Watching Television Audiences: Cultural Theories and Methods (Hodder Arnold Publication)

271 Pages·2000·15.61 MB·English

by  John Tulloch

Watching Television Audiences
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Watching Television
Audiences
Cultural theories and methods
JOHN TULLOCH
Professor of Media Communication, Cardiff University
A member of the Hodder Headline Group
LONDON
Co-published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press Inc., New York
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by
Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group,
338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH
http://www.arnoldpublishers.com
Co-published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York 10016
© 2000 John Tulloch
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The advice and information in this book are believed to be true and
accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the authors nor the publisher
can accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0 340 74141 4 (hb)
ISBN 0 340 74142 2 (pb)
12345678910
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Beyond celebration: from local ecstasy to global risk 15
3 Some histories of the television cop series 33
4 Talking about television soap opera 56
5 From pleasure to risk: revisiting 'television violence' 83
6 Two approaches to 'documentary' 97
7 Cartoons: modality and methodology 120
8 Watching TV videos: Annie, Rocky and an audience of
'one, two, or three' 137
9 Back to class and race: situation comedy 157
10 Foundations in encoding/decoding: current affairs and news 179
11 Conclusion: cult, talk and their audiences 202
References 249
Index 257
Acknowledgements
The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission
to include copyright material:
David Buckingham for extracts from Buckingham, D., Public secrets:
'EastEnders' and its audience (1987) and Buckingham, D. (ed), Reading
audiences: young people and the media (1993); Polity Press for extracts
from Hodge, R. and Tripp, D., Children and television: a semiotic approach
(1986); Routledge Ltd for extracts from Ang, I., Living room wars: rethink-
ing media audiences for a postmodern world (1996); Westview Press for
extracts from Enlightened racism: the Cosby show, audiences, and the myth
of the American dream by Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis. Copyright © 1992 by
Westview Press, a division of Perseus Books L.L.C. Reprinted by permis-
sion of Westview Press, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.; and University
of Pennsylvania Press for extracts from Beverley Hills, 90210: television,
gender and identity by E. Graham McKinley. Copyright © 1997 E. Graham
McKinley. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material repro-
duced in this book. Any rights not acknowledged here will be acknowledged
in subsequent printings if notice is given to the publisher.
1
Introduction
Looking back over nearly thirty years of research and teaching in media
studies, I am struck by how little of that time I spent on 'methodology'. The
reasons are easy to spot. In particular, there has been a considerable and (in
my view) justified suspicion of 'objective' empiricist methodologies which
have been so profoundly critiqued by the armory of theories sweeping the
fields of film and television studies since the late 1960s. Thus it is that I have
prestigious colleagues in the UK who still say they are 'critics not
researchers', and who nominate the social sciences as 'the enemy'. Thus,
too, a recent colleague in Australia, with whom I was designing an
'Audience and Reception' postgraduate module, questioned the need to
teach methodology at all.
This was a question that the School of Communication staff teaching the
other (quantitative) half of this 'Media Audience' postgraduate subject
would never have dreamed of asking. Yet, from my cultural studies col-
league's perspective, as a post-Barthesian specialist in literary theories of
'reading', it was an entirely appropriate question, as we shall see in this
chapter.
My colleague said that 'methodology' was not part of his competence.
His particular 'binary' was that of 'theory' and 'criticism', rather than 'the-
ory' and 'method'. So how, he asked, did one actually do focus group work
or long interviews? What were they for? Could I convince him that he (and
the audience studies students) would be any better off if they knew about
'methodology'? What did this additional repertoire of 'methodology' add to
the 'theory' that students debated already? Most importantly, how could I
answer some pretty foundational critiques that poststructuralist theories
were mounting against approaching the everyday experiences of people as
some kind of 'truth', whether by focus group, long interview, survey, or any
other methodology?
This chapter begins to answer these questions. Why, in other words, is
there a need for a book on television audiences that emphasises theory and
Watching television audiences
method together? I will start to answer these questions from a personally
reflexive position, and then build up to a more general 'meta'-theoretical
response. I am taking this 'bookend' (personal/global) approach to this
introductory chapter (as well as the concluding one) for theoretical reasons
that will become apparent as we proceed.
But there are also strategic reasons. Since returning to Britain I have
found my Australian colleague's view widespread here also; and not just in
the critical literary theory end of cultural studies. I have heard colleagues
