The ‘place’ of television in celebrity studies

Celebrity Studies ISSN: 1939-2397 (Print) 1939-2400 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel20 The ‘place’ of television in celebrity studies James Bennett & Su Holmes To cite this article: James Bennett & Su Holmes (2010) The ‘place’ of television in celebrity studies, Celebrity Studies, 1:1, 65-80, DOI: 10.1080/19392390903519073 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19392390903519073 Published online: 17 Mar 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 7431 View related articles Citing articles: 29 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcel20 Celebrity Studies Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2010, 65–80 The ‘place’ of television in celebrity studies 1939-2400 1939-2397Studies, RCEL Celebrity Studies Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan 2010: pp. 0–0 James Bennetta* and Su Holmesb* Celebrity J. BennettStudies and S. Holmes a London Metropolitan University; bSu Holmes, University of East Anglia, UK Despite its centrality in the production, circulation and consumption of contemporary celebrity culture, the detailed study of television fame has occupied a relatively marginal place in star/celebrity studies. Early work on television fame originated from film studies, or was generally defined ‘against’ the concept of film stardom. This meant that it was often characterised negatively: the apparent specificities or qualities of TV fame were defined in pejorative terms, and it was imagined in terms of what it was not (‘film’ stardom proper). The subsequent expansion of celebrity studies has arguably placed less emphasis on the specificity of media forms and boundaries – in part reflecting the fluid and pervasive circulation of contemporary media fame. We suggest here that this has created a conceptual context in which the real complexities of TV fame have fallen between the analytical cracks. This article thus seeks to explore the ways in which television fame has been positioned within star/celebrity studies, while also examining how a range of historical and contemporary studies can illuminate the possibilities and challenges for the future study of TV fame. Keywords: TV personality; BBC; familiarity; cultural value; film stardom Introduction . . . television fame must be judged by television standards, all others forgotten. When we make friends we do not stop to ask: What do they do? We like them for their personality alone. The medium of the small screen has brought new friends to every household. And that, for sure, is television. (Editorial, TV Mirror Annual, 1956, p. 5) It’s all television’s fault . . . It is the primary force in the breaking down the barriers that formerly existed between the well-known and the unknown. (Schickel 1985, pp. 9–10) [A]s the prime outlet for, disseminator of, and certifier of public images, television has made decontextualized fame a ubiquitous currency. (Gamson 2001, p. 271) In an article which seeks to examine how television is positioned within the landscape of celebrity studies and celebrity culture, it seems appropriate to begin with a range of quotes on this subject – from different historical periods and contexts. While, in 1956, TV Mirror Annual reflects on the ‘newness’ and specificities of TV fame, Schickel ponders the medium’s role in fostering the apparent demystification of the famous, and Gamson aims to locate television in a historical narrative which has seen the proliferation of celebrity as both an industrial and cultural concept. What these quotes have in common is that they play out the now entrenched relationship between the perceived specificities of television *Corresponding author. Email: j.bennett@londonmet.ac.uk; susan.holmes@uea.ac.uk ISSN 1939-2397 print/ISSN 1939-2400 online © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/19392390903519073 http://www.informaworld.com 66 J. Bennett and S. Holmes fame and discourses of cultural value. Canonical conceptions of television fame famously emphasise how the medium’s rhetoric of familiarity and intimacy, and the domestic context of its reception, mitigate against the paradoxical and enigmatic construction of the film star, instead creating the ‘personality effect’ (Ellis 1982, Langer 1981/1997). Such paradigms pivot on the notion of television fostering a close identification between persona and role – thus giving the impression that the TV personality is just being ‘themselves’. Yet this foregrounds how the perceived specificities of television fame are always also evaluative: after all, while ‘ordinariness’ and ‘authenticity’ are often qualities which are highly praised in relation to stars and celebrities (Dyer 1986), being ‘oneself’ is unlikely to be applauded as a skill on TV (and discourses of work, performance and ‘talent’ are also evacuated from the equation). If television personalities merely present themselves, then the question of ‘what do they do?’ has gained greater prominence with the rise of reality TV today (in which winning contestants are usually validated for appearing to ‘be themselves’, but then often go on to occupy a denigrated cultural status). The perceived specificities of television celebrity, as Christine Becker also observes, have therefore functioned simultaneously to ‘denigrate the stature’ of television fame (2005, p. 9). The title of this article is intended to echo Patrice Petro’s polemical 1986 essay entitled ‘Mass culture and the feminine: the “place” of television within film studies’, which examined the value (and often gendered) judgements conferred upon television by film scholars, and the extent to which these were used to create and maintain an ‘appropriate’ distance between film and television studies. In this regard, and in terms of our purposes here, it is important to recognise that the foundational conceptual paradigms for celebrity studies – which emerged from within film studies and which constructed television fame as a ‘lack’ via a comparison with film stardom – are intertwined inextricably within discourses of cultural value. Furthermore, although these earlier paradigms have since been subject to complication or challenge, we should not underestimate their continued currency. For example, in discussing the canonical work on the ‘TV personality’ versus the (film) ‘star’, Graeme Turner suggests in his useful Understanding celebrity that this dichotomy remains a ‘well caught distinction’ (Turner 2004, p. 15). The attraction of these earlier paradigms is also encouraged by the fact that the subject of television fame has hardly suffered from a surfeit of academic attention, especially in the British context. While American scholars have built up a small but significant body of work on early television and radio stardom (Murray 2005), as well as the shift of film stars to the home (Becker 2008, Mann 1992, Negra 2002), historical interest in the British context has been more sporadic (for exceptions see Holmes 2008, Medhurst 1991). As a result, the focus has been conceptual (Bennett 2008, Ellis 1982, Langer 1997) or contemporary, with the recent focus largely encouraged by the burgeoning interest in reality TV. Yet while such a surge is welcome, reality TV is invariably invoked as the epitome (or instigator) of ‘declining’ standards in the currency of fame, so it has at best represented a contested or ambiguous conceptual space for the expansion of work on television celebrity. The extent to which reality TV has been invoked to exemplify wider shifts in fame indicates a further problematic where approaches to television celebrity are concerned. If, during the earlier years of scholarly analysis, television fame was characterised specifically and negatively, then the subsequent expansion of celebrity studies has placed less emphasis on the specificity of media forms and boundaries; but in this move from the specific to the general, the real complexities of television fame have fallen between the analytical cracks. On one level, this broadening-out is understandable: it reflects the fluid and pervasive circulation of contemporary media fame which does not respect media borders. Furthermore, and in an