Introduction to Television

Broad Overview of the Medium Television viewing is the most popular leisure activity in the world. In Britain in 2015 around 95% of all homes had at least one television set and over half of British homes had a tablet. Ofcom estimates that British people spend an average of over 26 hours watching television a week with, on a typical day, 80 per cent of the population tuning into TV (Ofcom 2016). In America it is estimated that the average viewer watches over five hours of television a day. Its worldwide power and influence can be seen, most crudely, by the priority for capture that is given to television stations during army coups, or by the billions of pounds advertisers pay to television stations worldwide.

Historical Overview

Television, like most inventions, was the combination of earlier technological developments and not the creation of a single 'creative genius'. Its history can be traced in the developments of radio, motion picture, photography, the cathode ray and the electronic camera. Although much of this technology had existed for some time experimental broadcasts did not take place until the mid - 1920's. These broadcasts took place more or less simultaneously in Hungary, The Soviet Union, The USA and Germany.

Regular Television transmissions began in 1936 in Britain and in 1939 in the US. TV was forced to close down completely in Britain throughout the The Second World War and it was not until after the war that TV was able to grow as a medium - partly thanks to military technology and expertise. It was during the 1950 's that TV overtook cinema as the most popular medium of entertainment for the majority of the population in Europe and North America, a phenomenon that has occurred, alongside industrialisation and the resulting changes in living standards, virtually throughout the world.

The Television Experience

Broadcast TV as sound and image

In 'Visible Fictions' John Ellis describes the fundamental characteristics of the 'experience' of television. He compares this experience with that of cinema and, by highlighting the differences, illustrates how the medium dictates the nature of the material made for it. The following account is a summary of some of the central points he makes.

Three essential characteristics which Ellis uses to distinguish TV from cinema are:

1) The quality and size of the image.

The television image is of a lower quality than the cinematic image in terms of its resolution of detail as it is composed of electronically produced lines and is rarely more than 30 inches in diameter. The viewer is physically larger than the image: the opposite of cinema . TV is also usually looked down on, rather than up at as in cinema.

2) The environment in which the medium is experienced.

Television is usually watched in domestic surroundings and is viewed in normal light conditions. Unlike cinema there is no surrounding darkness, no anonymity of the fellow viewer, no large image, no lack of movement amongst the spectators, no rapt attention.

3) The degree of concentration.

It has a lower degree of sustained concentration from its viewers, but a more extended period of watching and more frequent use than cinema.

These characteristics help determine other key features of the television medium.

TV's Use of Sound

It is the relatively low level of concentration that viewers give to television that explains the importance of sound in the medium. By 'sound' Ellis refers to such elements as programme announcements, signature tunes, music in the various kinds of series which are used to ensure a certain level of attention and 'drag viewers back' to looking at the set.

Sound, he argues, holds attention more consistently than image. Many of TV characteristic broadcast forms rely upon sound as the major carrier of information and to ensure continuity of attention. The news broadcast, the documentary with voice over commentary, the bulk of TV comedy shows, all display a greater reliance on sound than cinema has developed for itself. The image becomes illustration, and only occasionally provides material that is not covered by the sound track (eg comedy sight gags, news- actuality footage). Sound tends to anchor meaning on TV, where the image tends to anchor it with cinema.

TV's 'stripped down image'

TV's lower level of sustained concentration on the image has had another effect upon TV production. Contrasting with cinema's profusion of detail, broadcast TV's image is stripped-down, lacking in detail. Ellis compares the fussy detail of a film shown on TV to 'the visual bareness of a TV cop series, where cars chase each other through endless urban wastes of bare walls and near deserted streets'.

On TV then, background and context tend to be sketched rather than brought forward and subject to the fetishism of details that often occurs in cinema, especially art cinema. The narratively important detail is stressed by this lack of other detail. Sometimes, it is also stressed by music, producing an emphasis that seems entirely acceptable on TV, yet would seem ludicrously heavy-handed in cinema.This is particularly so with American crime series, where speed of action and transition from one segment to another dictates the concentration of resources on to single meanings. Where detail and background are used in TV programmes, for example the BBC historical series, action tends to slow down as a result.

