Janet McCabe

And bringing up the rear: Pippa Middleton, her derrière and celebrity as feminine ideal

Nearly upstaging Catherine Middleton on her wedding day was maid-of-honour and younger sister, Philippa. Whereas Kate glided up the aisle and into fairy-tale mythology (so compelling, so alluring in fact, that even the Obamas felt obliged to seek out a photo opportunity), Pippa Middleton drifted into our global media consciousness – before ascending into the celebrity stratosphere. As soon as Pippa stepped out of the Rolls Royce in her buttermilk body-skimming gown, calmly grabbing hold of little paws and shepherding the youngest bridesmaids into the Abbey before returning to sort out her sister’s two-metre bridal train, I sensed that she’d somehow be the story du jour. We like to ‘discover’ our celebrities. As if we are the first to see something special, something no one else has seen before. Amidst the pomp and circumstance, Prince William may have chosen his bride, but Pippa somehow proved the revelation of the day – the people’s choice, our new celebrity obsession. Little did I think, however, that our gaze would initially sink quite so low. As she followed down the aisle behind her sister, Pippa’s rear view acquired its own following. Igniting the blogosphere, the pert ‘P-Middy’ posterior attained instant iconic status. It went viral, becoming a trending topic on Twitter, nearly crashing the site (Oliver and Nicholl 2011), and acquiring its own Facebook page tastefully titled ‘Pippa Middleton ass appreciation society’, which (as I write in June 2011) has 235,087 ‘likes’ and is linked to another page selling t-shirts, including one printed with a silhouetted, bent over woman in heels with the words ‘I’d like to be in the Middleton of that!’1 ‘So bot’s happened to perky Pippa?’ tittered the Daily Star the following morning, as the world woke up to a new international media star – ‘Her Royal Hotness’,2 Pippa Middleton. I must confess to sharing Melinda Tankard Reist’s unease (2011) over the fetishisation, or (and let’s be honest) the ‘pornification’, of Pippa’s derrière. Tankard Reist was told to lighten up. ‘I think you need a bex and a good lie down’ counselled one male reader, while a female respondent said the article reflected ‘a pseudo-feminist puritanical agenda’ (Tankard Reist 2011). Leaving aside the various disciplinary techniques used to put Tankard Reist in her place, what gets revealed in the incessant cyber chatter, and sustained by a media hurricane, is how the objectification of women remains deeply entrenched in our culture – not to be easily dislodged. Royal occasions are, of course, all about spectacle. Nevertheless, and perhaps less central to nation-building, the most popular YouTube video of her is ‘Pippa Middleton shake ya ass’ and has (of June

Appreciating Wallander at the BBC: producing culture and performing the glocal in the UK and Swedish Wallanders for British public service television

This article explores how the different versions of Wallander, all in some ways are remakes of the original detective books written by best-selling Swedish author Henning Mankell, are collected together by the BBC into a corpus of television. The central purpose is to understand how the Nordic-based procedurals featuring the protagonist Kurt Wallander are positioned as a privileged form of culture at the BBC. Looking, in particular, at how the various performances of this titular character are made sense of in the UK public service broadcasting televisual flow and beyond, the article takes up the task of considering how the BBC uses the remakes to imagine its role as a cultural institution with public service responsibilities at a time when television is increasingly produced and consumed globally.

Imitations of lives: ageing men, vocal mimicry and performing celebrity in The Trip

This essay examines the role of the voice and vocal performance in the BAFTA award-winning BBC2 semi-improvised sitcom series, The Trip (2010a). Starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, the two men embark on a culinary road trip around Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Lake District in the interests of sightseeing and food reviewing. Behind the premise of the series being about, as Coogan explains, ‘restaurant celebrities and their fashion-grabbing with food’ (Thorpe 2010) lies an increasingly poignant meditation on ageing and its relationship to masculinity and the male body, fame and celebrity. On this alternative menu is unease with the crunching of gears from youth to middle age, of the ageing process and all that it entails while in the media spotlight. This essay develops these themes in relation to the role of the voice and vocal performance – impersonations, crafting characters based on devising a distinctive voice – to offer a peculiar kind of meditation on the very nature of modern celebrity and ageing in the media.

The Girl in the Faroese Jumper: Sarah Lund, Sexual Politics and the Precariousness of Power and Difference

Who killed Nanna Birk Larsen? It was a question that gripped audiences of the Danish crime thriller, The Killing (Forbrydelsen, 2007), but none was more obsessive in the pursuit of her killer than the ever-mournful Detective Inspector (DI) Sarah Lund (Sofie Grabol) of the Copenhagen homicide unit. The series begins with Nanna (Julie R. Olgaard), terrified, bloodied, dressed only in a torn slip, running for her life through a forest at night. Urgent, pounding music is overlaid with her panting, capturing further the sheer terror of the (sexually) vulnerable, lone female pursued in the woods after dark. Lund awakens suddenly from a dream, gasping for breath. It is as if the nightmare of the latter-day Red Riding Hood had been conjured deep from inside Lund’s own unconscious: a spectre of being devoured. It soon transpires, however, that this is no night terror. Similar to what Lisbeth Salander experienced at the hands of Advokat Nils Bjurman (‘She felt him putting something around her ankles, spread her legs apart and tie them so that she was lying there completely vulnerable’),1 Nanna is raped repeatedly and abused for several hours. However, unlike Salander, the 19-yearold student dies. Her battered, sexually violated body is discovered in a car, registered to the mayoral campaign of Troels Hartmann (Lars Mikkelsen), dredged from marshland on the outskirts of the Danish capital. The first to look with a silent, contemplative and penetrating gaze at Nanna’s corpse — her hands and feet tightly bound with plastic restraints — is, of course, Lund.

