Audience

'Art that cannot rely on the joyous, heartfelt assent of the broad and healthy mass of people is intolerable.' (Adolph Hitler)

The audience for television is enormous and, to a large extent, unknown. To be a member of this audience, is to consume, interact with and, in a sense, be 'constructed by' television programming. McQuail (1969) suggests that this engagement with television and other mass media constitutes: 'at least a mark, and possibly even a requirement of membership of modern society' (quoted in Hartley et al. 1994)

Audiences - the individuals and groups watching television - may be defined by the particular programme they watch, such as the audience for Dr Who or Star Trek. They may also be defined according to the genre, or type of product, they consume - such as the audience for sports programmes or soap operas. Finally, audiences may be identified according to their 'social profile' - their age, gender, class, racial group, sexual orientation, lifestyle etc.

Research into audiences has, until quite recently, been largely confined to determining the effects of exposure to the mass media (see chapter Effects). Social scientists, often funded by governments, have been more interested in what television does to people, than what people do with television. As Masterman (1985) suggests this is because so much study of the media, like literary criticism, has traditionally been based on the belief that textual meanings are produced by authors (writers/directors/producers) and are inherent within the 'texts', rather than actively produced by 'the reader' or member of the audience.

'Uses-and-gratifications' research (see chapter Effects) was an early advance on the idea of audiences as merely the receivers of messages. This research was a move towards the idea of an 'active reader' because it claimed that audiences used television, and other mass media, to gratify particular, individually experienced needs. These needs include the need for escape from routine or worry, the need for information about the immediate and more distant world, the need for 'company' , the need for 'advice' about how to deal with personal problems or relationships, and the need of individuals to measure their sense of identity against the values and lifestyles of others. Uses and gratifications research, much of which came from psychological studies in America, suggested that individuals used the media in unique ways - by selecting a particular range of material, to satisfy particular needs. This brought to the fore the idea that the meanings and pleasures audiences obtained from television could be quite different from those intended by the makers of the programmes.

Following upon 'uses-and-gratifications' there have been a range of approaches to the study of audiences. These have attempted to re-describe the viewing behaviour of audiences and show how viewing television is typically a process of negotiation between the text and reader. These studies have shown how the response of any given viewer to television messages is determined by a large number of factors. These factors might include apparently trivial issues such as the viewer's mood or degree of attention at a particular time. Studies of viewing behaviour, which have included installing video cameras in the television set, have revealed that people engage in a remarkable variety of activities in front of the television set, including eating, talking, working, reading, playing, fighting and making love. According to one study by Peter Collett people have their eyes on the screen for only about 65 per cent of the time they are in the room (O'Sullivan et al 1994) and for much of the time that viewing is taking place there is talk, which may or may not relate to the programme being watched. Such talk may be about some obscure part of the programme such as the newsreader's tie, the similarity of a character to a friend or acquaintance or an unusual name in the credits.

Female Audiences

Studies of audience behaviour also noted gender specific viewing patterns. Many men, it was found, preferred to watch television in silence while women were often engaged in more than one activity such as ironing, and were quite happy to talk during a programme. It was also found that men frequently determined, or controlled, what was being watched when in the room, preferring particular types of programming - such as news, sport, documentaries and action films - over romantic stories or films, soap operas and other 'women's fiction'. Men often exercised this power through possession of the remote control.

Research has demonstrated that use of other television related technology is equally gender related. An investigation by Ann Gray (1992) into the use of video recorders in the home showed that women were less confident in using the apparatus, particularly the timer function, to record programmes and films. Whereas women were found to to be quite able to deal with equally 'difficult' technology in the kitchen (such as microwave ovens) that men struggled with, the video recording of programmes was often regarded as a 'male activity', along with the use of computers and computer games. Women were also found to use the VCR in a different way, usually 'time shifting' favourite programmes which were watched once only, whereas men frequently kept a 'library' of favourite films and programmes which they watched several times over.

