Angela Smith

Lifestyle television programmes and the construction of the expert host

This article will seek to explore the role of the host presenter in television lifestyle programmes. In the general context of consumer culture, the apparently mundane interactions between the host of lifestyle programmes and the members of the public serve to circulate discourses about preferred lifestyles, aesthetic tastes and cultural activity. The most common format of many of the lifestyle programmes features a host who is constructed as ‘expert’ in their field, offering guidance to members of the public. A case study of the British television programme Property Ladder, where the host offers advice and guidance to amateur property developers, will draw on the work of Davies to develop an analytical structure that explores the frames of friendship and credibility informed by theories of politeness. These frames will be explored in relation to double audience structure.

Belligerent broadcasting and makeover television : professional incivility in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares

This article looks at the significance of the practices of ‘belligerent broadcasting’ in the popular ‘trouble-shooting’ business television programme Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, USA. Belligerent broadcasting is a broadcast style that offers as spectacle expressions of anger or impatience, or the exercise of intimidation, against an on-screen interlocutor. Focusing on the performances of Gordon Ramsay, the article analyses the management of on-screen confrontation between participants occupying asymmetrical positions of power and perceived expertise. The article looks at how the face-threatening component of belligerent talk is ameliorated by strategies of authenticity and its representation as a productive force within the narrative of the programme. Finally, we assess the relevance of arguments that this broadcasting style might be seen as part of a ‘new incivility’ across media discourses.

The convenient ambiguity of ‘tone’: Style and the politics of witnessing in Kate Adie’s reporting of the Dunblane tragedy

Kate Adie’s coverage of the 1996 murder of 16 schoolchildren and their teacher in the Scottish town of Dunblane occasioned much critical discussion. Using material from the newly constituted Kate Adie Collection at the University of Sunderland Library, this article looks at aspects of the ‘tone’ and content in Adie’s reports, and reflects upon the ways in which style and practice can position the reporter relative to the affected community. The article highlights the importance of Adie’s established practices and public renown as a high-profile war reporter for the BBC, as well as the socio-political environment of the reports which includes a political resurgence of Scottish nationalism with an associated identity politics. Through critical analysis, the article sets Adie’s reports within a tradition of media ‘bearing witness’ to tragedy, while suggesting that they offer an insight into potential breaches in the assessment of the emotional performativity of witnessing.

Mediated political masculinities: the commander-in-chief vs. the new man

ABSTRACT The media play a very influential role in our perceptions of our political leaders, irrespective of where in the world they appear. Since the latter part of the twentieth century, our leaders’ personalities came to play an increasing role in their appeal, in particularly their gendered performances. As Barack Obamas presidency draws to the end of its second term, this paper will examine the representation of his persona in the context of the election in 2008 when he became the first Black US president. Much has been written of him being the first Black president of the USA, however, if we explore his campaign through a gendered lens, we can see that he is equally revolutionary. This contrasts with the gendered construction of male political leaders in other parts of the world, particularly that of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Building on work carried out in relation to the mediatisation and personalisation of politics in the last 50 years, this article shows how gendered performances can be seen to mirror changes in society.

Belligerent broadcasting, male anti-authoritarianism and anti-environmentalism: the case of Top Gear (BBC, 2002–2015)

ABSTRACT This article considers the format and cultural politics of the hugely successful UK television program Top Gear (BBC 2002–2015). It analyzes how—through its presenting team—it constructed an informal address predicated around anti-authoritarian or contrarian banter and protest masculinity. Regular targets for Top Gear presenter’s protest—curtailed by broadcast guidelines in terms of gender and ethnicity—are deflected onto the “soft” targets of government legislation on environmental issues or various forms of regulation “red tape. Repeated references to speed cameras, central London congestion charges and “excessive” signage are all anti-authoritarian, libertarian discourses delivered through a comedic form of performance address. Thus, the BBC’s primary response to complaints made about this program was to defend the program’s political views as being part of the humor. The article draws on critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis to consider how the program licensed a particular form of engagement that helped it to deflect criticisms, and considers the limits to such discursive positioning. We conclude by examining the controversies that finally led, in 2015, to the removal of the main presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, and the ending of this version of the program through the departure of the team to an on-demand online television service.