States of Confusion: Sarah Palin and the politics of US mothering

Rarely has someone emerged so unexpectedly and sensationally on to the American political scene as Sarah Palin. In August 2008, the then forty-four-year-old, mother of five, Alaskan Governor joined the Republican ticket as only the second woman in US presidential history to become a vice-presidential nominee. Her place on the GOP platform electrified the election cycle in ways no one could have predicted, provoking an avalanche of media visibility followed swiftly by scandal and Internet rumour. With Palin came what had rarely, if ever, been seen before on a presidential trail: hockey moms, Caribou-hunting, pit bulls in lipstick parcelled as political weaponry. And let’s not forget those five children, including Track, nineteen who was set to deploy to Iraq, Bristol, and her unplanned pregnancy at seventeen, and Trig, a six-month-old infant with Down’s syndrome. Never before had motherhood been so finely balanced with presidential politics. Biological vigour translated into political energy, motherhood transformed into an intoxicating political ideal. As she cradled Trig in her arms, Palin rose so far so quickly that she was soon on the cover of magazines the length and breadth of America: “A mother’s painful choice” ran the heartrending OK! headline, but the glossy image told another story of maternal pride, domestic bliss and pro-life principles. Grappling to make sense of the unforeseen choice of Palin as VP, struggling with the perplexing semiotics of her postfeminist brand of motherhood as empowerment, media commentators and political pundits worked themselves up into quite a tizzy. We may know that the political image is highly choreographed (in which both the media and politicians are inextricably entangled), but on seeing Palin holding her handicapped baby son, few could have failed not to be affected by the sight as a groundbreaking moment for women—or as Nancy Gibb saw it, “you felt the shattered glass raining gently down” (2008). Political campaigns are to a large degree a high-stakes image game. Even so, Palin’s story of “rugged Alaskan motherhood” (PunditMom 2008) proved so potent that it effectively authorised her political message and polarised a nation with “her faults invisible to the [party] faithful” (Gibb 2008). Some time ago I wrote about Palin and how her media image represents a “feminine ideal, which is compelling enough to psychically entangle us and from which we are not entirely able to free ourselves” (Janet McCabe 2008). When we talk of Sarah Palin, we cannot seem to stop talking about her gender—her procreative abilities, her pro-life choices and anti-abortion stance, her balancing motherhood with politics. It is for these reasons that she so seductively embodies, what Rebecca Traister describes as, “a form of feminine power that is utterly digestible” (2008). This power is not merely about partisan party politics, but nonetheless remains a profoundly political issue. It is “utterly digestible” because what she

Sea of love: place, desire and the beaches of romantic comedy

This article argues that within romantic comedy, the setting of the beach has come to function as a highly potent and privileged setting, evolving into a generic ‘magic space’ (Deleyto 2009) that sanctions and protects those desiring love, while allowing for certain forms of speech involving intimacy and the (sexual) self that cannot be uttered elsewhere. Our analysis finds that, time and again, the sea functions as an alternative, liberating space away from the intellectualism and emotional cynicism of the modern city, constituting an arena where characters can find intimacy and give themselves over to love in ways impossible elsewhere. But importantly, at the same time, we argue, it is also a setting that may function in a compelling manner to suggest, finally, the elusiveness of everlasting love. The meaning of the sea in romantic comedy in this respect is not entirely stable, and is not used only to endorse romantic notions about ‘authentic’ love and natural ‘soulmates’. Rather, a certain paradox is at play in the genres use of the shoreline, since the liminal space of the sea/beach stands simultaneously both for enduring natural wonder that will outlast each of us, and the very essence of evanescence. Always changing, never fixed, inescapably different from one day to the next, it is a reminder of the capriciousness of love and life, an expressive signifier which by its very nature reminds us of the transience of all things.

In Debate: Remembering 9/11: Terror, Trauma and Television 10 Years on

As the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist atrocities was marked last September, In Debate discusses how that fateful day is being remembered (or not) on television a decade later. Documentaries re-remember events, news programmes debate the tragedy and television series/serials dialogue with what happened on 11 September 2001, and the four short essays discuss how television remains engaged in important mourning work.

In Debate: Television Studies in the American Academy:

‘In Debate’ invites eight notable US scholars in the field of television studies to reflect on the current state of television studies as a discourse - its origins and methodologies, its value and legitimacy as a discipline - as well as speculate about further challenges.