A study by Ien Ang (1985) of attitudes of Dutch women to the soap Dallas highlights some of the differences in viewing between the sexes. Ang found that while Dallas was widely criticised in Dutch society as an example of American cultural imperialism, and that Dutch men generally ridiculed the programme as an 'unrealistic' melodrama, many women enjoyed it and found it to be 'emotionally realistic'. By this term Ang suggested that female audiences identified with experiences in the serial such as rows, family-problems, extra-marital affairs, emotional abuse, and characters' occasional happiness set against their more sustained misery. Family life in Dallas was shown to be less of an ideal state than a condition continuously 'shattered' by events within the drama. Stevenson (1995) writes of Ang's study:

'The world of Dallas was felt to be realistic by certain sections of the audience because it took for granted the workings of patriarchal society. The tragic structure of feeling not only symbolically opened up a world where the celebration of happiness is always short lived, but represented those with power as most often being men.'

Women were found to adopt an ironic or humorous disposition towards the programme as a means of defending their enjoyment of the programme. The 'language of the personal' - emotional honesty and exploration of relationships, including the possibility of a more equal, caring relationship (Bobby and Pamela Ewing) set against the recognition of male dominance (J.R. and Sue Ellen) gave the soap its popular appeal to many women. Ang linked the popularity of Dallas amongst women to the empowering right of setting aside time for a programme which offered pleasures not always identified, or even shared, by males in the domestic setting.

Ang's conclusions echo those of earlier research by Dorothy Hobson (1981) into the audiences of the soap opera Crossroads. Crossroads was scorned by critics and people working in the television industry, for its low-budget production values, 'wooden acting' and 'creaking scripts'. The show was notorious for its tiny budget which, frequently, did not even stretch to editing out fluffed lines. Despite huge ratings the soap was reduced from five to three episodes a week and was finally pulled altogether from the schedules. It has been widely acknowledged that although Crossroads attracted one of the largest audiences of any television programme after Coronation Street, that this audience - principally middle aged and elderly women - was not attractive to advertisers or television executives.

Hobson's study looked at the reaction to a decision by a single (male) television executive, Charles Denton, to write the central character Meg Mortimer out of Crossroads in 1981. People wrote and telephoned the television company ATV in their thousands to defend Meg Mortimer who had been played by Noele Gordon ever since the first episode. Unmoved by the 'Save Meg' campaign which dominated several tabloid newspapers for days, scriptwriters arranged for her to sail to a new life in Australia aboard the QE2. Hobson read all the letters ATV received which were written mainly by female pensioners and contacted several to watch the programme with them in their home. Her work revealed how many women saw Crossroads as 'their' programme - not something selected by their husbands or other men - and they articulated, usually with great clarity, how important the programme was to them. Hobson concludes that a programme that drew an audience of fifteen million was equally valuable to single plays or documentaries, which traditionally gained critical attention and respect, but might attract an audience of only four million:

'Neither is better nor worse than the other. They are simply different programmes and each is dependent on the understanding which the audience brings to it for its ultimate worth.' (Hobson 1981)

For Hobson, television provided a vital service in providing entertainment and a sense of contact for a large group of people virtually ignored by the rest of society, a responsibility television executives could not shrug off.

Ethnographic Research

Dorothy Hobson's study of Crossroads is an example of ethnographic fieldwork research because she attempted to enter the culture of the women who enjoyed Crossroads and provide an account 'from the inside'. Other ethnographic studies have investigated audience response to programmes in a variety of cultures and countries. A study by Katz and Liebes (1985) found that various ethnic groups viewed Dallas differently from American audiences. Many Arabs, for example, viewed the soap as evidence of American immorality and the corrupting effect of wealth. Many thought that Sue Ellen had returned to her father and not her former lover when she left J.R. with her child, because such a scenario was unthinkable in Arabic culture. Similarly, a Moroccan Jew says:

'I learned from this series to say "Happy is our lot, goodly is our fate" that we're Jewish. Everything about J.R. and his baby, who has maybe four or five fathers, who knows ?The mother is Sue Ellen, of course, and the brother of Pam left, maybe he's the father.... I see they're almost all bastards.' Katz and Liebes (1984)

Significantly, in light of concerns about media imperialism, Katz and Liebes' study, like Ang's, argued that it was the melodramatic nature of the narrative and the importance of everyday experiences in the soap, rather than the glitter of consumerism, that captured the attention of the audience.

Shohat (1996) sums up the conclusions of many ethnographic studies, that different reactions to television material are symptomatic of different historical and social experiences:

'Perception itself is embedded in history. The same filmic images or sounds provoke distinct reverberations for different communities. For the Euro-American, shots of Mount Rushmore might evoke fond memories of patriotic father figures; for the native American they might evoke feelings of dispossession and injustice.'