age of media convergence, a contention to pay attention to Celebrity Studies 67 the specificities of televisual fame might smack of ‘medium theory’; attempting to delineate the legitimate methods and theories of television from other media; yet this is not the intention of our argument here. Rather, we suggest that as ‘celebrity studies’ solidifies as an academic discipline, the field would be served poorly by neglecting questions of media specificity, and by continuing to accept an understanding of televisual fame based on the dichotomy established by Langer and Ellis (and then simply aiming to ‘update’ it in new contexts). Such an approach fails to consider the historical, aesthetic, institutional and economic specificities of television fame – and its different national configurations – as well as the continuities and similarities between television and other forms of fame. This article seeks to explore the ways in which television fame has been positioned within celebrity studies, while also examining how a range of historical and contemporary studies can illuminate the possibilities and challenges for future study in this field. In this regard we want to ask: how do we understand the value and specificities of television fame? In attempting to answer this question, and rather than delineate or create a typology of television fame, we suggest that greater attention should be paid to three key areas: first, the relationship between the historical and the conceptual in understandings of television fame, and the implications of more recent historiographic work in this regard; secondly, discourses of work – variously understood in terms of ‘skill’ or ‘knowledge – and the construction of televisual fame in terms of ordinariness and authenticity; and finally, the relationship between the ‘television personality’ system and the increasingly visible status of the ordinary person as celebrity. Film stars/television personalities: a ‘well caught distinction’? In the United Kingdom, the narrative of Jade Goody’s rise to visibility has been invoked in popular and academic debate as exemplary of the structures indeed ‘excesses’ of contemporary fame (despite the fact that she stands as relatively unique, given that no British reality TV contestant has remained as culturally visible, nor garnered such wealth from the fruits of their reality TV exposure). Jade emerged as the fourth place contestant in the 2002 series of Big Brother, succeeded in maintaining her media profile between 2002 and 2007, fell from public grace during the 2007 Celebrity Big Brother ‘race’ row and subsequently saw the rehabilitation of her celebrity image during her battle with cancer and eventual death in March 2009. In this respect, Jade’s celebrity narrative has often been seen as emblematic of Boorstin’s definition of celebrities as people ‘well-known for their well-knownness’ (1961, p. 58). However, Goody’s position as a celebrity also provides a fitting example of the difficulty in discussing television fame: variously described as a ‘celebrity’, a ‘TV star’, a ‘reality TV star’ or contestant, as well as a ‘television personality’1, Goody was certainly a celebrity, but in what way is it useful to understand her celebrity as configured specifically by television? Previous academic studies of television personalities have tended to treat the TV celebrity as an undifferentiated conglomerate. Goody’s fame exemplifies why the term ‘TV star’ has been resisted within the academy: television can seemingly confer fame upon anyone, ‘without the requisite association with work’ (Marshall 1997, p. ix). While some attention has been invested in examining the genealogy of the terms which designate fame (see Marshall 1997, on ‘celebrity’), little has been conducted to explore the discursive currency of terms – or the relationship between popular and academic terminology – at any one time. This is despite the fact that it is in such cultural arenas that interpretations of, and thus distinctions between, different forms of media fame are fought out. 68 J. Bennett and S. Holmes Historical discourses are particularly useful in this respect, not least because when they circulate around a ‘new’ medium; they are self-conscious in discussing its specificities and particular forms of address. Indeed, and to consider how the later conceptual definitions of fame might relate to the 1950s, the concept of the ‘TV personality’ clearly had a currency at this time, and in the British context the term was used in relation to hosts, announcers or panel-game faces (Sylvia Peters, Gilbert Harding, Isobel Barnett, Eamon Andrews), as well actors and actresses from popular fiction (Holmes 2008). But to end the discussion of terminology here accepts too readily the parameters set out by subsequent conceptual approaches in the field. The term ‘celebrity’ did have a currency in relation to television in the 1950s, as did the term ‘star’ – even while differences between television and film were being discussed. To accept the terminology of the ‘TV personality’, at least without further critical reflection, neglects the range of terms in circulation – from a historical and contemporary viewpoint. Furthermore, to accept the term ‘TV personality’ as configured currently within the academy also neglects the fact that such definitions are also attempts to mark out cultural value. When the film fan magazine Picturegoer argues in 1955 that it is better not to refer to TV names as ‘stars’, it is because it wants to shore up the difference and superiority of the cinema (‘TV is not a midget cinema . . . It’s simply a developer of fireside friends’)2; but Picturegoer went on to describe names and faces from television as most certainly ‘stars’ – especially when, by the later 1950s, they populated at least half the space in the magazine itself. The use of the term ‘television star’ has historically been routine in popular media. In comparison, famous names from all media spaces are simply ‘celebs’ when they appear in contexts such as popular celebrity magazines heat or Now, with film and perhaps pop stars apparently ‘downgraded’ as they jostle for space with famous socialites or reality TV names. However, congruencies (rather than differences) between academic and journalistic terms can be just as revealing in terms of how categories and judgements are mapped. For example, and with respect to reality TV, although academic work has complicated the sweeping sound-bite assertions which often emerge in journalistic commentary, both spheres place the use of the term ‘celebrity’ here in inverted commas. This is despite the fact that as celebrity studies has increasingly conceived of celebrity as less a trait of a particular person than a discursive mode of representation (Turner et al. 2000, p. 11), it is difficult to see how the contestants emerging from reality TV are any less celebrities than other names in the media sphere – they are, after all, subject to the same mode of ‘celebrification’ in order to become visible. Of course, if we are now placing the primary emphasis on a particular representational paradigm of fame, this may in itself be an argument in favour of rejecting media distinctions; but the suggestion here is that it would be worth offering a greater self-reflexivity about the discourses, value judgements and assumptions which structure our own discussion of fame, not least of all because they shape the questions that we ask of celebrity, and thus the conclusions we might draw. This is not to suggest that we should now elevate television fame to the rhetoric of ‘stardom’, or that all television fame is best described by the term ‘television star’. For us, the term ‘star’ is too loaded – and well-theorised in film studies – to be helpful in this context. Indeed, to propose one catch-all term for television fame would be erroneous: television produces actors, presenters, contestants, celebrities, stars and personalities. It is therefore conceptually helpful to draw a distinction between ‘stars’ and ‘personalities’ – although the intertextual circulation of television fame may use each term interchangeably – whereby the former term might relate to actors in fictional