Guest Paper: 'Invisible Television'

In the final guest paper in the Cultural Studies Research Group series for the current academic year, Dr Brett Mills (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia) talks about 'Invisible Television: The Programmes No-one Talks About Though Lots of People Watch Them'. 

In his paper, Brett focuses on how There exists a disparity between the programmes that get repeatedly discussed and written about in television studies, and the programmes watched by the largest audiences. This paper argues that there is, as a consequence, invisible television. Or, more accurately, it argues there is television invisible to the academy. Through quantitative analysis of ratings and publications, the paper demonstrates this disparity. It then goes on to explore the reasons for its existence and demonstrates why it should be a matter of concern for us all.

The event takes place on from 4.00-5.30 pm on Wednesday 5th May in GEE019, Clifton Campus. Everyone welcome. For further information, please email Joanne Hollows.

(Photo credit: sermoa. Permissions.)

Freeview and DRM: An update

In an earlier blog I discussed how the BBC was requesting a form of digital rights management for its Freeview High Definition service, which is due to begin rolling out in December. In a submission to Ofcom, the BBC said so-called 'content providers', which is widely taken to mean principally US rights holders, would withhold content if such provisions weren’t put in place. Critics such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation argued that these rights holders were attempting to improperly influence the development of future TV hardware and the move would not be in the public interest.

Despite the brevity of the consultation period, in a letter to the BBC Ofcom yesterday put the proposals on hold. It said it had received a large number of submissions, mainly from consumer groups, who had ‘raised a number of potentially significant consumer “fair use” and competition issues that were not addressed in our original consultation.’ (Such groups included the Open Rights Group, a UK based organisation similar to the EFF that campaigns to ‘preserve and promote your rights in the digital age’.) Ofcom ordered that until these issues have been resolved no DRM requiring a licence, which is the critical point in all this, can be implemented.

Given the imminence of the HD rollout this is something of a cat among the pigeons, but then again the BBC only applied for the change in its broadcasting licence at the end of August. And it seems the BBC is suddenly left holding the baby. According to a contributor to the BBC’s ‘backstage’ mailing list, ‘The big shock was that (and I read all of the responses) no “content provider” was prepared to say why they asked the BBC for it in the first place. No PACT. No BSkyB.’

This strange state of affairs seems to speak ill of the whole exercise. Today would be an interesting one to be a fly on the wall in a number of boardrooms.

See also
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/09/bbc-anti-piracy-freeview-turned-down
http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2009/11/09/ofcom-holds-on-hd-licence-change/

Photo credit Ladybeames Permissions

Mosaic: Fragments in Search of the Bigger Picture in FlashForward

We're delighted to welcome our second guest blogger to the site. Today's guest is Mark Jancovich (Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia) who is currently working on a history of the 1940s horror film. Below, he takes time out to discuss some recent TV.

In FlashForward, the whole world experiences an unexpected and unprecedented event – everyone appears to lose consciousness for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. The event causes devastation and loss of life and, it soon transpires, that each person did not lose consciousness but rather had their consciousness shifted six months into the future. In other words, the world has seen its own future, if only a decontextualized 2 minutes and 17 seconds of that future. For some, this future offers hope and for others despair, and soon the Los Angeles FBI are trying to make sense of the event by piecing things together – literally. They set up a website called MOSAIC on which people can post their visions of the future and verify their experiences by cross-referencing them with the visions of others.

In this way, the series continually plays with the notion of fragments that are meaningless in themselves but form part of a larger picture – like most network television in the US, it follows a series of characters whose different narratives form a complex multi-layered broader narrative arc. More importantly, the larger arc is explicitly global.

In many ways, then, the series creators hope to emulate the global themes of Heroes and its frequent narrative globetrotting, but with the exception of one Asian-American character, Demetri Noh (John Cho), the series lacks the multi-national cast of characters that distinguishes Heroes, and remains firmly centred in the US. However, where it fails to replicate certain aspects of Heroes, the ways in which it borrows from other shows are rather more successful. Indeed, what is odd about FlashForward is how familiar and fresh it feels.