convince younger scholars that important sources of research funding like
the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) are probably not for
them ('the enemy' again). I do not share this view. I never did; and least of
all at a time when there is a clear move within media and cultural studies to
re-synthesise more global theories of communication with localised ethno-
graphies of production and audience (Alasuutari 1999). Consequently, I see
the readers of this book as both the kinds of media/cultural studies acade-
mics who think of social science funding bodies as 'against them' and their
students (who have perhaps done a year or two of university work already
and are now shaping up to do a more specialised 'audience' course).
So where, then, do we start in the 'current debate' - given the wide-
ranging poststructuralist critique of methodology as an objectivist mystique
of modernity?
A personal audience story
When I first thought about writing a book about Doctor Who in the early
1980s, it was as something of a fan. The twentieth anniversary of Doctor
Who was fast approaching, and I had watched virtually every episode since
its beginnings in November 1963. I had also taught about it in media stud-
ies courses in the late 1970s at the University of New South Wales; and I had
found that students there got some of the same pleasures I did from the gen-
tly parodic and reflexive signature of the show at that time. Only later was
I to recognise this as the 'Douglas Adams' (author of A Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy, and script editor on Doctor Who in 1977-8) period. This
ignorance made me only 'something of a fan', because in fact fans world-
wide were busy at that time (and thereafter) excoriating Douglas Adams's
notorious '17th season' of Doctor Who as containing several of the 'worst
episodes of all time'.
The fact that neither I nor any of my UNSW (University of New South
Wales) students 'read' this period of Doctor Who in terms of a 'Douglas
Adams' signature indicated that we were not 'real fans'. If we had been, we
would have attended fan conventions and read fanzines, where we would
very quickly have realised that the period of Doctor Who that we were
enjoying so much was a very particular one in both local and international
fan communities. Globally, this very localised moment in the longue duree
Introduction
of Doctor Who as a series was establishing mythical status. But this was not
myth in Barthes's sense as the historical seen as 'natural' and unchangeable.
The fans knew as well as any professor of media studies at that time that
texts were produced in very finite, local conditions of production, and that
the texts (if not the means of production) could be changed.
I was soon to find out about this as I began researching my book, inter-
viewing fans in Britain and Australia, attending their conferences, reading
their articles and letters in fanzines, and so on. But even prior to this stage I
knew that Doctor Who, over the twenty years that I had watched it, was not
an unchanging and unitary programme. After all, I reasoned, as an audience
member 7 had changed a lot. When I had started watching it in 1963 I was
a young Cambridge University undergraduate, whereas now, by 1983, I was
a father watching Doctor Who regularly with two young sons of my own.
But as well as these personal developments in my daily life, I had also
changed quite profoundly politically and epistemologically over that time.
In 1963 I had been an empiricist historian (whose methodological and polit-
ical conservatism was further exacerbated by being brought up on family
'eyewitness' narratives which privileged a particular version of British impe-
rial history in India - in which my family had actively participated for two
hundred years). Whereas by 1988 I was a 'post-1968' radicalised graduate
in Marxist and 'conflict' sociology.
I had started my Master's degree at Sussex University in 1968, without
actually knowing it was '1968', as it later came to be mythologised. It was
there (at Sussex University) and then (in 1968) that my overlapping fam-
ily/Cambridge history narratives of 'communist world orders', of Vietnam
as 'domino effect', and so on had to meet the incisive (but on reflection, per-
sonally gentle) critique from other Master's degree students, of the calibre of
Tony Bennett, Paul Q. Hirst, Janet Woollacott, and many others to whom I
owed the chance to live intellectually in new and exciting ways.
My own intellectual story is, I am sure, a familiar one; and it is repeated
in each generation; as, for example, neo-Marxist theorists have encountered
critique from poststructuralists and postmodernists in their turn. But (as far
as I know) only I, among this body of Master's degree students at Sussex
University, was 'something of a fan' of Doctor Who. Only I had been
watching it for five years already, and would still be watching it fifteen, even
twenty years later. If I had changed so much during that time-frame, yet still
enjoyed it, what did that tell me about the narratives of Doctor Who? About
how the programme constructed its audiences? And how did my own vari-
ously developing identities relate to it now, in the late 1970s/early 1980s as
I talked with my students about it, and as I prepared to write a book about
it?
For example, what had led me to choose a particular Doctor Who
episode, the 1974 'Monster of Peladon' to open up discussion in sociology
of mass communication classes at the University of New South Wales? This
was certainly not an episode that a 'real' fan would have chosen, since it