programming, and the latter presenters in factual programming. Such a distinction allows us to start to pay greater attention to the specificities of television fame and unhinge the evaluative discourse that suggests Celebrity Studies 69 all forms of stardom should conform neatly to that of film (and the extent to which the status and meaning of ‘film’ stardom has itself shifted in the contemporary media landscape surely also questions the use-value of such a dichotomy). If we turn now to a brief historicising of television fame, we can examine how discourses of stardom shaped the understanding of early television and the emergence of the ‘television personality’ as a figure who emphasised ordinariness, authenticity, intimacy and the continuity between on/ off-screen self. The emphasis on these qualities, however, emerged less because of any properties ‘inherent’ in the medium than because of a range of economic, historical, institutional and aesthetic factors. Historicising television fame Historiographic work on television fame, which has expanded in recent years, has played perhaps the key role in redressing or challenging the existing assumptions of earlier conceptual paradigms. As Holmes observes in her exploration of television fame in 1950s Britain, ‘returning to this earlier context does raise important questions: Where do these later conceptual claims about television fame locate their historical roots, and to what extent are discourses of ‘ordinariness’, familiarity and intimacy historical?’ (2008, p. 155). An important attempt to answer this question is offered by Susan Murray’s work on 1950s American television. Murray’s analysis draws our attention to the pervasiveness of the term ‘TV star’ in the construction of early US television fame. On one level, however, her work consolidates the paradigms offered by Ellis and Langer, as she argues that television was perceived to dissolve the boundary between on/off-screen self. Thus, while Murray makes it clear that what she terms ‘TV stars’ were pivotal in the formation of a televisual aesthetic and its modes of address, the performers she discusses – Arthur Godfrey, Milton Berle, Jackie Gleeson – do not conform to the regime of stardom as set out in film studies: [W]ithin the context of the discourses that constructed television’s aesthetic, television viewers were encouraged to believe that they could actually locate the true personality of a television performer somewhere within his or her performance. . . . [B]ecause television was said to produce intimacy, immediacy, and spontaneity, it also generated authentic identities. (Murray 2005, p. 129–130) The concealment/revelation discourse which was seen to structure film stardom (deCordova 1990, Ellis 1982) represents an economic strategy intended to encourage repeat trips to the cinema, but the regular flow of television culture demands a different economy of viewing. As Murray outlines, the goal may have been to naturalise the performers in the domestic setting so as to make them appear less ‘aberrant in the context of the everyday, yet simultaneously make them engaging enough to capture the audience . . . and to draw positive attention to the sponsor’s product’ (Murray 2005). In this sense, the importance of discourses such as ‘ordinariness’ and ‘authenticity’ emerge from a confluence of economic, institutional and aesthetic frameworks that are located historically. This, in turn, immediately raises a question about national differences, and the extent to which conceptions of television are shaped by particular institutional and cultural contexts. After all, Murray’s study finds no easy application to British broadcasting, which has been structured historically by an economy of public service. Since Andy Medhurst’s (1991) discussion of Gilbert Harding, the grumpy, outspoken and erudite panellist on the BBC’s What’s My Line? (BBC, initially 1951–62), Harding has often been viewed as a historical test-case with regard to the earlier conceptual paradigms. According to Medhurst, 70 J. Bennett and S. Holmes Harding’s fame emphasised the authenticity of his persona by merely trading on an aspect of his ‘genuine personality – it was who he was [original emphasis]’ (Medhurst 1991, p. 62). In turn, Medhurst places Harding within the devalued currency of television fame: ‘He was famous for being famous’ (Medhurst 1991, p. 64). Yet we suggest here that not only were the meanings of authenticity and ordinariness worked out across a number of different sites, these were far from the only registers within which early televisual fame was constructed. Furthermore, there is also a need to consider how the apparently ‘innate’ qualities of television fame actually emerged from the BBC’s efforts to negotiate the popular appeal of television personalities in relation to the institutional parameters of public service. To some degree, the idea of fame or stardom sat uneasily with the BBC’s concept of public service (see also Bourdon 2004), as variously related to the corporation’s limited economic base (star salaries), attitudes toward publicity generation and a wider – and more diffuse – suspicion of prioritising packaging over content, or surface over substance. Even the BBC’s own publicity department expressed distaste for ‘the ballyhoo . . . the press party, the interviews, the glamour photographs, the screen-trailing, the Sunday paper story’.3 Indeed, and in comparison to the American context, there were reservations about promoting the intertextual coverage of a programme or ‘star’. However, if this appears to shore up the later conceptual argument of a dissolution of the boundary between on/offscreen image in television fame (thus enforcing the impression that the person is simply ‘being themselves’), then it was inflected by specific institutional, aesthetic and cultural concerns which cannot be explained adequately by these paradigms. To take an example from popular fiction in the mid-1950s, the BBC’s The Grove Family (1954–57) indicates how the corporation’s desire to collapse the on/off-screen identity of ‘The Groves’, and to minimise any dialectic which forged a gap between actor and role, was fostered primarily by a desire to maintain the diegetic (and class-based) realism of the series. There was equally a moral discourse to consider here in so far as, as the Producer explained at the time, ‘the television family is supposed to be so full of virtues that the actors and actresses are expected to carry them into their private lives’.4 Yet despite attempts to delimit this semiotic base, the development of televisual fame – in relation to both individual personalities and as a discursive category – led inevitably to intertextual coverage, and for both the BBC and the personality the question of the popular had to be negotiated carefully within this intertextual framework. One such site of negotiation was discourses of glamour which circulated in the intertextual coverage of the BBC’s female ‘in-vision’ continuity announcers during the 1950s. Each of the BBC’s main announcers during this period – Mary Malcolm, Sylvia Peters and Noelle Middleton – appeared on the front cover of the magazine TV Mirror in formal evening wear with plunging necklines. After Middleton first featured on television and the front cover of TV Mirror, the magazine reported receiving 432 letters from men asking her for a date. Moreover, a postcard competition for readers run by TV Mirror in 1954 to ‘make your own choice of television beauty’ named both Malcolm and Peters in the winning three names.5 Yet as an interview with Middleton revealed, audiences’ interest in the glamour of television threatened to disrupt the attentive citizenry the BBC sought to address and cultivate. Middleton explains the paradox: I am often asked by women viewers why we are so rarely shown . . . full-length, so that our dresses can be seen in full. The main reason for this is the very nature of the announcer’s job . . . I’m afraid she is not there to display herself or the dress! Moreover, the BBC found out that when an announcer is shown full-length, the viewers’ eyes are so occupied taking her in that what she says may not be properly