Gender, race, religion, class, sexuality and age are all major determinants in the way a given audience is likely to view a programme. Dynasty and The Professionals are just two programmes that have gained a cult following amongst specific gay communities for reasons that could not have occurred to the programme makers. Alexis, played by Joan Collins has been seen as 'a destroyer of sexual difference' and the high style, high fashion 'bitchiness' of the serial regarded as a source of camp humour with video loops of cat fights between Alexis and Krystal being played in gay bars in Los Angeles (Fiske 1987) The Professionals, by contrast, has gained cult status in America due to the extreme machismo characterisation of Bodie and Doyle.

By contrast, in Australia, market research found that school-children enjoyed Prisoner Cell Block H because they identified the series with life at school, which they saw as resembling the institution of a prison in many important respects:

'Schoolchildren and the prisoners live under a single authority, are treated alike in a tightly scheduled order imposed from above, and have their activities co-ordinated by the rational planning of the institution. The schoolchildren also articulated a number of points of similarity, between the school and the prison, in terms of the way they are often shut in, separated from friends, have no rights, wouldn't be there unless they had to be, and are made to suffer rules they see little point in keeping. The pupils' own self-perceptions resembled those represented by the prisoners, who were reduced to 'childlike' roles within the programmes. Similarly, the teachers and the prison warders were often positioned together.' (Stevenson 1995)

Prisoner Cell Block H has also been acknowledged as having a strong cult status amongst many lesbian women, although this appeal is likely to be significantly different to that of Australian schoolchildren. That is not to say, however, that the reading of any programme is determined only by the 'reader's' social profile. Gramsci has argued that human personalities are not the 'unified boxes' we often imagine them to be, but are full of very contradictory elements - 'progressive' elements and 'stone age' elements. Fiske quotes Morley (1986) who illustrates the possibility of contradictory subject positions within a single personality:

'the same man may be simultaneously a productive worker, a trade union member, a supporter of the social Democratic Party, a consumer, a racist, a homeowner, a wife beater and a Christian.'

Hence each individual is capable of contradictory or even multiple readings of media texts.

Encoding and Decoding

In 1973, in a famous essay entitled 'Encoding and Decoding' Stuart Hall developed 'meaning systems', outlined initially by Parkin (1972), to show how television messages are 'encoded' (produced) and 'decoded' (understood by audiences) according to three main categories. This coding: 'dominant', 'negotiated' and 'oppositional' corresponds, in Hall's model, to the class backgrounds and social experience of the producers, or audience members concerned. Hence most television programmes are encoded in a dominant meaning system because the people who make such messages are privileged, middle-class professionals with a stake in the dominant ideology (see chapter Ideology). Hence the 'preferred reading' of this text will be a dominant or dominant hegemonic one.

In a negotiated text or reading, elements of the dominant ideology may be challenged. 'Official' or 'establishment' positions may be questioned, for instance, in relation to the need for privatisation of major utilities, currently agreed by the major political parties. Corruption may be shown to exist within the police, unions shown to have a positive role to play in defending workers rights, or homelessness and unemployment explained against a backdrop of social inequality. An example of a negotiated reading would be a person who has suffered short-term unemployment and thinks, after watching a news report on the subject, that the government should do more to create jobs, whilst continuing to vote for that party in a general election.

An example of an oppositional text would be Newman's Law and Order series (see chapter Police) which represented the police and judiciary as rotten institutions. The director Ken Loach is known to have made a series on the history of the trade union movement in the 1980s - as being a betrayal of the working class by union leaders. To this day, the film has neither been broadcast nor allowed to be taken away for private screening performances by the director. Ken Loach claims that the message - that powerful union leaders colluded in the destruction of the union movement - was too radical, or 'oppositional' to be allowed. Similarly, in an oppositional reading, a shop steward organising a strike could reject the entire framework or 'preferred reading' of a news report on that strike as being pro-management and totally biased against the union action.