On the one hand, the series borrows heavily from the fan favorites of post-X-Files television in ways that are often surprisingly blatant but, on the other, it does so without seeming to be derivative. The show features FBI officers searching into an inexplicable and possibly paranormal event in ways that are clearly reminiscent of The X-Files. It is also features Brannon Braga as an executive producer, a figure whose presence is highly significant. Braga was not only a key figure behind Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise, but also, while Enterprise wandered off into a rather misguided post-9/11 storyline (see a forthcoming blog entry on this topic), he has since become associated with another key series to which FlashForward is greatly indebted. After Enterprise folded in 2005, Braga was hired to work on the post-9/11 counter-terrorism series, 24, and he had just finished working on season seven (the last episode of which aired on 18 May 2009 in the US) when he began working on FlashForward (the first episode of which aired on 24 September 2009 in the US).

Much like the Jack Bauer and his associates in 24, the FBI of FlashForward whizz around trying to explain the mysterious event and counter an increasingly bizarre conspiracy. Furthermore, the event itself is clearly likened to 9/11. While it is clearly presented as a global event, it is largely visualized in terms of urban devastation in which smoking skyscrapers figure prominently. Even the Mosaic website is strongly reminiscent of the numerous 9/11 memorials, with they collages of fragmentary photographs and testimonies that are supposedly unified by a common trauma. From these disparate details, it is hoped a pattern will emerge, and an enemy will be identified that can account for things.

Of course, another feature that is central to 24 is its use of time but, while 24 unfolds in ‘real time’ as Jack Bauer and his associates race against the clock, Flashforward’s use of time draws upon yet another key show, Lost. In its early seasons, Lost (which told the story of the survivors of Flight 815 after their plane had crashed on a mysterious island) dedicated each episode to a different character and not only told the story of their present but also features flashbacks to their previous lives before they arrived on the island. In later seasons, however, the time-line became increasingly complicated, with flash-forwards, and with the character’s literally jumping between different time periods. It is hardly any surprise then that by the end of episode four of FlashForward, Dominic Monaghan (who played the drug addicted musician, Charlie, in Lost) turns up as Simon, a character that seems to be central to the conspiracy behind the event.

In other words, while FlashForward imagines a world trying to make meaning and coherence out of fragmented experiences, the show itself tries to bring together bits and pieces from a range of other shows and, at least so far, has fashioned something fresh and coherent out of its raw materials. Of course, there is a very real question about what will happen once time catches up with the series itself, and its character’s visions of the future have become visions of the past.

(Photo credit: qbix08. Permissions)

Freeview Retune Day Part II

The second part of Dave Woods’ report on last week’s Freeview retune. Part I is immediately below.

At present the restrictions on Freeview HD seem pretty modest. As Graham Plumb, the BBC’s head of distribution technology explains, ‘Even in its most restrictive state [the system] still allows one HD copy to be made to Blu-ray […] (and for most content there will be no restriction whatsoever on the number of Blu-ray copies permitted)’. This hardly seems like the end of the world, then. (A less well known consequence is that if your set top box dies so do your recordings because they are paired with that particular box, but again this is only going to be a rare occurrence.) So why are the critics getting so heated? There are two recurring reasons. First, attempts to close distribution systems in the name of protecting content holders’ interests are identified with a stifling of creativity and competition. As Danny O’Brien puts it elsewhere,

It was the very lack of control by big media over what citizens plugged into their TV aerials that got us video-recorders, video rental stores and digital video recorders. With a pre-emptive veto, no broadcaster or movie company would have ever let those happen. In fact, the movie companies sued to have VCRs banned in the US. Yet it was those innovations that led to movie rental stores, a widening of ‘prime time’ and a vibrant TV industry.

In particular, open source solutions—a prime source of technological innovation that has more complex relationships with capitalism than conventional, proprietary rights-based production—would be outlawed.

The second issue is a consequence of the first. Critics point out that once the viewer’s control over their own media use is in principle taken out of their hands, other perhaps more invasive types of control become possible, such as disabling the skipping of adverts and the automatic deletion of recordings after a set time. It’s important to be clear that there is no hint of such measures in the current proposal, but the critics are arguing for the long term. After all, probably all mainstream TV will be HD one day; whatever is set in place now will have lasting effects upon the public broadcasting landscape. And that landscape looks set to be one where Ofcom effectively cedes control to rights owners to specify what sorts of technology will be allowed to develop, and what sorts of restrictions they will require and be able to impose. In this context, the fact that, as Paidcontent puts it, ‘it’s taken just 21 days to go from broadcaster request to the end of a public consultation’, does look somewhat precipitate. Writing in The Guardian online, anti-DRM campaigner Cory Doctorow puts it in perhaps extreme terms:

The BBC's cosy negotiation with big rightsholders and offshore manufacturers excluded the public and the free/open source software community – the very groups that blew the whistle on previous attempts to lock up the public airwaves. It's almost as though it wanted to limit the "stakeholders" in the room to people who wouldn't cause any trouble, so that it could present Ofcom with a neat and tidy agreement with no dissenting voices.

