Philip Drake

The Cultural Politics of Celebrity

[Extract:] Celebrities are a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary Western culture. Although the phenomenon of celebrity itself predates the twentieth century, the rise of the modern mass media – popular newspapers, cinema, radio, and television, and more recently the Internet and other digital communication technologies – has done much to promote and circulate public knowledge of celebrities during the last 100 years. The presence of multi-channel digital television, radio, and the World Wide Web in Western households at the turn of the twenty-first century has not only increased the number of places in which celebrities can be seen and heard, but has also required media producers to compete with each other and with alternative leisure activities for the attention of fragmented audiences, an increasingly precious commodity. The rise of celebrity culture is inextricably linked to developments in media systems that operate within capitalist systems of commodity exchange. Most obviously, celebrities provide a well-proven route to attracting and retaining audiences, helping to offset the risks inherent in cultural production. They also play out a fantasy of the individual simultaneously performing within public and the private spheres. As P. David Marshall neatly puts it, celebrities might be seen as a “production locale for an elaborate discourse on the individual and individuality” (1997: 4). However the ubiquity of celebrity culture does not mean that its considerable diversity can be ignored. A cursory glance through the prime-time television schedules, for instance, reveals how one might choose between shows featuring celebrity hosts and guests, contest-based reality television shows that participate in the construction of celebrity, personality driven lifestyle programming, sports shows featuring star athletes and commentators, and even political shows with celebrity journalists. All of this is indicative not just of the pervasiveness of modern celebrity culture but also its diversity and breadth.

Lights, Camera, Election: Celebrity, Performance and the 2010 UK General Election Leadership Debates:

The 2010 general election was the first in the UK in which a series of televised leaders’ debates were broadcast. This article takes forward research on mediated political performance and the relationship between celebrity and politics through an analysis of these debates. By discussing how the candidates perform ‘personality’, the article highlights the use of performance in constructing informality and a personalised audience address, contrasting these with where candidates engage in conventional political speech-making. The article also examines the strategic use of language, particularly where it is designed to align speakers with the public in opposition to the political establishment. The article argues that celebrity should not be viewed as an innate quality but instead as an interpretative set of frames, the terms of which are established through performance. The article concludes by reflecting upon the implications that can be drawn about the relationship between performance, framing and political celebrity.

Policy or practice? Deconstructing the Creative Industries

This chapter examines the complex relationship between creative industries policy and creative practice in the UK film industries and the place the Scottish film industry occupies within this relationship. My aims are twofold. The first is to examine how specific conceptualizations of the “creative industries” and “creativity” have functioned as structuring discourses for policy approaches to the creative sector since the mid-1990s. The second is to consider the issues that arise when the rhetoric of creative industries policy meets creative practice within the Scottish film sector, through evidence gained from a number of interviews with practitioners.2 Although my focus here is primarily on the film industries, creative industries policy formation cuts across many areas including substantial aspects of regional economic development and related sectors such as broadcasting and the visual and performing arts. In this chapter, I consider how creative industries policies might be positioned within studies of production cultures and influenced by policy subventions such as tax credits and urban planning. In my analysis, I want to suggest that policy discourses do not simply attempt to coordinate creative processes; they also help to shape, to support, and sometimes to limit ways of thinking about creativity and cultural production.

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.

Hollywood and the Law

Since the earliest days of cinema the law has influenced the conditions in which Hollywood films are made, sold, circulated or presented – from the talent contracts that enable a film to go into production, to the copyright laws that govern its distribution and the censorship laws that may block exhibition. Equally, Hollywood has left its own impression on the American legal system by lobbying to expand the duration of copyright, providing a highly visible stage for contract disputes and representing the legal system on screen.

Television, Deregulation and the Reshaping of Leisure

When John Clarke and Chas Critcher published their critical analysis of leisure in the mid-1980s they noted that one of the more significant features of the British population’s leisure was watching television. Along with drinking, smoking and sex, television was one of the main focal points of the nation’s habitual leisure practices. We would like to revisit the place of television in British society and trace some of the contemporary ways in which television is produced, regulated and consumed at the start of the twenty-first century.