Hall's thesis was important because it suggested that the variety of readings different audiences brought to a text, protected them from the direct influence of television. In 1978 David Morley's study of audience's responses to the daily news and current affairs programme Nationwide challenged some of the assumptions implicit in Hall's 'encoding-decoding' model. Morley's study of occupational and social group responses found, for instance, that some of the audience's readings did not accord with their objective class position. For example, apprentice engineers who were at the bottom of the wages ladder and had the least material 'stake' in society were, surprisingly, giving dominant readings that allied them with management positions. Morley found that print management trainees were capable of 'rightist oppositional' readings. Other, previously overlooked factors such as gender and ethnicity were sometimes found to be the major determinant of a given reading and in some cases the message of Nationwide was completely ignored or misunderstood, particularly if it failed to engage with the experiences of the viewers.

Morley therefore adapted Hall's dominant, negotiated and oppositional terms to mean that such readings were aligned with, or set against - to a greater or lesser extent - the interpretative framework of the programme itself. This allowed for the fact that the audience were sometimes more conservative than the programme makers and could oppose a more 'progressive' preferred reading. Hence an oppositional reading, in Morley's terms was not necessarily the same as an 'anti-establishment' reading. Another conclusion was that different audiences brought different 'cultural competencies' to their readings. Morley hoped to show how that not just class, but other economic, social and cultural formations within an audience could 'determine' the decoding of the message for different sections of the audience. However, Morley concluded as a result of his research that textual decoding could not be simple 'read off' class/ethnic/gender or sub-cultural positions, 'that social position in no way directly, or unproblematically, correlates with decoding.' (Morley 1983)

Fiske and 'Subversive' Readings

John Fiske ascribes huge power to audiences arguing that popular culture is, in fact, produced by audiences, not media industries. He places great emphasis on the subversive and oppositional readings of people, who, in his view, transform the uniform products of the 'dominant power blocs' into 'resistant practices'. The explosion of communications and media messages has, according to Fiske, paradoxically weakened the grip of the 'power bloc' over audiences and the range of interpretations available to them.

Fiske points out the importance of talk or 'gossip' in audience research. Oral culture has an important role to play in promoting diversity, equality, tolerance and understanding. It creates 'audience driven meanings' and nurtures the communities in which these popular meanings can circulate. Critics of Fiske's position accuse him of mistaking consumerist 'choices' and 'pleasures' with access to the information necessary to make informed democratic choices, and confusing his own sophisticated oppositional readings with the decoding strategies of wider audiences . Shohat et al (1996) take up this point:

'Resistant readings, for their part, depend on a certain cultural or political preparation that "primes" the spectator to read critically. In this sense we would question the more euphoric claims of theorists, such as John Fiske, who see TV viewers as mischievously working out "subversive" readings based on their own popular memory. Fiske rightly rejects the "hypodermic needle" view that sees TV viewers as passive drugged patients getting their nightly fix, reduced to "couch potatoes" and "cultural dupes". He suggests that minorities, for example, "see through" the racism of the dominant media.But if it is true that disempowered communities can decode dominant programming through a resistant perspective, they can do so only to the extent that their collective life and historical memory have provided an alternative framework of understanding.'

Audience Positioning and Screen Theory

Fiske's notions of resistant audiences and subversive readings lies in opposition to theories of textual determination and 'audience positioning'. According to these theories, which emerged in the 1970s, particularly in the film journal 'Screen', audiences are metaphorically 'stitched' or sewn into the narrative of film and television by a variety of conventional production techniques. These techniques, derived from the classic realist style of Hollywood (the dominant stylistic influence on television, worldwide) include the use of shot and reverse shot, the 180% rule, reaction shots, inserts, motivated cutting and a host of other conventions designed to 'suspend disbelief' and involve the audience. These techniques, it was claimed, effectively allowed only one reading of events, the reading 'preferred' by the film or television makers.

The stitching or 'suture' (a French term used in screen theory) of the audience into the narrative can be seen at a shot-by-shot level. A reaction shot, for example, will give the viewer an intimate insight into the emotional response of a character to developments in the narrative by showing that person's face in extreme close-up. Shot-reverse-shot allows us to observe two or more characters in conversation from nearly the same point as the other character (it is often filmed over-the -shoulder). This allows us to see the full range of expressions, to observe in detail the changing mood of the speaker, to judge their every action and word, without ourselves being the object of their gaze (as occurs with the direct address of the news-reader, for example). An insert will show us exactly what a character is looking at which could be, for instance, the time on their watch, a dog barking at them, a beautiful landscape or an exploding car. All these techniques are designed to grant the audience a privileged point of view and make them forget they are watching a production filmed and edited painstakingly over weeks or months. We are, in this sense, 'positioned' to look at certain things, in a certain way, whether we like it or not. The 'privileged point of view' might also be the legs of the heroine as she walks through the door, or a violent attack where we see the pain of the victim from the point of view of the person attacking. In this way members of the audience are often positioned as masculine spectators of women, or as voyeurs of violence.