heard. (Ackworth 1954, p. 12) Celebrity Studies 71 Middleton’s description of this problematic speaks to the historical equation of femininity with both spectacle and ‘distraction’ – and there has been a long-standing concern about women reading the news precisely because their appearance might ‘distract’ viewers from the ‘gravitas’ of a television news report. Such an anxiety was evidently understood as a production problem for the BBC, as the corporation attempted to negotiate the popular appeal of the announcers. Clive Rawes, head of the BBC’s Presentation Department, suggested that despite the popular interest in the announcers’ clothes, such long shots ‘won’t happen often . . . Sylvia and Mary have a first duty – to announce. I do not intend to turn them into television clothes pegs’ (Rawes 1953, p. 12). Thus, by 1954 Rawes had issued a production edict that meant announcers were given ‘a “throw-away line” at the beginning of the announcement. . . . [which] If viewers don’t hear it properly, it doesn’t matter, and by the time it is over, they are ready to attend to the announcement’ (Ackworth 1954, p. 12). Arguably, the problematic of television announcers’ glamour was negotiated not only by such production techniques, but also via a counter-discourse which emphasised their ‘ordinariness’ and the continuity between their on-/off-screen personae. Thus, many popular articles in circulation also stressed their identities as wives and mothers. Portraits in Radio Times and Daily Mail television annuals always mentioned their marital status and children, while a self-penned article by Malcolm on the ‘problems involved in being a household face’ expressed incredulity at those who saw her doing her own shopping or on the underground – as though she belonged to a different, extraordinarily glamorous, world. As Malcolm pointed out, ‘I have to get around too’ (Malcolm 1954, p. 13). Such an appeal to ordinariness and authenticity is not only commensurate with our understandings of television fame, but also of the way ‘glamour’ was negotiated by the institutional parameters of the BBC’s public service ethos. This produces television’s own form of glamour, which we can draw usefully upon Beverley Skeggs’ notion of ‘respectable glamour’ to understand (1997). Rather than the unattainable and extraordinary image of the film star’s lifestyle, television’s discourse of glamour allows its personalities to function as figures of identification and ‘reachable’ ideals of wealth, extravagance and glamour, but in ways that did not breach the boundaries of a middle-class taste culture of the period (see Bennett forthcoming). While the example of female announcers still appears to play into discourses of a domestic, familial and ‘reassuring’ framing of television fame, the medium’s relations with celebrity have never been so ideologically cohesive – especially, in fact, in this earlier period. This is played out across what Marshall has conceptualised more widely as television’s ‘familiarisation function’ – its role in ‘substantiating the significance of public personalities that have emerged in other domains’ (1997, pp. 130–131). After all, and in both Britain and the United States, interview-in-depth programmes in the 1950s/ 1960s, such as Person to Person or Face to Face, promised to unearth the ‘real’ self through a penetrating close-up (Gamson 2001, p. 151). Similarly, the controversial popularity of a programme such as This is Your Life – described by critics as playing to the ‘craven curiosity of the mob’ (Desjardins 2002, p. 127) – clearly suggested the germ of a desire to probe at a disjuncture between public/private self. Related to the perceived relationship between liveness and realism, such popular and historical examples cannot simply be recuperated within the argument that television ‘deglamourises’ stars from other domains (see Mann 1992). From the image of Gilbert Harding later being pushed to tears on a 1960 episode of Face to Face (described variously at the time as a as a form of ‘soulwashing’ and as a ‘tortuous ordeal’),6 to Tom Cruise’s surprise ‘jumping the couch’ on Oprah (2005), to the growth of celebrity versions of reality TV (which hunger to see the 72 J. Bennett and S. Holmes famous ‘outside’ the parameters of their conventional domains or media roles), there is a wider historical narrative to be written about how, in circulating media personae from other domains, television’s ‘search for intimacy’ (Langer 1981/1997, p. 360) cannot be positioned as simply ‘ancillary’ or ‘familiarising’, but significant in its own right. If the despairing comment from a British press critic in 1959 that ‘celebrities crying in close-up is surely not the future of television’7 appears to resonate immediately with television culture now, then this connection may also confirm the fact that work on television fame has tended to be primarily historical (‘early’ television) or contemporary. Nevertheless, we suggest here that historical work can play a crucial role in shaping our use and evaluation of conceptual paradigms, and a more ideal scenario is for these spheres to work together – each informing the other. We turn to this question in the following section, suggesting how the early discourses that sought to map out the specificities of television performance illuminate the way in which we now conceptualise television fame. Authenticity, intimacy, ordinariness and televisual skill Murray’s work demonstrates how the vaudeville/comedy star was positioned initially as ‘the ideal television performer’ because of their ‘ability to represent what the industry believed were its primacy aesthetic properties – immediacy, intimacy and spontaneity’ (Murray 2005, pp. xiv–xv). Her retelling of Arthur Godfrey’s fall from grace as American television’s most famous personality, whose amicable on-screen self was exposed as ‘inauthentic’ when he fired a co-performer on air and rumours began to surface about his hard-nosed attitude, demonstrates the primacy placed on ‘authenticity’ in the construction of a successful on-screen televisual image. Indeed, as recently as David Letterman’s 2009 on-air confession that he has had affairs with female staffers, the on-going need for a cohesive, authenticated televisual image is demonstrated by Letterman’s decision to recuperate pre-emptively his off-screen, private persona with his on-air one. Away from television, the use of the term ‘authenticity’ has had other meanings to which we should be more attentive in understanding televisual performance and skill. Work in star studies has suggested that we are encouraged to locate the ‘real’, ‘private’ stars away from their public persona. Dyer’s analysis of the role of authenticity in the construction of stardom suggested that it functioned to shore up the ‘notion of individualism upon which capitalist society depends’ (Dyer, quoted in Holmes 2005, p. 27). Dyer continued that ‘the perpetual attempt to lay claim to the “real self”, was organized around a desire to suggest a “separable, coherent quality, located “inside” consciousness and variously termed “the self”, “the soul”, “the subject” ’ (Dyer, quoted in Holmes 2005), and it was this interplay between on/off-screen personae that produced the dialectic of the ordinary/extraordinary paradox (Dyer 1979/2001, Ellis 1982). In turn, such an understanding of the on/off-screen personae of film stars allowed for a discourse to develop onscreen acting, which valued acting as an achievement, that has worked towards establishing the hierarchical dichotomy with television fame and performance. As a result, we lack the same acknowledgement and vocabulary to understand the concept of performance in relation to television. This is certainly the case with regard to acting in television fiction, but the concept of performative skill in relation to non-fiction programming (and thus the figure of the TV personality) has been even less likely to receive analysis. However, we would argue that televisual skill is crucial to the longevity of television fame: while television may produce a plethora of celebrity and confer ‘ephemeral’ fame, it is those who master the techniques necessary to create an