TV FAQ

241 Pages·2007·1.797 MB·English

by  John Ellis

TV FAQ
Uncommon answers
to common questions
John Ellis
Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © John Ellis, 2007
The right of John Ellis to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this
book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 1 84511 565 4
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Typeset in Basset by Steve Tribe, Andover
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow
Contents
I Questions about TV as a medium
1. What is this book about? 2
2. What is ‘television’? 7
3. Is there such a thing as ‘good TV’? 13
4. Does TV ‘dumb us down’? 18
5. Does TV distort what it shows? 22
6. Can we trust anything we see on TV? 27
7. Has TV changed politics? 34
8. Is TV rubbish? 40
9. Is TV an agent of globalisation? 45
10. Does TV exploit people? 51
11. Does TV make you fat? 56
12. Is there too much violence on TV? 60
13. What’s the point of Jade Goody? 64
14. Who was that? 69
II Questions about TV genres
15. Does the news make us anxious? 73
16. Does too much horror stop people caring? 77
17. Why do TV stories never seem to come
to an end? 86
18. Why are sitcoms not as good as they used to be? 90
19. Why are there so many detective series? 95
20. What is a ‘precinct drama’? 99
21. Why are there so many soap operas? 106
22. Whatever happened to the single TV play? 113
23. Is there too much sport on TV? 118
24. What is ‘reality TV’? 124
25. Why are there so many challenge shows? 128
III Questions about using TV
26. Why is foreign TV such rubbish? 133
27. Why do they keep breaking the rules? 136
28. Why don’t you switch off and do something
interesting instead? 139
29. Why did they axe my favourite series? 142
30. Why are there so many repeats? 145
31. How do I find my way round the repeats? 148
32. Will any TV last? 151
33. Is any TV actually live any more? 153
34. Why does all TV look the same? 157
35. Why does old TV look so weird? 161
IV Questions about technology and the TV industry
36. How does this stuff get made anyway? 166
37. What is a channel? 171
38. What is a schedule? 175
39. Does TV exist to sell audiences to advertisers? 182
40. Why aren’t there any ads on the BBC? 187
41. How can I get a job in TV? 192
42. Who pays for TV? 196
43. Who regulates TV… and why? 204
44. How do you work the remote control? 212
45. Is TV bad for the environment? 217
46. Will downloading replace broadcasting? 220
Notes 224
Where can I find out more? 230
Index 234
TV FAQ
iv
I
Questions about
TV as a medium
Q1 What is this book about?
This book tries to answer common questions about TV as
we find it in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
These stretch from the political, ethical and cultural to the
technological and industrial and the plain inconsequential.
Yet they all illuminate an aspect of the complicated modern
phenomenon that is television. They all relate to each other,
directly or indirectly, as is shown by the frequent cross-
»
references between sections indicated by a ‘ ’. Television
as a social phenomenon is difficult to comprehend because
it involves technology, politics and entertainment, yet TV
itself is such an everyday, taken-for-granted medium. A
lot of what it does is supremely unimportant yet, at the
same time, TV is the primary source of much of our
information about and impressions of the wider world. If
» »
Q5, Q6 modern society has become a mediatised society, then
television has been central in that transformation. The vast
majority of people watch TV almost every day and for
» »
Q8, Q11 substantial amounts of time. It brings vital information,
the problems and disasters of the day, along with much
that seems trivial or mundane. Many of the problems
of understanding TV come from regarding these as
conflicting activities, rather than tracing the interrelations
between the two. Politics has been transformed by the
growth in psychological understanding that has developed
» »
Q7 in TV dramas, soaps and chat shows.
Television can be found everywhere in modern society;
it provides much of our entertainment and information
about the wider world; yet it is still regarded as an inferior
medium. There is plenty of bad TV about – some of
it astonishingly inept – just as there are plenty of bad
paintings. Hardly anyone rejects painting as a medium
on the basis of those bad examples, yet some feel able
to reject TV as a medium based on the dissatisfaction or
revulsion aroused in them by some of its programming.
Much writing about TV, both popular and academic, treats
the medium in disparaging tones. Many of these criticisms
tend to assume that TV could do things for which, as
TV FAQ
2
a medium, it is ill-suited: to explain or even solve the
important issues of the day, to be consistently inoffensive
or even to uphold particular public moral standards. That
TV is expected to do these things is partially the fault
of the medium itself in its past and current forms. TV
is a medium that aspires to cover everything and to be
accessible to everyone. It aims to be universal in its reach,
inclusive in its coverage and intelligible to everyone. Not
» »
Q4 surprisingly, it fails to present complex arguments well.
It is also a medium that regularly fails to take a
moral stance. Individual programmes can be fiercely
» »
Q27 moralistic in tone, or can flout moral conventions. As
an entertainment medium, TV sometimes seeks to shock.
As a medium of information, it generally tries to avoid
didacticism and preaching. As a result, TV tends to be
morally ambivalent. Many TV programmes, both fictional
and factual, show things and suspend explicit judgement
on them, within the bounds of a wide consensus about