Screen theory has been challenged by Fiske and others as too text-centred and dismissive of audiences. The theory fails to take account of the reality of differing viewers reactions to a single text, and is closely associated with the monolithic view of audiences proposed by hypodermic effects (see chapter Effects). Nevertheless, audience positioning does occur and it is important to be aware of the preferred meanings (how we are expected to view a series of events or characters) presented in television programmes.

Mode of Address

Audiences are 'addressed' in different ways by television programmes. The mode of address is the way a text is constructed that establishes a relationship between addresser and addressee. Dramas, usually produced in the classic realist style described above, normally use an impersonal or unseen mode of address. There may be first person narration in, for example, historical dramas or literary adaptations where we are guided through the events by a single character within the story. News, game shows, magazine programmes or any television form using presenters adopt the 'direct address' (direct eye contact with 'the viewer', who is openly acknowledged) for much of the programme. The audience may also be addressed as concerned consumers, sophisticated connoisseurs, highly literate readers, young, cynical music fans, potential financial investors, families, children, devout Christians, film buffs, 'ordinary members of the public' and so on. Each will use a different discourse, or language, just as people adopt different discourses, or ways of talking and writing, for different events and people. The mode of address, therefore, may be formal, informal, serious, humorous, sincere, ironic, personal, impersonal, just as with any other communication. The presenters or mediators of MTV, for instance, are usually in their 20's, are slim, attractive, vaguely 'transatlantic' rather than belonging to any region, casually dressed, direct, informal, irreverent or even conspiratorial in their manner, often ironic or detached from their scripts, 'cool', musically aware - everything, in fact, that is designed to include, rather than exclude, MTV's target audience.

Audience Power

Mode of address is one technique whereby television producers 'construct' their audiences. The popular music industry is interested in young, relatively affluent audiences, with spending power that they are prepared to direct towards their products. They are less interested in older audiences, who only occasionally buy music, or very young audiences with limited spending power. According to some media theorists, therefore, the major product of a music channels such as MTV or Channel V is the audience power they attract. Undoubtedly, commercial television makes its money by selling audiences to advertisers. According to Dallas Smyth (1981), the Canadian Marxist economist, the mass media were 'beckoned into existence' by their ability to create audiences that advertisers wanted to buy. These audiences are constructed in order to 'consume' and to market themselves more effectively to advertisers. Masterman quotes Smyth on the working of 'Consciousness Industries' which produce audiences who are ready to buy consumer goods, pay their taxes and continue working in their alienating jobs in order to continue buying tomorrow:

'The full grocery store of 1900 is long gone with its telephone order-filling, charge accounts, sales persons showing customers the merchandise, and delivery service. In its stead we have customers waiting on themselves with a paucity of relevant information provided by the supermarket, then waiting in line at the cash register to pay cash and transport the groceries home by their own means.'

Advertisers today are often more interested in who the audience is, rather than how large it is, as the example of Crossroads' 15 million strong audience has already illustrated. Media marketing is about identifying audiences according to income, social class, sex, age, 'lifestyle' and a whole range of classifications so that advertisers can more easily reach their 'target audience'. Programmes on commercial television then, are regularly devised with advertisers needs in mind. A programme such as Wish You Were Here will obviously appeal to holiday firms while Home and Away, The Chart Show or The Word will attract advertisers trying to reach a younger audience.

Scheduling

Scheduling is the placing of programmes in such an order that will gain the largest audience. An example of this is the policy of putting popular soap operas at the beginning of an evening's schedule. It is hoped they will keep an audience watching that channel through new or less popular material. The so called 'inheritance factor' of such programmes has been used to maintain audiences through low-ratings items such as documentaries. 'Hammocking' a weaker programme between two more popular ones is also common. 'Cross-trailing' refers to the use of common junction points in the schedules to advertise programmes on another channel not regarded as a rival (BBC1 promoting a programme on BBC2, for example). Another feature of traditional scheduling techniques has been to account for the different age profiles of a television audience at any given time. Between 4 o'clock and 5.30, for instance, most programmes on British terrestrial channels are aimed at children. Between 5.30 and 9 o'clock programming is supposed to be suitable for a family audience. After the 9 o'clock 'watershed' material may be of a violent or sexual nature and contain explicit language, and is usually made for an older audience.