intimate, Celebrity Studies 73 spontaneous, immediate performance style that may be understood as ‘television personalities’. In the space available, we want to take three short examples to demonstrate the way performance can be understood as pivotal to construction of a successful persona, while at the same time often disavowing their own manufacture. First, to return to the example of announcers discussed in the previous section, direct address was understood as one of the fundamentally televisual elements of the new medium that performers had to master. Thus Earnest Thomas, BBC publicist, described their role as ‘learning the unheard of art of talking and smiling straight into the goggle eye of a television camera lens’ (Thomas 1954, p. 6). The development of this mode of address has long been understood to cultivate an intimacy between television performer and viewer, arguably having been placed at the heart of television’s familiarisation function whereby audiences are felt to ‘know’ regular personalities as ‘friends’ (Horton and Wohl 1956). However, while almost all performers (in non-fiction television at least) might utilise this mode of direct address, this is far from the only register of performance that we can associate with it. As James Naremore has argued in relation to ‘certain types of vaudeville-inspired comedy’, performers may ‘use direct address to disrupt illusion’ (1988, p. 36). In early television this could be used to emphasise the visual immediacy of television and create a form of spectacle – drawing attention away from narrative of flow towards the apparatus and possibilities of television itself (Gunning 1986). A letter from a reader of TV Mirror is illustrative here: We were all watching Arthur English on ‘music hall’. The picture went a little dim. I went forward on my knees, face practically touching the screen, and he roared out: ‘What cher looking at, Big Head?’ I rocked back on my heels, there was a startled silence, then my family burst out with a roar of laughter. I was too astonished at first to join in.8 Karen Lury’s analysis of post-modern performance in ‘yoof television’ (2001), such as Chris Evans in TFI Friday, suggests that such uses of direct address for disruption and spectacle have persisted into the contemporary television landscape but are intermixed constantly with more familiar and intimate modes.9 Lury and others have suggested, in this context, how direct address is therefore marked predominantly as a site of control in performance. For many forms of light entertainment, comedy and variety programming this has involved the negotiation of the place of the studio audience, who had the potential to both represent and supersede the home audience. Ronald Waldman, the BBC’s head of light entertainment, noted in 1954 that such performance is central to the maintenance of programming ‘flow’, whereby the presenter must demonstrate ‘skill and efficiency in this direction’.10 Paying attention to the varied uses of such taken-for-granted aspects of television personalities’ appearance allows us to understand the way in which they are, in fact, a performance. Especially in the context of television, the term ‘performance’ often immediately beckons connotations of inauthenticity (Hill 2005), but to describe a performance of authenticity need not be seen as a contradiction in terms. As British television critic Mark Lawson has suggested, understanding the television personality as a performance does not amount to ‘insincerity . . . [as] certain elements of [their] nature’ are exaggerated ‘while others [are] play[ed]down’ (Lawson 2001, p. 8). Secondly, we can pay closer attention to the way performance constructs an ‘authentic’, intimate persona for television personalities that is then central to their celebrity. The increased importance of lifestyle programming to the schedules has led to a commensurate emphasis on the televisual skill of its presenters, so that while the ‘expert’ is enlisted on such programmes for their vocational skills – for example, Jamie Oliver’s profession as a 74 J. Bennett and S. Holmes chef – they must also be capable of managing a televisual performance. Thus, whereas during the boom of this genre in the early 1990s such programmes were generally presented by a televisually skilled performer, such as Carol Smillie in Changing Rooms, in the noughties we expected programmes such as How to be a Gardener (BBC, 2002–03) to be carried by the performances of vocationally skilled performers alone. In much of this programming, direct address is used verbally and visually to make the transformations undertaken – whether of gardens or dress sense – to appear as a collective project. For example, British gardening television personality Alan Titchmarsh, like many lifestyle presenters, often addresses the viewer as ‘we’ to make gardening a collective project. Titchmarsh’s performance is filled with anecdotes, jokes and observations on life and gardening’s pleasures all delivered in the soft Northern accent of his Yorkshire lilt, which is often described as ‘safe’ and ‘cosy’. Such a mode of performance works towards diminishing any ‘expert’ status (that is, an intelligence or insight that would distinguish him as ‘extraordinary’ from his audience in any way), within his televisual image. However, in his lifestyle programming, performance technique and technology both work towards making his skills seem credible, ‘ordinary’, fun and worth doing. One of the most obvious techniques in this regard is the use of realist aesthetic strategies and performance styles so that any use of post-production voice-over that might formalise the ‘didactic’ elements of his address is kept to a minimum. Televisual skill takes place at the interplay of technique and technical production factors. By analysing these signs of performance, we can understand how ‘sustaining a performance – over three hours, a run in the theatre, over weeks of filming – starts to look like a professional problem’ (Thompson 1985, p. 68). A final example, such as Anne Robinson, emphasises the way in which performativity is constructed as an extension of an intertextual persona – in Robinson’s case, one developed on Watchdog (BBC, 1995– on-going) and carried through to The Weakest Link (BBC, 2000–on-going) as a hostile and short-tempered host.11 With regard to Robinson’s performance, this is a question of ensuring a robotic delivery style of disparaging put-downs to contestants, with little modulation of tempo or timbre allowed from programme to programme, and editing is arranged so as to ensure her comments appear to be ‘quick-witted’. This is framed by television’s system of ‘delegated looking’ that constantly aligns us with Robinson so we appreciate her verbal artillery in registering the contestant’s reaction from her perspective. As The Guardian’s television critic Mark Lawson has suggested, the extension of this persona has, in fact, become a ‘theatrical performance’, which both viewers and contestants alike are keen to experience (Lawson 2001, p. 8). However, while the formatting of the show for international circulation emphasises the way in which this host role is one that must be ‘performed’ – hosts of ‘local’ versions must learn to play the Robinson persona – at the same time, the continuity with local hosts’ intertextual image is highlighted so that the problem of performance – in the form of auditions, rehearsals and editing – is largely down-played. Performance, and any skill that goes towards it, is therefore glossed over by the intertextual emphasis on authenticity. Ordinary people: playing themselves? If, in conceptual and cultural terms, television personalities are seen as largely playing ‘themselves’ (no ‘skill’ or talent required), it is little wonder that reality TV has been foregrounded as the totemic medium in the ‘famous for being famous’ debate. In deliberately shrinking the dimension between the self that is ‘on television’ and ‘not on television’, reality TV appeared to beckon the question: ‘what better format for the medium [of television] than one in which people are precisely encouraged to “play” themselves? [original emphasis]’ Celebrity Studies 75 (Holmes 2004, p. 