Ruth McElroy

Property TV : The (re)making of home on national screens

This article explores how home is made and re-made on national television screens by reference to new domestic lifestyle genres. Through a comparative analysis of the property TV of English-language broadcasters in the UK and US, as well as the minority-language Welsh broadcaster S4C, this article examines the inter-relationship of domestic scenes of private homes with the formation of national constructions of homelands and national belonging. The aestheticization of everyday home life is tied both to distinct material cultural practices and to the politics of taste in the formation of cultural identities within distinct national locales.

Remembering Ourselves, Viewing the Others: Historical Reality Television and Celebrity in the Small Nation

This article explores the specificity of media participation in a small nation, Wales, through empirical research on participants in historical reality television. It takes as its focus the case study of BBC Wales’s multiplatform project, Coal House (Indus, 2007) and Coal House at War (Indus, 2008), which exemplifies how public service broadcasters in the digital era seek to cultivate diverse forms of participation from national and regional audiences. Drawing on interviews, text-in-action participant observation, and online postings, the authors examine how participants and their families negotiate issues of experience and embodiment, engaging in unpaid media labor to protect and promote their own experiences and interpretations of the show. In contrast to theories of celebrity emerging from analyses of globalized formats such as Big Brother, the authors propose the concept of the “localebrity” to explain how celebrity functions in the local and regional context of the small nation.

Whose body, whose nation? Surrogate motherhood and its representation

This article explores surrogate motherhood as an instance of how womens rights of belonging to nations are repeatedly sexed and racialized. Feminist theorists have rightly critiqued the reification of womens reproductive capacities within nationalist discourse and have begun to explore how maternity operates as the grounds for womens inclusion and exclusion from the nation. I argue that surrogate motherhood vividly demonstrates how nation states police the composition of the nation through legislative powers over womens reproduction. In doing so, they situate women, on the basis of their fertility, as competing bearers of a nation that grants them symbolic worth but inequitable power on the basis of their embodiment. This paradox is then traced in the narrativization of surrogacy in feminist, theological and legal texts. In particular, the Internet-based advertisements of law firms and agencies are taken as case studies that vividly demonstrate how embodiment and belonging need to be carefully negotiated in the representation of surrogate motherhood to different participants. Racial, sexual and classed hierarchies of power are seen to be operating in these texts and the stories they tell and visually represent. From this understanding, I move to an assessment of how surrogate motherhood operates within modernitys investment in bodies as signs of truth that fallaciously hold the potential to guarantee origins and belongings. I conclude with an analysis of literary and visual texts selected because they deliberately seek to problematize this logic, which they nevertheless fail to escape.

Broadcasting after devolution: policy and critique in the Welsh media landscape 2008–2015

Abstract This essay examines the provision of media (especially broadcasting) in Wales and considers recommendations made in key reviews and reports which have sought to bring about change in how the media serve people in a devolved Wales. It provides a critical insight into how these debates have developed since 2008 and reveals how some of the monumental economic, policy, production and technological changes that have affected broadcast and digital media internationally have taken shape in Wales specifically. The chief aim is to identify how a distinctly Welsh media policy agenda is developing in the context of devolution. This research is timely given the growing political pressure from several parts of the UK both for greater accountability of broadcasting to the nations of the UK and also for substantive devolution of powers over broadcasting to their governments. The essay argues that media scholars need to pay further attention to how policy evolves in the context of multi-governmental levels such as those existing in the devolved nations of the United Kingdom.

Mediating home in an age of austerity: The values of British property television

Lifestyle television provides a dramatic space in popular culture where the values of neoliberalism are articulated, enacted and sometimes contested. The ideological reliance of this consumer-driven form of television on financial markets and economic growth has posed a significant challenge for programme-makers in the post-crisis recessionary era. This article explores the myriad ways in which British property television has responded to the global financial crisis, particularly as it has been framed discursively as a new age of austerity. Austerity is understood here as an ideological formation that mobilises a selective version of 20th-century British history in order to establish continuity of national values of thrift, poverty and collective stoicism that are seen to characterise a cohesive, British response to a crisis that emerges from external forces. The article charts the contradictions that become evident when the financial and ideological system upon which the property TV genre is reliant are being undermined. Although UK consumers’ access to mortgages has been a casualty of the crisis, the aspiration to home-ownership in Britain has survived relatively unscathed. This article illustrates how these contradictions are played out on-screen in diverse iterations of the property TV genre transmitted by British public service broadcasters, including new domestic craft series presented by property gurus. It argues that the genre, as a cultural and industrial artefact, is remarkably adaptable to new economic and ideological circumstances.

Small is beautiful? The salience of scale and power to three European cultures of TV production:

As television production becomes increasingly global, television studies must advance its understanding of how the global and the local intersect and impact upon the cultures of production. Drawing on original comparative research of three small European nations – Denmark, Ireland and Wales – this article offers empirical insights into the distinct challenges and opportunities for non-Anglophone producers and public service broadcasters (PSBs). The concept of small nations is employed critically to reveal how distinctions of scale and power make a tangible difference to how television is produced and distributed, and to how smaller, national PSBs are trying to secure a sustainable future.

Memory, Television and the Making of the BBC’s 'The Story Of Wales'

The production of television history programming is a rich site for examining the dynamic relationship between history and memory. This article approaches these dynamics through original, empirical research of a specific case study, BBC Wales’ The Story of Wales (Green Bay for BBC Wales 2012). It analyses the commissioning, production and presentation of a landmark national history programme within the specific context of a small nation (Wales) and provides insights into how television intervenes in the construction, revision and remembering of the national past. The role of national histories in the construction of memory and national identity is importance at a time when the legitimacy of nations and states is under question and when governmental and political settlements are under construction as is the case in the post-devolutionary United Kingdom.

The Local, the Global and the Bi-Cultural: Welsh-Language Television Drama

Established in 1982, S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru), the Welsh fourth channel, emerged from the campaigning efforts of a diverse group of people who – wishing to be informed, educated and entertained in their own language – sought to contest the potential erosion of linguistic and cultural diversity posed by a mass media organised along dominant national, state lines (see Niamh Hourigan,1 Angharad Tomos,2 Kevin Williams3). From the perspective of 2007 (the channel’s 25th anniversary), it is striking how such a group imaginatively rendered themselves an audience for an as-yet non-existent entity – an inspiring instance, perhaps, of what a genuinely active and resistant audience looks like. But television has changed enormously since S4C’s establishment, and the contexts for minority-language broadcasting have not remained static either. This is clear when reading the limited older literature on S4C. Writing in 1993, Alison Griffiths, for example, concluded her article on cultural identity and Welsh-language television with the following ‘future considerations’: