Deborah Philips

Transformation scenes: the television interior makeover

The ‘transformation’ or ‘makeover’ of people and places has long been a standard feature of popular women’s magazines and is now a dominant form of television. The television design programme offers an uneasy interface between the private world of the domestic and the public world of television, a tension apparent in the conventions that surround the encounter between ‘ordinary’ people and television personalities in interior decoration programmes such asHome Front andChanging Rooms. The magic of television promises that the old fashioned, the dowdy, the ‘tasteless’ can be transformed through the expertise of ‘designers’ and experts. This article will address the transformation of designers into television personalities and argue that the ‘experts’ on the television makeover show act as ‘tastemakers’. The article will argue that the growth of the transformation programme on television is bound up with the privatization of property and with the rising cost of housing and that knowledge of interior design is explicitly understood in the language of these programmes as a capital investment. Using Bourdieu, this article suggests that while claiming a democratization of taste, such programmes serve to confirm the superior knowledge and cultural capital of the designated expert. The subjects of the makeover are required by the programme’s conventions to accept the dictates of the ‘tastemaker’ and, in that acceptance, to erase the traces of their own ‘habitus’ in favour of a commodification of taste and style.

Consuming the West Main Street, USA

Main Street, USA is the corridor to the Disneyland parks, whether in Los Angeles, Paris, Florida, or Tokyo. Main Street offers the appearance of a public space, with architectural references to civic institutions, but is a bounded and privatized site, which requires an entrance fee. Main Street offers a nostalgic construction of early twentieth century American small-town life. It is also the space in the theme parks that is most dedicated to consumption. Main Street is an idealized urban landscape that has not stopped at the theme park; the Disney owned town, “Celebration,” in Florida is organized around the same nostalgic wish for an urban context that offers itself as both traditional and modern. Main Street offers a version of America frozen at a point of late nineteenth century modernity; it presents a mythical reconciliation of past and future, ecology and consumption, and the local and the global in its simulacrum of a small-town America which could never have existed, but which can be endlessly reproduced across the globe.

Stately pleasure domes – nationhood, monarchy and industry: the celebration exhibition in Britain

The Stately Pleasure Dome, the state sponsored national exhibition, offers a moment at which a sense of national identity is publicly declared and presented as cause for national celebration. This paper charts the shifts in the mechanisms for funding, the framing of the ‘British people’, industry and the role of the monarch at three distinct historical moments. In case studies of the Great Exhibition, the Festival of Britain and the Millennium Experience, the paper assesses how each exhibition conceived the leisure experience of a good day out. The paper suggests that while each exhibition claimed historical continuity, the constructions of the British people, the monarchy and the nation change. The different modes of funding and the public participation in each event demonstrate that while they are presented as unchanging, there are clear revisions in the way that these concepts are understood. While the Great Exhibition could celebrate Queen and Empire without question, these terms needed to be reconfigured in the post‐Second World War moment of the Festival of Britain, and still further in the globalized world of the new Millennium.

Mapping literary Britain: tourist guides to literary landscapes 1951-2007.

The literary pilgrimage is a form of tourism that seeks out the landscapes and environments that shaped an author and their works. It is the illustrated literary guidebook to Britain (and often Ireland) that defines which authors and places are worthy of pilgrimage, draws these locations together, and points the literary tourist towards them. ‘Literary Britain’ is an object of the tourist gaze that has been constructed not only by tourist professionals, but also by literary critics and by writers. This article analyses a range of guidebooks to the literary landscapes of Britain from Bill Brandt’s Literary Landscapes published in 1951 to the current edition of The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Great Britain and Ireland. The article argues that the hierarchy of both sites and authors remains remarkably unchanged; Literary Britain is seen in these collections as a place that turns its back on modernity and change. The selection of sites and authors is framed by nostalgia for the 19th century and for a pre-industrial rural world.

The New Miss India: Popular Fiction in Contemporary India

Abstract: Miss New India is the title of a 2011 novel by Indian-born (now American-based) Bharati Mukherjee, which tells the story of a young woman who leaves her small-town home and family to find work in a call centre in the information technology city of Bangalore. The call centre is emblematic of a ‘new India’, in which educated young people seize the possibilities of a global labour market. This is a generation for whom colonialism is ancient history, a generation who have grown up in the aftermath of economic liberalization in India. Chetan Bhagat refers to this generation as ‘Young India’ and has written a series of best-selling novels that feature ambitious young men in the ‘new India’. There is, however, an emerging genre of similar narratives written by women and addressed to a female readership. This article discusses a range of contemporary Indian women’s popular novels and argues that, while Bhagat and his male heroes may embrace globalization and the market, the narratives written by women are more nuanced in their celebration of economic liberalization. The novels dramatize the tensions between tradition and modernity, family and independence, and suggest that these are particularly fraught for young Indian women. These texts pick up on the discourses of contemporary journalism about ‘Young India’, within the generic form of the romance, but their resolutions are repeatedly uneasy and suggest that the ‘new India’ is not an entirely comfortable space for the new Miss India.

Education Free for All

In November 2015, Investors Chronicle carried a front page which declared: ‘CARVE UP: Tap into Britain’s outsourcing boom’ (Investors Chronicle, 20–26 November, 2015). The editorial goes on to state: ‘…recent history has taught us that when government money is tight, the level of services outsourced to private providers often rises’ (Powell & Liberton, 2015, p. 27).

Cooking doesn't get much tougher than this: MasterChef and Competitive Cooking

Abstract: Television cooking does link back to Reithian principles, in that it sets out to teach the audience; this has now been co-opted in favor of competitive individualism. MasterChef is yet another site for the discourse of enterprise, in which passion and competitiveness are required in the interests of neoliberalism.