115). This question remains important given that while, in cultural terms, this is invoked as a regrettable downgrading of the currency of fame, in reality TV itself (and some of its popular media coverage) the concept of successfully ‘being oneself’ within a mediated environment is highly validated, praised and pursued. Furthermore, as audience research has shown, viewers understand the highly constructed and performative nature of reality TV; they nevertheless validate participants based upon their propensity for ‘authenticity’ when ‘judging the integrity of the [screen] self’ (Hill 2005, p. 36). This has been seen as central to the appeal of the form although, when it comes to constructions of celebrity and selfhood, that is not to suggest that all formats function in the same way. As argued elsewhere, the reality pop shows such as Pop Idol or X-Factor seek to distance themselves from the concept of ‘easy’ or ‘arbitrary’ celebrity by combining an emphasis on manufacture and image production with more traditional ideologies of fame (which suggest that talent and stardom is ‘innate’ and not simply acquired) (Holmes 2004). In their emphasis on ‘ordinariness’, ‘lucky breaks’, ‘specialness’ and ‘hard work’, they are also paradigmatic of Dyer’s (1979/2001) description of the ‘success myth’. In comparison, a programme such as Big Brother appears to be lacking some of the fundamental discourses of the success myth – the emphasis on work and more traditional conceptions of talent. Yet, as Bonner has noted, there is a wider ideological impetus here to disguise the concept of work on screen: ‘work and employment have never been particularly productive discourses for television, because however ambiguously television may situate itself as a leisure pursuit . . . it certainly establishes itself in opposition to work’ (Bonner 2003, p. 137). In this regard it is interesting to note Biressi and Nunn’s suggestion that, in Big Brother, ‘[The contestants’] boredom becomes our diversion and our optional leisure time is filled with their enforced inactivity . . . their “labour” is actually our entertainment’ (2005, p. 21). We might ask why ‘labour’ is placed in inverted commas here. Like any other job, the contestants enter into a complex contract with the producers from the start, and while presented as only covering loss of earnings, contestants are paid the minimum wage while in the house. In performing in the show, they are in part responsible for the production of what, in the United Kingdom, has been Channel 4’s most hyped and lucrative show of the noughties (until a decline in its ratings in 2009). As performers on which the show is economically dependent, they wield a certain amount of contractual power – something which is occasionally made explicit in the show. For example, in the 2004 series, demoralised and angry contestant Dan Bryan gestured toward the camera and warned: ‘Well, if they keep moving the goal posts, we can start swearing [in the live tasks] and using brand names. Either that or we refuse the next [live task] . . . They can’t kick us all out – no live tasks, no programme on Saturday night. No programme, no money’ (12 June 2004). Like angry workers about to ‘revolt’, there is an understanding here that their labour is sold (as well as access to their personal lives) (see Andrejevic 2004), in exchange for media visibility and (celebrity) status. Neither the audience nor the contestants are ordinarily encouraged to think of the contestants as offering labour or work here, not least of all because this has connotations of professional performance which would undermine the centrality of the ‘ordinary’ – the unscripted and the spontaneous. In fact, it is interesting to note how the eighth series of the UK Big Brother framed the following comments from housemate Kara-Louise: I know you get to be some kind of minor celebrity after being in here, and it is a celebrity that is looked down upon. But, actually, I do think you deserve recognition as, watching it on TV, people don’t recognise how hard it is . . . I think you do deserve the celebrity in return: it’s hard work . . . I think it is an accomplishment. (6 August 2007) 76 J. Bennett and S. Holmes This excerpt was then replayed on one of the format’s ancillary shows, Big Brother’s Little Brother, while its host, Dermot O’Leary, rolled his eyes and asked: ‘Kara-Louise – what were you thinking? It isn’t coal-mining!’ (8 August 2007), and this solicits a laugh from the studio audience. In this sense, irony is used to deflect the question of labour, while it also seeks to show that the programme is knowing about the popular cultural debates which circle around its construction of celebrity. Yet in Big Brother, winning or highly visible contestants are often valued for their ability to offer what appear to be spontaneously amusing or comedic performances, containing everything from one-liners and impressions of celebrities to catchphrases (Brian Dowling, Kate Lawler, Alison Hammond, Nadia Almada, Pete Bennett, Nikki Graeme in the United Kingdom would all come under this category). The fact that such contestants often then move into the field of light entertainment after the show (for whatever length of time this may be) – including television presenting – again questions whether there is a radical break with modern celebrity, or whether this is really about a wider attitude towards television fame and its relationship to skill and labour. Furthermore, presenting a likeable – and ultimately marketable – self to the general viewing public for 10 weeks or more is surely more difficult than it sounds. To date, no one has won the UK version of the show for playing a good game, for displaying open duplicity or revelling in machiavellian traits. Time and time again, however much the winners may vary, there is a pull towards validating those that (appear to) have been that ‘true’ to themselves. Subsequent intertextual coverage in popular magazines then continues this emphasis, and there is an insistence on the self remaining unchanged by fame – a highly traditional discourse on selfhood which offers the impression of bearing ‘witness to the continuousness of [the self’]’ (Dyer 1979/2001, p. 11). In fact, these expectations illuminate in part the semiotic process which drove the bid to divest Jade Goody of her celebrity identity after the Celebrity Big Brother race row in 2007. The accusations of racism overlaid the sense that perhaps most damaging of all to Jade’s image as a reality TV star was the fact that this heightened surveillance of her celebrity persona (24 hours a day) led to the charge of a multi-faceted self, a narcissistic (post-modern) identity which is fashioned to suit the demands of the context in hand. Given the extent to which reality TV stars are required to maintain a close semiotic relationship with their original on-screen persona, the reaction to Jade in part circled around the fact that the race row had apparently exposed an undesirable disjuncture between these spheres. As PR guru Max Clifford insisted: ‘the person we thought we knew was a sham – [Jade] was not that person at all’.12 It was only in allowing the public access to the most ‘intimate’ domain of the private – the process of death – that Jade was seen to (largely) rehabilitate the notion of a congruent, authentic and knowable self. Future directions: locating televisual fame in a DIY celebrity era As we have suggested throughout this article, the devaluation of television fame has been exacerbated by the medium’s connection with the expansion of fame through reality TV. By way of conclusion, we want to reflect upon how paying closer attention to the work and skill that goes into the presentation of the self in these contexts might illuminate our understanding of celebrity in an era of ‘DIY celebrity’, where the digital tools of self-publicity are increasingly available to ordinary people. That is, reframing our understanding of reality TV via reference to the arguments about television fame and performance we have discussed suggests that the celebrity produced via reality TV is much less the manufacture of a ‘pseudoevent’ and more emblematic of a turn to a