Scheduling is designed to create viewing 'routines' - fixed points in the ordering of programmes with which the viewer can become familiar. If the same audience can be guaranteed at the same time every week, programme production can be more easily planned and budgeted, and audiences sold to advertisers on a more reliable and regular basis. Television companies, therefore, hope to offer, wherever possible, 'guaranteed audiences' to their advertisers, which explains the popularity of serials and series. For this reason, in America, where commercial pressures on the television industry are that much sharper, the networks are only interested in long programme runs of at least 52 episodes - one for every week of the year. A series such as Fawlty Towers, of which only 12 episodes were ever recorded, creates problems for American broadcasters because a large, regular weekly audience cannot be guaranteed to draw revenue from sponsors and advertisers.

Nevertheless, whereas early television broadcasting was aimed principally at mass audiences (particularly in America) the situation has slowly changed since the 1970s. Television executives and advertisers have become increasingly interested in audiences with high spending power - the middle and upper classes and young 'upwardly mobile' viewers in particular. For this reason it is possible to run a channel such as Channel 4 as a commercial concern, with only ten per cent of the total viewing figures, or an entire 24 hour satellite station such as Asia Business News with high production values, on a tiny fraction of the Asian television market. Maltby et al (1989) note this development in relation to the type of programming developed on the American networks:

'In the developed world further expansion of the media involved the exploitation of increasingly specialised markets for higher-priced media commodities such as financial information or "quality" television. These appealed to the more privileged social groups. A 1979 survey identified 14 separate audience groupings among the consumers of American television. MTM sustained the most impressive record among American producers of "quality" television, aiming series such as 'Lou Grant' and 'Hill Street Blues' at a liberal professional audience, who preferred programmes that they felt were more sophisticated, stylistically complex and psychologically "deep" than ordinary television fare. "Quality" programmes such as M*A*S*H* could reach "quality" social groups (the metropolitan, the upwardly mobile, the wealthy), and this offered advertisers an alternative strategy to the constant quest for a larger share of the ratings.'

What such systems of scheduling demonstrated is that in an increasingly diverse media economy there can only be profit in supplying products aimed specifically at the upper end of the market. As the hardware costs of broadcasting continue to increase, however, many analysts argue that only the pursuit of international mass audiences can sustain the investment in both equipment and programming. This leads to the prospect of a diet of least objectionable programming, sport, music, videos, news and reruns.' (Maltby et al 1989)

Increasing market pressures, the fragmentation of the family audience (many households have more than one television), the arrival of remote control devices, video recording, and the proliferation of channels resulting from satellite, cable and digital television have each put their strains on scheduling policies. As audiences 'surf' the various channels available to avoid adverts, television makers have moved towards incorporating the advertising message into the programming. This has occurred in the form of sponsorship (the use of explicit messages within the programme), 'product placement' (displaying or incorporating branded products within a programme) or, more insidiously, in the type of programme made. CNN's 'Future Watch' reports, sponsored by IBM, are typical of the merging of advertising and programming, with promotional features on the latest computer programmes and hardware available on the market a major feature. This incorporation of advertising material into programming is a key aspect of the experience of contemporary television as being a continuous 'flow':

'The greater the competition for viewers in order to increase revenue directly the more marked the flow character of television becomes. This is because the flow helps to disguise the breaks in programmes and mask potential channel-switching moments.' (Paterson 1990)

Moreover, the commercial broadcasting environment described above is not confined to commercial broadcasting. A glance at the schedules of the BBC reveals a range of programming that is explicitly promotional, particularly 'magazine' programmes such as The Clothes Show, Top Gear, Holiday and Food and Drink, but also in other popular programmes such as The National Lottery Live, or Top of the Pops.

