with burgeon- ing ‘documentary style’ programmes that represent the world around us in a startling variety of forms. For this reason I have sought to use insights and ideas from the study of documentary applied and tested within the environment of popular television.

Introduction

3

In this sense of course the book reflects my own formation – and in a study concerned with ‘first person media’ how could it be otherwise? The first 15 years of my own professional life were spent making video tapes, working as an independent producer, as a researcher and editor in broadcast factual TV. This process began with a personal attachment to the ‘idea’ of documentary and its address to the public at large. This attach- ment is maintained in my increasingly infrequent forays into the world of broadcast production. Consequently my own response to the films and programmes under discussion here is the starting point. Although I may sometimes extrapolate from my own interpretations I hope that I have avoided making too many unjustified assumptions about other people’s viewing processes. I have attempted to provide a synoptic analysis of this sudden lurch towards the private in public speech by reviewing existing approaches and reformulating them around a broad argument that links the evolving form of first person media to changes in economic patterns of organisa- tion. These changes are reflected in a variety of fields of interaction, including personal relationships, politics and the media. The questions at stake thus become questions not just of the institution-text-audience for- mulation of media studies but also cultural questions concerned with our sense of the ‘public’. These questions in turn have implications for the wider polity as a whole: what kind of collective identities and common sym- bolic patterns emerge from a public speech increasingly rooted in local and particular speaking subjects, from ‘Other’ people who speak intimately and incessantly of their profound difference to an assumed ‘public’. The book hence becomes an argument for forms of representation based in difference and mutuality, and by implication for a complete reformula- tion of the idea of the ‘public’ that takes account of our new economic and political realities. It would be possible to misread the above as a call for a return to docu- mentary’s former serious tone, to a Griersonian suspicion of pleasure. Such an assumption would be symptomatic of the cultural terrain of binary oppositions that this book attempts to negotiate. The popular is ‘good’ – for no other reason than its functionality in consumer led culture. Texts that are not popular are ‘bad’ – ‘worthy’, ‘minority’, ‘dull’. To be against the popular is to be elitist, traditionalist, paternalist. To be for the popular is to be contemporary, value free, democratic – it is possible in these recurrent polarities to see a pattern that characterises some important features of 1990s media culture,

4

Freakshow

TRADITIONAL Authoritative Film Public service Observational documentary Investigation Argument TV News Working Elitist Boring

POPULAR eRflexive Video Reality TV Docu-soap Entertainment Pleasure TV Chat Shopping Democratic Fun

If documentary and factual television are to continue to have any public role at all it will be necessary, here as in so many other spheres, to find a way through the stultifying binaries of such a pattern. It is my view that such a way can be found on the basis of specific local engagements which whilst tactical in their nature may be cumulative in their outcome. There is no end point in this process, only an ongoing series of interventions in which practice and theory are informed by one another. The nature of such interventions changes and develops on the basis of historical circum- stances. Twenty years ago, when I first picked up a video camera, public service media was an object for critique and reform, and indeed the democ- ratising processes of producers outside the mainstream were instrumental in widening the kinds of access to media available to the ‘the public’. The situation is now almost reversed. In face of the capitalisation of public service spaces across the range of our cultures through commodification and consumption the task is not to defend ‘public service’ so much as to call for its complete overhaul. This necessitates a consideration first of all of what it means to be part of a ‘public’. As a nameFreakshowcarries a pejorative sense based upon a particular historical response to this form of side-show entertainment. However the social changes that are part and parcel of neo liberal economics clearly open new domains for the expression of identity. These spaces are filled by voices proclaiming and celebrating their own ‘freakishness’, articulat- ing their most intimate fears and secrets, performing the ordinariness of their own extraordinary subjectivity. The performance and display of dif- ference has become a driving force in our aspirations. We are all learning to live in the freakshow, it is our new public space.