The stripped down image that broadcast TV uses is a central feature of TV production. Its most characteristic result is the TV emphasis on close ups of people, which are finely graded into types. The dramatic close-up is of face virtually filling the screen. The current affairs/ news programme close up is more distant, (head and shoulders are shown) providing a certain distance, even reticence. Close ups are regularly used in TV, to a much greater extent than in cinema. The effect is very different from the cinema close up. Whereas the cinema close up accentuates the difference between screen-figure and any attainable human figure by drastically increasing its size, the broadcast TV close up produces a face that approximates to normal size. Instead of an effect of distance and unattainablilty, the TV close up generates an equality and even intimacy.

The broadcast TV image is gestural rather than detailed; variety and interest are provided by the rapid changes of images rather than the richness within one image. TV compensates for the simplicity of its single images by the techniques of rapid cutting. Again the organisation of studios is designed for this style of work. The use of several cameras and the possibility of alternation between them produces a style of shooting that is largely specific to TV: the fragmentation of events that keeps strictly to the continuity of their performance. There is much less condensation of events in TV than in cinema. Events are shown in real time from a multiple of different points of camera view. Cinema events, by contrast, are shot already fragmented and are matched together in editing.

TV's Immediacy

TV, Ellis argues, often gives the impression of being 'live'. Whilst only news and sports coverage are routinely transmitted live, 'the notion that broadcast TV is live still haunts the medium; even more so does the sense of immediacy of the image'. This 'immediacy' Ellis describes as an effect of the 'directness' of the TV image and is achieved by various means:

1) Broadcast TV very often uses forms of direct address - addressing its viewers as though holding a conversation with them. Announcers and news-readers speak directly from the screen, simulating the eye-contact of everyday conversation by looking directly out of the screen and occasionally looking down (a learned and constructed technique). Advertisements contain elements of direct address: questions, exhortations, warnings. Sometimes they go further, providing riddles and jokes that assume that their viewers share a common frame of reference with them. (eg references to other advertising campaigns) This also is an operation of direct address - knowledge is assumed in the viewer addressed as an equal: 'we both know what we are talking about'.

The powerful effect of direct address in its most obvious form (speaker facing camera) is usually reserved for politically neutral figures (with the exception of party political broadcasts or an address by a Head of State). Other strategies of direct address more commonly used by politicians include, for example, appealing to 'common sense' or, as with interviewers, asking questions on behalf of their viewers/constituents ' what the ordinary people really want to know...'

2) Broadcast TVs own perpetual presence (there every night of the year), and its series formats, breed a sense of the perpetual present. The tight scheduling that is favoured by most large broadcast operations means that an audience wanting to see a particular programme has to be present at a very precise time, or they miss it. This increases the sense that broadcast TV is of the present moment.

The forms which work best on TV, Ellis suggests, are those which operate with this sense of immediacy. Soap opera, 'entirely cast in a continuous present' and the open ended series formats of the situation comedy or the dramatic series create a sense of the immediate by being presented as on-going, without the neat resolutions of cinema narrative, 'part of the texture of life'.

Immediacy and intimacy are also produced by TV's constant use of 'the family'. This is particularly noticeable in dramas and soap operas, producing a 'bond between the viewers conception of themselves (or how they ought to be) and the programmes central concerns.' Thus broadcast TV sets up a community of address - a 'them and us' complicity between broadcaster and viewer. The domestic place of the TV set and its assumed audience (the family) becomes the norm against which any grouping outside can be measured. Certain attitudes are taken towards these outsiders - patronization, hate, wilful ignorance, pity, generalised concern, indifference. By defining those outside the concensus in this way, the consensus of TV and family is further reinforced and confirmed.

Exercise

Watch a popular TV programme and note any ways in which it displays the characteristics of the 'experience' of TV as outlined by Ellis.

Source

Ellis, J. (1982) Visible Fictions - Cinema: Television: Video. Routledge