With the dramatic increase in the number of television channels, and no corresponding increase in advertising revenue available, it has been suggested that advertisers and sponsors will put more financial pressure on programme makers to incorporate their messages into the programme content. The result of these pressures can already be seen in the blurring of programming with advertising. When CNN runs a three minute report on Depeche Mode's latest album release, for instance, the question arises: is this news ? In the commercially determined world of contemporary television the answer is, apparently, yes. In this sense, the lack of clear programme and advertising boundaries will become more marked, with important implications for scheduling policy. Programmes which are too distinct from, or challenge, the advertising that surrounds them, or that are markedly different from the programmes that follow and precede it in the schedules, will be dropped. Television output, according to this model, will become a seamless, 'commercially friendly' whole; and the fragmentation of audiences with their 'distinct' needs, programmes and channels, little more than an effective marketing strategy.

Exercises and Essays

Task

Research the use of television by the people in you home. Look at:

- who is watching.

- when they are watching.

- how they are watching.

Who in you opinion 'controls' what is being watched at any one time ?

Task

Conduct a survey of at least ten male and ten female viewers on their favourite programmes and viewing habits. Does any 'gender determined' pattern emerge from the survey ? Does it support, or refute the findings of other academic surveys ?

Exercise

Look at how any television programme attempts to 'position' its audience. What techniques are employed ? Are they successful ?

Exercise

Interview people about a programme that they have recently watched. What type of reading have they, in your opinion, given of the programme - dominant, negotiated or oppositional ?

Exercise

Make a list of programmes from a day's schedule. Summarise in a single sentence the 'mode of address' for each.

Essay

How, and in what ways, can audiences 'resist' the preferred meaning of a text ?

Essay

Audiences, whether they are 'mass' or 'niche' are targeted carefully. With reference to specific example, show how this is achieved.

Essay

'Any media text that may be termed 'popular culture' is bound to be of low worth.' Discuss this view, basing your answer on at least one example of a programme you have studied.

Task

Michael Grade made his fortune by his skill at manipulating the schedules and drawing bigger audiences back to the BBC in the 1980s.

Cut up an existing schedule from any television listings and remove the times given. Rearrange the programmes in a different order and justify your decision in terms of some of the scheduling strategies outlined above.

Essay

What recent technological and organisational changes have affected ideas about broadcast scheduling and flow ?

or

New technologies, such as video-recorders, satellite, cable and digital television, have made possible the disruption of 'broadcast flow'. How has this affected the use of traditional scheduling methods by the BBC and ITV companies ?

Essay

'In America, unbridled competition between the major networks has produced so called 'jugular' scheduling in which each network seeks to win as large an audience as possible.' (Paterson 1990)

In what ways is British scheduling distinct from the American tradition ? Are there any other models for television scheduling ?

Sources

Ang, I. (1985) 'Watching 'Dallas': Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination' Methuen quoted in Stevenson, N (1995) 'Understanding Media Cultures' Sage

Branston, G and Stafford, R. (1996) 'The Media Student's Book' Routledge

Shohat, E and Stam, R. 'Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalisation' in Wilson, R and Dissanayake, W. (eds) (1996) 'Global/Local - Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary' Duke University Press (USA)

Fiske, J. (1986) 'Television Culture' Routledge

Hartley, J. et al. (1994) 'Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies' Routledge

Katz, E. and Liebes, T. (1984) 'Once Upon a Time in Dallas' Intermedia quoted by Fiske, J. (1987) 'Television Culture' Routledge

Katz, E. and Liebes, T. (1985) 'Mutual Aid in the Decoding of Dallas' in Drummond, P. (et al) (Eds) 'Television in Transition'. BFI

Gray, A. (1992) 'Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology' Routledge

Hobson, D. (1981) 'Crossroads:The Drama of a Soap Opera' Methuen quoted in Masterman, L. (1985) 'Teaching the Media' Routledge ###

Morley, D. (1983) 'Cultural Transformations: the politics of resistance', Davis, H. and Walton, P. (Eds.) 'Language, Image, Media' Blackwell quoted by Masterman, L. (1985) 'Teaching the Media' Routledge

O'Sullivan et al. (1994) 'Studying the Media - An Introduction' Edward Arnold

Parkin, F. (1972) 'Class Inequality and Political Order' Paladin quoted in Fiske, J. and Hartley, J. (1978) 'Reading Television' Routledge

Paterson, R. 'A Suitable Schedule for the Family' in Goodwin, A et al. (eds) (1990) 'Understanding Television' Routledge

Smyth, D. (1981) 'Dependency Road' Ablex summarised by Masterman, L. (1985) 'Teaching the Media' Routledge