what constitutes socially acceptable behaviour. Within these
boundaries, evil characters tend to be understandable, and
good characters are hard to find. Beyond the boundaries,
however, lies an undifferentiated evil populated by al-
Qaeda, teenage hoodlums and paedophiles alike. TV
as a medium suspends moral judgement within the
boundaries, but seldom explores beyond them. And these
boundaries differ depending on the national culture that
is involved. TV is not so much immoral as amoral. It shows
a wide range of social attitudes, and can tend towards the
sensationalist. But the come-ons often seem worse than the
actual programmes. The idea of the Big Brother house
with its round-the-clock surveillance was greeted with
horror before people saw it; when they got the idea, they
criticised it for its great stretches of tedium and trivia.
Indeed, compared to cinema, novels or newspapers, TV
contains a remarkable amount of mundane material.
Television is also a medium of the moment. It is
convenient to use, always available at the touch of a button.
The majority of its programming addresses the moment in
» »
Q33 which we live. This is at once the strength and weakness
of television. It makes it a medium that addresses people
Q1 What is this book about?
3
as it finds them, in their everyday lives. It relates to
the common comings and goings of life, designing its
programming to fit the concerns of the moment and the
» »
Q38 patterns of daily, weekly and seasonal change. Yet it also
makes television seem like an ephemeral medium, of no
» »
Q32 lasting value. I prefer to see television as a medium that
is temporarily meaningful. Many programmes contain
allusions to the moment in which they co-exist with their
audiences, to the extent that the passing of time makes
them hard to understand: many programmes from the
1950s are more incomprehensible now than are novels
» »
Q35 from the nineteenth century. Yet the temporarily
meaningful nature of television is also its strength as a
medium. Several of the questions in this book relate to the
feelings of connection with television that are produced
by this address to the present moment. It lies behind the
particular ways that TV entertainment and drama have
developed, producing genres like the sitcom, the long
drama series and the soap opera.
The temporary nature of most television output may
blind us to its role in transforming modern society.
Television has been part of wider trends towards developing
a consumerist society (by promoting its trappings through
adverts and programmes) and a more personalised society
(by developing discourses and understandings of the
emotions). Television has also mediated the increasing
complexity of modern life to modern citizens. It has shown
their myriad of problems with technology and personal
behaviour, the intergenerational conflicts, the cheats
and rip-off merchants, the frustrated and violent, those
who understand too little and those who know the truth
only too well. Television has not been the cause of this
increasing complexity of life. As a pervasive and everyday
medium, it has been central in mediating it to the widest
possible number of people.
Now, it seems possible that television will lose that
centrality. The Internet is providing new means of
providing moving images and sounds when and where
they are demanded. In some areas, television is adapting;
in others it is being swept away. Television has always
TV FAQ
4
been a one-way medium, providing material for an
audience with no substantial means of returning the
favour or disputing what they get. Television broadcasters
are finding some of this interactivity by extending their
operations to include the Internet. Yet the Internet in
its current form and patterns of use does not easily
encompass some of the major characteristics of television.
It does not easily support sustained narratives, for instance.
Instead it delivers television narratives (or summaries of
» »
Q46 them) through download and streaming sites. It is also a
medium that requires a more active and engaged process
of search and selection, a clear understanding of what
you want before you can get it. TV provides ‘always-on’
flows of material that might be of interest now. TV will
be finished only when the population as a whole turns
instinctively to another medium just to see what’s on.
Television is an extensive and pervasive medium.
Any one person can watch only a tiny proportion of the
output that is nowadays available to them, but everyone
has views and questions about the medium as a whole.
This book examines the whole phenomenon of television
as it is found in UK and similar countries today. It tries
to answer many of the questions about television that I
have been asked frequently over the years, and the main
assertions about the medium that are generally held to be
true. Often the most basic questions have proved to be the
most illuminating. The questions are grouped together so
that the book could be read sequentially as an attempt to
outline the main features of the medium. The questions
are organised into four sections, but many of the answers
refer the reader on to other questions and answers that
are often in different sections of the book. The first
section confronts some of the major generalisations about
television, how it behaves as a medium and how it affects
both individuals and society. The second section looks
at the major genres of television and how they operate.
This and the following sections contain many details that
develop the arguments put forward in general terms in
the first section. The third section contains questions that
relate to the everyday use of television, and the fourth
Q1 What is this book about?
5