Disaffiliation and belonging: twitter and its agonistic publics

This article looks at forms of political and public engagement to emerge in Web 2.0. Focusing on the platform Twitter, the article looks at both antagonistic and agonistic types of political engagement. It discusses Twitter’s capacity for direct contact with main political party leaders as part of an antagonistic public discourse, geared towards creative expressions of individualised disaffiliation. However, in interventions around @EverydaySexism, the article finds collectivising practices more in keeping with an agonistic public discourse based upon involvement and the tactical use of irony and humour. While showing that the platform provides for new forms of antagonistic engagement with political elites, the article therefore offers support for the view that Web 2.0 gives rise to new and shifting formations of non-institutionally-aligned political public.

Bulging biceps and tender kisses: the sexualisation of fatherhood

ABSTRACT This article explores recent developments in masculinity, focusing on the sexualisation of fatherhood in Anglophone media. As it becomes socially acceptable for men to engage with “hands-on” fatherhood roles that had previously been primarily associated with motherhood, the appeal lies not just in this shift in gendered performance, but the representation of this as an opportunity for men to reveal a desirably body image. Where previously the hands-on fatherhood role had been glossed as “nappy changing duties,” this more recent development focuses on men’s bodies and in particular the act of carrying a young child which affords the chance for biceps to be flexed in juxtaposition with the gentle act of holding a child. Colloquially, this has led to the emergence of the “DILF,” particularly on social media where sites are devoted to photos of such men.

Femininity Repackaged: Postfeminism and Ladette to Lady

This chapter looks at the recent backlash against postfeminist discourses of empowerment through special reference to the commercial phenomenon of “Girl Power”. Since the late 1990s, this backlash has manifested itself in the British press, which has generated and fuelled a “moral panic” about binge drinking, alcohol-induced violence, and increasing levels of sexually transmitted diseases in the young. This generally gives cause for concern about adolescent behaviour, which is persistently formulated as “out of control” — a formulation that was validated, to some extent, by the introduction of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs1) under the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. Much of this attention has been aimed at young women, who are commonly referred to as “ladettes”2 because of their perceived adoption of behaviours more usually associated with young British men. As Katy Day et al. have shown, many British national newspapers in the period 19982000 reported on studies of teenage drinking which claimed that young women were “bigger binge drinkers” than their male counterparts. Such articles trade on wider moral panics about the behaviour of young women and are used to represent women as a threat to themselves (on account of the fact that their drinking leaves them more exposed to the risks of assault and ill-health) and to patriarchy (through the challenges they pose to established norms of female passivity). Although this chapter will focus primarily on representations of young women in British media texts, the anxieties with which these texts engage are not limited to the United Kingdom and are, as Ariel Levy observes in Female Chauvinist Pigs (2006), equally widespread in contemporary American culture.

Styling Feminism: The View from Spare Rib

Women’s appearances have been under scrutiny in terms of hair, make-up and clothing, as well as body image, for centuries. This chapter explores how an article from the December 1973 edition of Spare Rib challenges the concept of the ‘male gaze’ as far as hairstyling is concerned.

Big sister tv: bossiness, bullying and banter in early twenty-first century make-over television

Make-over television shows became one of the defining genres of early twenty-first century television across the Western world. From their small beginnings in 15-minute slots on daytime TV in the late 1990s, by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century they had come to dominate primetime TV and even have their own devoted network and cable channels. A common feature of all of these shows has been the prevalence of female subjects to be ‘made over’. As Rosalind Gill (2007) has observed, the body is promoted as integral to female identity, and thus is a site for postfeminist attention where a woman’s pursuit of beauty engages both her consumer power and her self-governance. If, as Angela McRobbie (2009) attests, postfeminism is linked with vocabulary of ‘freedom’, ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’, then these shows are underpinned by the assumption that the participants have made the ‘wrong’ choice, and thus are in need of stern guidance if they are ever to achieve the ‘empowerment’ that postfeminism promotes through the female body. What characterized these make-overs is the use of bullying, bossy tactics by the hosts and tears by the subject as they progress on their ‘journey’ to a better, more stylish self. This chapter will suggest that, while the bullying of the earlier shows has diminished, there nevertheless remains an underpinning strategy of humiliation that is accompanied by a more dissipated sense of belligerency throughout such shows as the female body continues to be open to surveillance.