Trying to step back from the detail, of course none of the above is to say that content holders don’t have a legitimate interest in protecting their rents and that piracy doesn’t have real consequences. Nevertheless, a familiar pattern I’ve found in other new media forms seems to be playing out once again. On the one hand, large media corporations or bodies representing them lobby, predict industry collapse and threaten boycotts to secure their media content. They propose DRM as a means of doing so. Their actions provoke more or less well founded suspicion on the part of critics such as Robert McChesney who points to ever-increasing concentration of media ownership and the power that accrues therewith, or Kembrew McLeod who highlights the overweening ambitions of rights owners to extend control over their content. On the other, as outlined above, DRM—least of all the token version of it proposed here—doesn’t prevent illegal uploads and thus downloads. It does however make greater or lesser impositions on ‘normal’ users, who may thus become motivated to explore ways of getting around them. This seems to be a vicious circle where no-one really wins.

Another point rather closer to home for academics is that these measures could impact upon existing copyright agreements. The MP Tom Watson had an early blog on this issue. (This at first got something of the wrong end of the stick, condemning the fact that millions of existing set-top boxes would be made useless, which isn’t true, as he later clarified. However, he’s definitely on target when he asks ‘If implemented this will make it difficult to view or record HDTV broadcasts with free software. Where’s the consumer interest in that settlement?’) The comments on the blog are a rich source for critiques of the issues, and I recommend a read of them. Amongst them is David Newman’s observation that

Once again, the proposed technical changes will overrule existing copyright licensing arrangements, like the one offered by the CLA to all schools and universities to use for education all over-the-air broadcasts forever.

In light of Graham Plumb’s comments it’s unlikely we’ll see copying restrictions being implemented for the BBC, but the system will be in place and there is no guarantee the other public service broadcasters will follow suit. UK librarians may feel obliged to follow their American counterparts. Except by then it might be too late.


Latest: Graham Plumb posted a response to Doctorow’s article on the BBC blog on Friday, with Doctorow in turn providing a counter (post #13). This blog and its comments is also recommended (and lively!) reading.

photo credit: jbonnain, permissions

Freeview retune day: the thin end of a long wedge? Part I

In a two-part post Dave Woods reports on the Freeview update that happened earlier today.

As of lunchtime today, approximately 18 million UK households will have to retune their digital televisions and set-top boxes in order to keep receiving certain Freeview digital television channels. The main changes are to Channel Five and some channels in the ITV bouquet, along with the arrival of a new Discovery channel, Quest. After the retune, little will be different for most people apart from the appearance of Quest, though there will some loss of services to a small percentage of households. (See here for more details.) Behind the scenes, however, this reshuffle is part of the technical preparation for Digital Switch Over, the turning off of the analogue TV signals that makes terrestrial TV reception entirely dependent on possessing digital receivers. There are two main outcomes from the changes. First, Channel Five will become available ‘universally’ (which means about 98.5% of homes) to Freeview viewers, the same proportion as the other public service broadcasters (BBC, ITV and Channel 4). But the changes also pave the way for the introduction of high definition (HD) TV reception via the rooftop aerial, and it’s here that controversial measures that could affect the viewing habits of the nation are being pushed through, and rather speedily at that.

The big issue is Digital Rights Management (DRM). Or perhaps more accurately, DRM is the technological expression of a wider struggle over the future of UK television. On Sept 3, Ofcom began a consultation stating that it was ‘minded’ to allow for ‘the protection of intellectual property rights in High Definition television services’ on the public service channels. The consultation itself was a response to a letter from the BBC sent at the end of August requesting such measures, in which the BBC made it clear that the pressure to implement some sort of content management system (i.e. restrictions on copying programmes) for HD was coming not from itself but from ‘[t]hird party content owners’.

Trying to introduce a system to control the copying of television content for public service television is a legally tricky business since it is a condition of the broadcasting licence that the signals be available ‘free to air’, i.e. cannot be encrypted so that proprietary hardware is needed to receive them. Ofcom duly rejected this suggestion. As a way of coping with this, the BBC proposal suggested encrypting not the video and audio signals themselves, but the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) needed to make a set-top box usable. Hardware manufacturers who were willing to produce equipment that obeyed the copying controls embedded in the signal would be given access to the keys to unlock the EPG.