presentational, entrepreneurial self (see Hearn Celebrity Studies 77 2006, Marshall 2006, Ouellete and Hay 2008). Reality TV appears to embrace the concept of the ‘entrepreneur’ of the self, and a culture which demands strategic self-fashioning and remaking – a subject who can adapt and respond to change at will (Palmer 2002) – while at the same time as it invests in more conservative discourses on an essential, ‘inner’ core. Rachel Dubrofksy’s (2007) article, ‘Therapeutics of the self: surveillance in the service of the therapeutic’ explores this dialectic, and Dubrofksy argues that, in reality TV, we see the traditional emphasis on the therapeutic desire to change the self, combined with a clear impetus to accept or affirm the existing self. Therefore, successful participants are often seen to affirm the image of ‘a consistent (unchanged) self across disparate and social spaces’ (2007, p. 268) while, for example, the idea of a ‘journey’ is also valued. The ideological implications of this are considered below, but Allison Hearn’s suggestion, with regard to reality TV, that ‘the constitution of the self is now an outer-directed process, which involves our skill at self-production [our emphasis]’ (2006, p. 631), emphasises the need to reflect on the ‘common sense’ dismissals of reality TV fame. This seems particularly pertinent in an era where it is not simply reality TV, but also the growth of viral circulation of celebrity content on the internet, as well as the emergence of DIY celebrity via digital media forms, which challenge our understanding of what celebrity means, and what skill and work it takes to produce celebrity. Indeed, instances such as Susan Boyle’s YouTube fame suggest that we encounter celebrity increasingly in its circulation away from ‘primary’ television or film texts. In such a media landscape the contours of fame are changing, and as Marshall has recognised with regard to film stars (and in such a way that echoes the emphasis on television’s impact on the film star’s image), in an era of digital media that proliferates both celebrity and information about celebrities, ‘the film star’s aura of distance and distinction is breaking down’, not least of all because there is ‘less possibility for industry control’ (Marshall 2006, p. 643).13 This, in turn, places renewed emphasis on the presentational self (see Marshall in this issue), as film stars compete to be heard and seen in a culture of pervasive celebrity – a self which is founded largely upon some of the discourses and aesthetics we have taken for granted with regard to television fame: ordinariness, authenticity and intimacy. Via such media spaces, the presentational self is constructed as constantly interactive: the audience is invited to feel part of the celebrity’s life sphere and persona in ways which are everyday, ordinary and familiar– much as in the way television’s celebrity function has been conceived. While Twitter certainly serves as a publicity machine, it is intriguing to note that the top 10 list of ‘twitterholics’ is dominated by television personalities – Oprah Winfrey, Ellen de Generes, Ryan Seacrest – which suggest the skill and work in creating a cohesive, intimate on/off-screen persona in television also functions effectively in the digital economy of celebrity.14 In this regard, intimacy and authenticity have already been placed as key hallmarks of Twitter’s celebrity function. Moreover, and understood in these terms, fame is rarely simply attributed: in the cacophony of voices in the blogosphere and selfpromotion of the net, some users within a community are able to master the techniques and technologies of self-publicity in order to stand out from all those people who turn the webcam, blog, Twitter, MySpace and a myriad of other social networking tools on themselves. As Bennett has suggested, if these tools and techniques of self-promotion are increasingly ordinary, then one requires a degree of ‘vernacular skill’ to master them to become famous (Bennett forthcoming).15 We would suggest that celebrity studies, therefore, has much to learn from paying greater attention to the specificities of television fame. The exploration and analysis of television personalities as a site for understanding the social and political implications of fame has remained under-researched. The growth of reality TV, and its position within debates about the ‘democratisation’ of fame, has 78 J. Bennett and S. Holmes arguably obscured our attention to these specificities – functioning to reinforce a conceptual dichotomy between film and television stardom; yet it has done so in a context where we have barely begun to understand fully the complexities of television fame. Work, such as that we have attempted here, which positions reality TV within longer discourses of authenticity, ordinariness, work and skill, can help to illuminate our understanding of fame, its construction and its social and political implications. For example, taking such sites seriously in relation to reality TV might draw upon a range of current scholarship on the discourse of the mediated therapeutic, which has emphasised the recasting of social issues as essentially private problems of the individual (Furedi 2004). Understood in this context, Dubrofsky’s analysis discussed above both reframes and builds upon such observations in the context of reality TV performance and celebrity: Now therapeutic subjects can be content with who they are and with the state of the world around them. There is not impetus to change anything, but rather, people are invited to learn to become comfortable with things as they are [original emphasis]. (2007, p. 268) The emphasis on being ‘comfortable with things as they are’ also returns us to the status and function of the conceptual paradigms of television celebrity explored throughout this article, and the extent to which these are used and re-used without the necessary critical (re)interrogation and reflection. With regard to Dubrofsky’s argument above, it is less that this view of selfhood and celebrity in reality TV undermines or challenges the existing paradigms of television fame than it highlights further the complex relationship between such arguments and the contextual and generic specificity of particular case studies. Furthermore, it encourages us to think beyond the structural scaffolding of such paradigms to ask questions about their cultural and political implications. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. See, for example, the ‘starring race’ special comment and debate section of Feminist Media Studies, 7 (4), 455–469. ‘You see – TV’s only got six stars . . . ’, Picturegoer, 18 June 1955, p. 26. Nest Bradley to Head of Publicity, 29 September 1958. T16/168/2. Although there is not space to expand on this here, this attitude could also be examined on a wider, cultural level given that, in negotiating its difference from Hollywood, British cinema has equally been associated with an ‘anti-star inflection of stardom’ (Babington, 2001, p. 20). Evening Standard, 14 September, 1955. ‘The beauties you chose’, postcard competition, TV Mirror, 2 (2), 6 February 1954, p. 3. Daily Mail, 20 September, 1960. Evening News, 20 December, 1959. Letter to ‘postcard competition’, 1953. TV Mirror, 1 (17), 19 December, p. 3 Lury details the example of Evans colluding with the home viewer via direct address, telling the watching home audience that he wants to fool any viewers who are late to tune in that there is a problem with their television. Thus he informs watching audience members that he is going to mouth his performance for the next few moments so that anyone just turning on will think there is a problem with their set, tricking them into turning up their volume control – with predictable results. BBC Internal Memo, From Head of LE Television, To: All L.E. Producers, Subject: Presentation of L.E. Programmes, 29/11/54. The BBC’s website describes Anne Robinson as ‘a cross between Cruella de Vil, a dominatrix and a bossy school ma’am . . . earn[ing] her the title of the Rudest Woman on Television’. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/weakestlink/anne.shtml [accessed 10 July 2009]. You Can’t Fire Me . . . [screened November 2009]. Celebrity Studies 13. 