Anne Marit Waade

Imagine Paradise in Ads

Abstract Paradise has been a significant concept in tourism as well in consumer culture. The present article demonstrates how paradise is presented as visual, spatial and ideal concepts in ads, and how they illustrate imagination as a central communicative effect in marketing and consumer culture. Through an analysis of selected consumer and tourism ads for TV and cinema presented in Denmark, the author points out different ways of reflecting viewers’ imagination of paradise as a place and condition. The author outlines a theoretical framework for understanding imagination from a media-specific perspective as involving cognitive, emotional and sensuous processes, respectively, and looks at how paradise, as an active and present visual matrix in tourism and consumer communication, has a specific appeal to viewers’ imagination.

Haptic routes and digestive destinations in cooking series: images of food and place in Keith Floyd and The Hairy Bikers in relation to art history.

Taking modern television travel cookery series as a starting point, the article investigates the cultural significance of food and place in visual culture. The examples are, respectively, The Keith Floyd Cookery Collection: Floyd Around The Med [2000. BBC DVD, 2007] and The Hairy Bikers Cookbook Series 1 & 2 [BBC DVD, 2006]. The series illustrate the strong connection between travel, food and place in tourist consumer culture, as well as the way motion and emotion are related to sensuous and digestive aspects of touristic food. The series also illustrate the emblematic connection between food and the media in which aesthetical, cultural and symbolic values are related to the way food is mediatised. The main argument is that cooking television series produce haptic images of place and food that include a specific sensuous and emotional relation between screen and viewer. The haptic imagery is reflected in popular visual culture and tourism as well as in art history and aesthetics.

Armchair Tourism: The Travel Series as a Hybrid Genre

Travel journalism is increasing in magazines, newspapers and online media and on TV, representing a significant change in news and entertainment media over the past few decades. Lifestyle journalism and non-fiction entertainment are growing because they attract audiences, advertisements and product placement while at the same time they are easy to plan and cheap to produce for editors and broadcasters (Christensen, 2010; From, 2007). Travel and tourism constitute an essential part of contemporary Western popular lifestyle and indicate social and cultural status and preferences (Dunn, 2005a; Urry and Larsen, 2011). This has resulted in an increase in travel journalism, on the Internet, in newspapers and magazines and on television, where — along with other lifestyle programs on topics including food, interior design, fashion, house, garden, health and social change — travel programs are used for channel branding and securing market shares (Johnson, 2012). Within this media landscape, travel series comprise an important and yet unexplored field of study. The term ‘armchair tourism’ indicates that travel and tourism have become popular media entertainment and parts of a widespread mediated lifestyle consumer culture (Waade, 2006).

Norskov and Danish Commercial Public Service Drama

The authors take a closer look at the effect of Danish commercial public service drama on a national and international level and when competing with a large national public service player. Firstly, they introduce the complex broadcasting institution TV 2, the spatial history of their drama production and the embedded attention towards regionalism and often provinciality. Secondly, they address the close connection between a very local crime serial production, Norskov (2015–) and local, national and international industrial and cultural policies, as well as contemporary negotiations of a regional place, location and geographic peripherality. The authors show how, since the 1990s, television in the Danish regions in particular has become a vernacular opportunity for a broadcaster with an ambition to reflect provincialism and promote regional awareness.

The Team, Danish Transnationalism and the Local Colour of Europe

The authors outline the influence of the British reception of Nordic Noir as a basis supporting the increased transnational production model of Danish crime dramas. Besides the important German influence on the international distribution of especially The Killing, the BBC played a decisive role in broadcasting this and other subtitled series. The culmination of the transnationalisation of Danish drama production appears with the pan-European series The Team, illustrating how knowhow, creative personnel and expertise from the Danish television drama industry contributed to the production, and furthermore how the ‘local colour of Europe’ constituted the spatial concept of the series. The increased commodification of locations in screen productions is closely linked to transnational conditions in the funding of drama and in reaching international markets and audiences.

Location Studies: A Topography of Nordic Noir

The authors introduce the new method for media analysis, which they call location studies. This method is particularly interested in how locations are found and in which ways they are related to the spatial understanding of television drama. They present the method as an outcome of the spatial turn in media studies and also as a specific subdivision and combination of television production studies and textual readings of television drama. On this basis, the authors propose a model and a method for describing the negotiated, mediated interpretation of a specific place and location as these are represented on screen and influenced by off-screen factors of place, production, policy and destination.

Funding Models and Increasing Transnationalism

The authors give an outline of how local, national, regional and transnational cooperation has been an increasing Nordic tendency since the 1990s, but also how the traces of such local/global processes in television studies have deeper roots in visions of television as a private, glocal medium. They outline specific, different tendencies across the Nordic region and view the theoretical and historical backgrounds of places and locations in television drama from the perspective of glocalisation. The authors give an account of the funding models applying to television drama production cultures in the Nordic region. Finally, they give examples of how methods of collaboration, co-funding and co-production in Nordic Noir productions across the Nordic region in particular show clear signs of the increasing transnationalisation of television drama.

Four Perspectives on the Nordic Region

The authors expand their methodical approach to locations in Nordic Noir by way of a succinct overview of four important cultural preconditions for the understanding of Nordic Noir as a cultural phenomenon: (a) the recent Nordic wave in food, design and fashion as a market condition, (b) the history of Nordic melancholy in arts and philosophy, (c) the Nordic landscapes as commodities, and (d) the Nordic media welfare system and the public service basis for drama series. Summing up, the authors give a brief introduction to Nordic television production in general. The display of such local colour of the Nordic region and the relationship between the television crime series and the region are important as expositions of regional culture, topography, history and society.

Stieg Larsson and Scandinavian Crime Literature as a Stepping Stone

The authors analyse the literary roots of Nordic Noir’s spatial logic and link this to the notions of a neo-romantic tendency in local crime fiction and norientalism as a concept. The global reach and bestselling speed of Mai Sjowall/Per Wahloo, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, respectively, are singled out as specific indications of a changed literary market. In this process, especially the Swedish literary market appears to be influential on the world scene of Nordic crime fiction. The authors sum op the development from literature to screened crime fiction based on two different production models: the Beck model and the Danish model, and shed light on the blurred media boundaries in Sweden and the focus on televised crime fiction in Denmark.

Beck and Character Adaptations

The authors analyse the development of Nordic crime dramas in the 1990s and its reliance on the significant role of various Beck productions, the shift towards an increased market-oriented production model and the slow move away from cinema orientation towards VHS/DVD wholesale. The authors introduce character adaptations as a concept that shows the importance of series based on characters from crime literature, but as for the cases of Beck, Wallander, The Fjallbacka Murders and Dicte, most of these series use the literature as inspiration for characters rather than storyline. In the chapter, the authors reveal the slow change of film and television drama, primarily by way of character adaptations, from mostly adaptations for film and television to original television productions.