There are several crucial implications in this development, reflected in the rapidly growing number of responses to it. First and foremost, we have been here before. From the early 2000s in the US, the ‘content owners’ (which broadly means the film and television production complex based mainly in Hollywood) started pressing for a legally enforceable ‘broadcast flag’ for digital TV, which would have had similar effects to the proposals currently before Ofcom. The demand was taken up by the Federal Communications Commission. Due to the efforts of librarians and public interest groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, such measures were found to overstep the remit of the FCC and rejected. As Danny O’Brien of the EFF puts it, ‘Veterans of the broadcast flag battle in the United States will recognise [the language of the BBC proposal]: rightsholders are once again attempting to use the power of the public regulators to force universal DRM on the general public, and place their veto power over the next generation of HD digital TV technology’.

To expand this point a bit further, while the explicit aim of these measures is to help to ‘prevent mass piracy’ as the BBC proposal puts it, this has been argued to be a rather implausible reason. At least it needs some clarification. The sort of encryption (in fact a sort of compression) envisaged is very weak, and as the BBC acknowledges is unlikely to deter for long anyone intending to overcome it. Perhaps it would be better to describe it as deterring casual piracy, i.e. preventing a non-technically minded person from copying a programme onto a DVD and giving it to their friend. As a defence against uploading material to the internet (whence relatively technically unsophisticated people can acquire it easily) it is barely a token gesture. And that is all it needs to be; once it is in place hardware manufacturers, in order to be legal, will be obliged to implement whatever DRM the content owners specify. For O’ Brien this is precisely the point: ‘In Britain, as in the United States, this proposal isn't about piracy. It's about creating a rightsholder veto over new consumer technologies in DTV’. In other words, the technologically enforced modification of ordinary people’s habits without the option of other hardware becoming available to allow the old habits to continue.

But to try to be more specific, what habits are going to be modified? What are these restrictions on copying? Why is there widespread criticism of these measures?

Part two coming soon.

(photo credit: Lee Jordan, permissions)

Gastronomy, TV and 'Culinary Texts of Indirection' I

Since writing a quick response to the Channel 4 cookery show Heston’s Feasts in an earlier blog entry, Joanne Hollows and Steve Jones have been thinking in more depth about the show. In the first of two entries, they explore the idea that the show drew on some of the conventions of gastronomic writing to produce a televisual form of the ‘culinary text of indirection’.

Each episode of Heston’s Feasts saw Heston Blumenthal creating a memorable meal for celebrity diners which evoked a particular historical period: the Victorians, the Middle Ages, the Tudors and the Romans. At the outset of each episode, he says that ‘the future of cooking lies in the secrets of the past. I’m on a mission to use myth, science and history to create the greatest feasts ever seen’. These features give the programmes a scholarly feel that is accentuated by his use of the literary: for example the first episode on The Victorians is inspired by the spirit of the age but mediated through Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In this indebtedness to literature, Blumenthal plays with the connections between the gastronomic and literary fields identified by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Stephen Mennell.

Of Mennell’s four characteristics of gastronomic writing, two concern us here: first, gastronomic literature aims to provide ‘a brew of history, myth and history serving of myth’ and second, it is a nostalgic ‘evocation of memorable meals’ (1996: 271). Blumenthal’s characterization of his own practice as using ‘myth, science and history’ corresponds with Mennell’s first definition while his continual emphasis on the meal as the source of memory corresponds with the second. In this way, HF draws on the conventions of gastronomic literature to reconceptualize cookery TV. Like Mennell’s gastronomes, Heston’s role is to transform the creation of food into an activity of a higher order. For example, he experiments with a Victorian recipe for Mock Turtle soup. While the result is enjoyed volunteers on the street, Heston concludes that this incarnation of the soup lacks the element of the sublime he demands from his creations. In order to perfect his take on Mock Turtle Soup, Blumethal subjects it to further processes of refinement:

All I’ve done is made consommé, froze it, ice-filtered it over night… then I just froze it again, put it in a centrifuge… spun all of the clear broth from the ice, and then I froze it again in a minus 80 freezer and all I needed to do after that was pop it in the freeze-dryer and then simply add gelatine and Madeira.