14. 15. 79 Although in October 2009, the studios had not given up trying to exhort such control with Disney and Dreamworks reportedly placing limitations on the use of twitter and social networking sites in stars’ contracts. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/19/ hollywood-twitter http://twitterholic.com/top100/followers/ [Accessed 30 October 2009]. This is far from suggesting that by drawing on the way television fame is constructed, worked at and achieved, we can therefore understand all celebrity as therefore necessarily ‘good’: the emphasis on celebrity in coverage and use of Twitter has largely drowned out its use as a global platform for protests in Iran, or as a news distribution service (e.g. Mumbai), bearing out Andrejevic’s argument that the democratization of celebrity has ‘disturbing implications for the democratic potential of the internet’s interactive capability’ (2002, p. 251). Notes on contributors Dr James Bennett is Head of Area for Media, Information and Communications at London Metropolitan University. His work focuses upon digital, interactive television and TV fame in the United Kingdom. His work has been published in Screen, Cinema Journal, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Convergence and Media International Australia. He is the editor, with Tom Brown, of Film and television after DVD (Routledge, 2008) and, with Niki Strange, Television as digital media (Duke University Press, 2011) and is currently working on a monograph on television personalities (Routledge). Dr Su Holmes is Reader in Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is the author of British TV and film culture in the 1950s (Intellect, 2005), Entertaining TV: the BBC and popular television culture in the 1950s (Manchester University Press, 2008) and The quiz show (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). She is the is co-editor of Understanding reality TV (Routledge, 2004), Framing celebrity (Routledge, 2006) and Stardom and celebrity: a reader (Sage, 2007). Her key research interests are in British TV history, popular TV genres and celebrity. References Ackworth, M., 1954. This announcing business. TV Mirror, 2 (7), 12. Andrejevic, M., 2004. The kinder, gentler gaze of Big Brother: reality TV in the era of digital capitalism. New Media and Society, 4 (2), 251–270. Babington, B. (ed.) 2001. British stars and stardom: from Alma Taylor to Sean Connery. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Bailey, K., 1950. Here’s television. London: Vox Mundi. Becker, C., 2005. Televising film stardom in the 1950s. Framework, 26 (2), 5–21. Becker, C. 2008. It’s the pictures that got small: Hollywood film stars on 1950s television. Conneticut: Wesleyan University Press. Bennett, J., 2008. The television personality system: televisual stardom revisited after film theory. Screen, 49 (1), 32–50. Bennett, J., forthcoming. Architectures of participation: fame, television and web2.0. In: J. Bennett and N. Strange, eds. Television as digital media. Durham: Duke University Press. Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. 2005. Reality TV: realism and revelation. London: Wallflower. Bonner, F., 2003. Ordinary television. London: Sage. Boostin, D. 1961. The image: a guide to pseudo events in America. New York: Atheneum. Bourdon, J., 2004. Old and new ghosts: public service television and the popular – a history. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (3), 283–304. Couldry, N., 2002. Media rituals: a critical approach. New York and London: Routledge. deCordova, R. 1990. Picture personalities: the emergence of the star system in America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Desjardins, M., 2002. Maureen O’Hara’s ‘confidential’ life: recycling stars through gossip and moral biography. In: J. Thumim, ed. Small screen, big ideas: television in the 1950s. London: I.B.Tauris, 118–130. Dubrofsky, R.E., 2007. ‘Therapeutics of the self: surveillance in the service of the therapeutic. Television and New Media, 8 (4), 263–284. 80 J. Bennett and S. Holmes Dyer, R., 1979/2001. Stars. London: BFI Publishing. Dyer, R., 1986. Heavenly bodies: film stars and society. London: Routledge. Editorial, 1956. TV Mirror Annual, p. 5. Ellis, J., 1982. Visible fictions: cinema, television, video. London and New York: Routledge (original work published 1982). Furedi, F., 2004. Therapy culture: cultivating uncertainty in an uncertain age. London: Routledge. Gamson, J., 2001. The assembly line of greatness: celebrity in twentieth-century America. In: C. Harrington and D.D. Bielby, eds. Popular culture: production and consumption. Oxford: Blackwell, 259–282. Hearn, A., 2006. ‘John, a 20-year-old Boston native with a great sense of humour’: on the spectacularization of the ‘self’ and the incorporation of identity in the age of reality TV. In: P.D. Marshall, ed. The celebrity culture reader. London and New York: Routledge, 618–633. Hill, A., 2005. Reality TV: audiences and popular factual television, London: Routledge. Holmes, S., 2004. All you’ve got to worry about is the task, having a cup of tea, and what you’re going to eat for dinner: approaching celebrity in Big Brother. In: S. Holmes and D. Jermyn, eds. Understanding reality television. London: Routledge, 111–135. Holmes, S., 2005. Starring . . . Dyer?’: re-visiting star studies and contemporary celebrity culture. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2 (2), 6–21. Holmes, S., 2008. Entertaining television: the BBC and popular television culture in the 1950s. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Horton, D. and Wohl, R. 1956. Mass communication and para-social interaction: observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry, 19, 215–29. Langer, J., 1997. Television’s personality system. In: T. O’Sullivan and Y. Jewkes, eds. The media studies reader. London: Arnold Publishing, 165–167 (original work published 1981). Lawson, M., 2001. On the box: who are these people? The Guardian, 20 November, p. G8. Lury, K., 2001. British youth television: cynicism and enchantment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malcolm, M., 1954. On the back of my script. TV Mirror, 2 (13), 13. Mann, D., 1992. The spectacularization of everyday life. In: L. Spigel and D. Mann, eds. Private screenings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 41–69. Marshall, P.D., 1997. Celebrity and power: fame in contemporary culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Marshall, P.D., 2006. New media – new self: the changing power of celebrity. In: P.D. Marshall, ed. The celebrity culture reader. London and New York: Routledge, 634–644. Medhurst, A., 1991. Every wart and pustule: Gilbert Harding and television stardom. In: J. Corner, ed. Popular television in Britain: studies in cultural history. London: BFI Publishing, 59–75. Murray, S., 2005. Hitch your antenna to the stars: early television and broadcast fame. New York: Routledge. Naremore, J., 1988. Acting in the cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Negra, D., 2002. Re-made for television: Hedy Lamarr’s post-war star textuality. In: J. Thumin, ed. Small screens, big ideas: television in the 1950s. London: I.B Tauris, 105–117. Ouellette, L. and Hay, J., 2008. Better living through reality TV. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Palmer, G. 2002. Big Brother: an experiment in governance. Television and New Media, 3(3), 295–310. Petro, P., 1986. Mass culture and the feminine: the ‘place’ of television in film studies. Cinema Journal, 25 (3), 5–21. Rawes, C., 1953. Announcer’s suite. TV Mirror, 1 (7), 12. Schickel, R., 1985. Common fame: the culture of celebrity. London: Pavilion Books. Skeggs, B., 1997. Formations of class and gender. London: Sage Publications. Thomas, E., 1954. Thank you Ally Pally. Radio Times, 122 (1583), 6. Thompson, G.F. 1985. Approaches to performance. Screen, 26(5), 77–92. Turner, G., 2004. Understanding celebrity. London and New York: Sage Publishing. Turner, G., Bonner, F., and Marshall, P.D., 2000. Fame games: the production of celebrity in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.