However, even this does not exhaust the process: Heston makes a soup cube from this using a ‘Mad Hatter’ fob-watch shaped silicone mould before wrapping it in gold-leaf to form the basis of his Mock Turtle Soup. The ingot is places like a tea-bag in a tea-pot where the resultant brew is then poured over a turnip and swede gel ‘Mock Turtle egg’ adorned with minute enoki mushrooms, a terrine of cured pork fat and braised ox tongue served with ‘lightly-pickled’ turnip, cubes of black truffle gel, a scattering of mustard seeds and a few micro-leaves.

The original recipe for mock turtle soup that Blumenthal located in an old cookbook is merely an inspiration for the chef-artist’s creativity. Furthermore, it is not the sole inspiration as his culinary process is also infused with literary sources, scientific experimentation and historical research. Across the series, historical recipes serve as an inspiration in terms of what they signify (theatre, fun, experimentation, naughtiness) as much as their actual ingredient and techniques. Indeed, the recipes usually go through a series of versions and refinements as Blumenthal and various guinea pigs reject the ‘authentic’ recipe in favour of a series of improvements. While Heston’s Feasts seems to be an exercise in grounding his practice in tradition, the series is a demonstration of the ways in which tradition can be ‘invented’. Just as Duchamp’s intervention was necessary to create the modern artwork from found objects, so the series demonstrates how it is the production of the chef as artist and theoretician that is ‘the precondition for the production of these object [meals] as works of art’ (Bourdieu 1993: 61).

Goldilocks (aka Amanda Holden) and the Three Bears.

Last night (Friday 29th) I was privy with millions of other television viewer’s to a camp spectacle on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent. This spectacle was called The Dreambears. Three twenty-something chubby gay men camping about on stage doing all manner of pirouettes, arrières, and changement de pieds; all this is choreographed to the Weather Girls Its Raining Men. Why is it worth blogging about? My answer is not The Dreambears attempt at ballet (or burlesque or Bob Fosse) which of course is fine rather, I’m bothered by the way in which prime-time television negotiates and mutes the subcultural aspects of their bear-ness in order to make gayness hyper-legible to the audiences through terms they are more familiar with. The Dreambears are not off the hook either since they are in part complicit in their own camp debasement as the first prime-time bears. This legibility in their performance is achieved through the erasure of the bear’s subcultural aspects that then work to contain the potential of bear masculinity to be viewed as completely ordinary, unfussy, and ultimately boring for TV. The way Britain’s Got Talent erases the bear, except in name, was manifold in three strategies that disrupt the bears’ literal masculine definition of themselves as the man’s man version of gayness. Here are a few observations.

Strategy 1. Make them look as camp as possible. Dress all the bears up as Daffyd from Little Britain in ultra tight PVC shorts and sparkly union jack vests. The Dreambears mention the costume department’s role in bringing us this tired vision. As an extra note one should observe that known gay presenters on television (the BBC holy trinity of Graham Norton, Dale Winton and John Barrowman) are compelled to wear sparkly, glittery, reflective, and garishly patterned suits as a semiotic articulation of their prime-time gayness which otherwise remains unspeakable.

Strategy 2. Deal with their fatness. Since the bear’s chubbiness is considered to be erotically appealing within the subculture it’s important to disavow this central aspect of bear identity by making them look silly as fat bodies out of place. Put them in camp outfits five sizes too small and make them do ballet that ought to do the trick. Did I mention that the connection to the Weather Girls It’s Raining Men is not just about music also but also corpulent excess?

Strategy 3. It’s really got nothing to do with sex. Bear subculture is also predicated on a sexual hierarchy based on age, size and ways of communicating within those hierarchized relations through terms such as ‘daddy’ and verbs like ‘to paw’ and ‘to maul’. In the first instance, The Dreambears look like cubs to me and have not yet graduated to being fully-fledged big daddy bears. If you didn’t know already bears tend to be stout gay men, preferable hirsute but not essential, accommodating of a wide but hierarchical age range (which is then divided into cubs, otters, wolves, polar bears etc). An oversimplification of their self-promotion would suggest that bears often shun the apparent narcissistic, sissified, slender, fashionable, and consumption-led gays that have often come to represent the stereotypical gay as if bears themselves were not just as regulated as the next queer.


What ITV’s strategies do here (but not forgetting the complicity of The Dreambears) is to work against the potential for these prime-time bears to destabilize normative assumptions between certain alignments of homosexuality and masculinity. In turn, Britain’s Got Talent confirms what people already think they know about homosexuality on television, light entertainment in particular, that is, its only meaningful and acceptable as risible de-sexed camp spectacle (with soaps being the alternative). Something Richard Dyer once wrote is applicable here – “In taking the signs of masculinity and eroticizing them in a blatantly homosexual context, much mischief is done to the security with which ‘men’ are defined in society, and by which their power is secured” (167). It’s precisely this potential for mischief that Britain’s Got Talent attempts to contain in its camping up and desexualisation of a modern gay subculture.

Though Amanda Holden does make a good Goldilocks!


Reference: Richard Dyer (1992) ‘Getting over the rainbow’ in Only Entertainment. London: Routledge.

(Photo credits: frame grab; pinups mag; permissions)

'At Least He's Doing Something': Jamie Oliver and 'Broken Britain'

Last Sunday, in the Observer newspaper, Jamie Oliver was announced to be the Observer Food Monthly's Food Personality of the Year. Yesterday, the Guardian newspaper declared him to be 'the people's chef' and 'a proper national treasure'. As these plaudits come in the wake of last year's Jamie’s Ministry of Food, Joanne Hollows and Steve Jones reflect on the significance of the show.

In autumn 2008, during our casual readings of the blogosphere, Jamie Oliver was a persistent presence. There was a seemingly endless stream of articles and user-generated comment about his latest series, Jamie’s Ministry of Food, and the wider significance of Jamie’s role in public life. In particular, a consensus appeared to have emerged that, unlike British people in general - and unlike the Government in particular - at least Jamie ‘was doing something’ about a range of social problems.

In our current work we’re trying to make sense of both the series and the reception of it. We’re exploring how Jamie Oliver’s celebrity image has been transformed. He is no longer simply a lifestyle expert within the culinary field but increasingly operates as a moral entrepreneur involved with a range of social enterprises from his charitable ‘Fifteen’ foundation (the subject of Jamie’s School Dinners) to his more recent attempt to teach the whole of Britain basic cookery skills to improve the health of the nation.

If Jamie’s Ministry of Food focused on the ‘problem’ of a British people without culinary skills, damaging their health with a diet of junk food and takeaways, then it also represented a particular portion of the British people – the working class – as the source and embodiment of this problem. We’ve been struck by the similarities between the show and earlier forms of ‘social exploration’ conducted by middle-class reformers among the working class. There are also similarities between the aesthetic strategies used in the programme and those found in the cycle of British social realist films from the late 1950s and early 1960s. These help us to understand how the series works to represent contemporary working-class cultures as pathological and in need of intervention and ‘reform’.

Finally, we’re interested in how Jamie’s Ministry of Food articulates with a wider series of concerns that are being played out in the political sphere about ‘Broken Britain’, aided by Tory leader David Cameron and The Sun newspaper. The series provided a focus for debates about the state of the nation which had been played out in the media and political rhetoric during 2007-8. Jamie Oliver’s willingness to ‘cut through the crap’ and ‘get things done’ resonated with the notion that Britain was a society in need of healing, and that local and national government were incapable of remedying this situation. We want to suggest that the representations in the show of fast food, obese bodies, sink estates, and poverty of aspiration and welfare-dependence delineated a general crisis which demanded direct action by an inspirational figure. In this way, the show legitimated Jamie’s new role as a moral and social entrepreneur who was an inspiration to the nation.
(Photo Credit: Matlock. Permissions.)

Guest Paper - Lost Logos: Channel 4 and the Branding of American Event Television

Professor Paul Grainge from the University of Nottingham will be presenting this paper on Wednesday March 18 as part of the on-going ICAn seminar series.

For many television scholars, branding has become the defining industrial practice of the multi-channel era. This paper uses the franchise phenomenon of Lost to examine how network and programme brands function together in specific markets. Examining the identity of Channel 4 as the original brand home of Lost in the UK, it considers the ‘promotional surround’ of the series when launched on British terrestrial screens. In doing so, it puts at the centre of analysis the ephemeral media – the teasers, trailers, channel logos and series sponsorships - that helped position and domesticate Lost for British audiences.

Time: 4.00-5.30. Place: GEE219, Clifton Campus, NTU. Everyone welcome. For further information, please email Simon Cross.
(Photo credit: Roo Reynolds. Permissions.)

Heston's Feasts

How do we make sense of the new TV cookery series Heston's Feasts which started this week on Channel 4? By Joanne Hollows.

Heston Blumenthal is commonly regarded as one of the best chefs in the UK, frequently the best chef. His restaurant, The Fat Duck, has 3 Michelin stars and is regarded as one of the world’s best restaurants. While he has not courted the same level of celebrity as Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay (helping to maintain his credibility as a serious chef rather than a media personality), he is relatively well-known for his use of scientific approaches to cookery (associating him with molecular gastronomy) and his challenges to culinary conventions, epitomized by signature dishes such as ‘Snail Porridge’ and ‘Nitro-scrambled Egg and Bacon Ice-cream’.

His first TV series – BBC2’s In Search of Perfection – cemented this image of geekish eccentricity as he went to seemingly inordinate lengths to make the ‘perfect’ version of Britain’s favourite dishes such as Chicken Tikka Masala and Black Forest Gateau. While this was far more about a display of Heston’s culinary wizardry than instruction, there was the invitation to employ some or all of Heston’s techniques in your own kitchen (even if this involved doing strange things with a vacuum cleaner and a liberal supply of liquid nitrogen). However, by the time of a ‘Christmas Special’, the pretence that this might have anything to do with domestic cooking had been well and truly dropped.

This week’s Feasts maintained this focus, representing perhaps the logical outcome of some trends within TV cookery – it had become pure spectacle. As he went about creating a Victorian Feast inspired by Alice in Wonderland that would take his diners ‘down a rabbit hole’, the focus was on Heston’s skill, artistry and taste (combined with some healthy doses of wit, zaniness and erudition). The viewer could enjoy the visual spectacle of an edible garden populated by edible insects (in a nod to the reality show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here) and wildly wobbling absinthe jellies powered by mechanisms stolen from vibrators. We could also vicariously savour the taste of the food by watching the reactions and comments of his six celebrity guests.

Lest the audience had any illusions, the programme opened with a warning from Blumenthal: ‘Don’t try this at home’. Watching the show was clearly a spectator sport. And while the show featured some set pieces in which we followed the chef on his travels ‘in pursuit of perfection’ (including turtle fishing in the US), Feasts appeared to share more with arts programming than the cookery sub-genre Niki Strange has dubbed ‘tour-educative’.

There has been debate within media studies about how much contemporary TV cookery needs to be understood as a form of lifestyle television inviting us to makeover the self. Feasts appeared to decisively break with this format. We are only invited to take part as spectators on his culinary journey, receiving a culinary education rather than learning how to use cooking in a creative display of our lifestyle. While David Bell has argued that most TV chefs attempt the difficult balancing act of democratizing culinary capital while displaying their own distinction, the focus here was squarely on Heston’s distinction. As such it was also a perfect branding exercise, reminding us that we could never get The Fat Duck experience at home (a fortuitously timed exercise given that the restaurant was temporarily closed as the show aired amid concerns that diners had fallen ill after eating there.)
(Photo credit: Sifu Renka. Permissions.)

Guest Paper: Black Genes and White Sweat

Jacob Van Sterkenburg from Utrecht University will be giving a guest paper entitled 'Black Genes and White Sweat: Constructions of Race and Ethnicity in Sport Media' on Wednesday March 4th as part of the on-going ICAn seminar series.

Continuing immigration is one of the great challenges that contemporary western societies are faced with. According to Brubaker et al., race and ethnicity even ‘count among the most significant social and cultural structures of modern times’ (1994: 53). Meanings given to race and ethnicity are not only influenced by institutions like the family, education or paid labour, but also by the media. Due to its popularity, the sport media are an important factor in the expression of meanings given to race and ethnicity.

In my presentation I will discuss my research project that employs a qualitative content analysis to study the representations of racial and ethnic groups in the Dutch sport media, in particular in football on television. By studying representation of race and ethnicity in televised football, the project hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the ways race and ethnicity are socially constructed through popular (media) culture. The project is situated within the disciplinary framework of cultural studies and social cognition theory. The constructions of race and ethnicity in mediated football will be studied by analyzing Dutch football during matches of Dutch teams played at the highest professional level in The Netherlands (the Eredivisie). We draw on grounded theory to apply a method of conducting verbal content analysis that is sensitive to the contextual character of race and ethnicity.

The event takes place from 4.00-6.00 pm in GEE219, Clifton Campus, NTU. Everyone welcome.