2. Excessive
¤ ‘For some lifestyle television’s excesses
are yet another sign of the medium’s
inexorable decline. Its emotional
frameworks, quick results and freakish
extremes often make the sub-genre
look like the more flamboyant cousin of
reality TV.’
¤ Palmer, 2008: p1
2
7. PSB’s challenge
¤ Broadcasters responded in 2 ways –
1. ‘by changing the ways in which their
programmes were made by setting up an
internal market’ and
2. by ‘marrying the pedagogic impulse to
inform, educate and entertain to bright
jazzy strands of consumer advice.’
¤ Palmer, 2008: 2
7
8. PSB’s challenge
¤ Broadcasters responded in 2 ways –
1. ‘by changing the ways in which their
programmes were made by setting up an
internal market’ and
2. by ‘marrying the pedagogic impulse to
inform, educate and entertain to bright
jazzy strands of consumer advice.’
¤ Palmer, 2008: 2
8
9. Investors in people
¤ Increased casualisation of broadcast labour force over
last 30 years
¤ Costs cut
¤ Decline of training programmes
¤ Service industry ethos
9
13. Taste and class
¤ In the guise of re-education the working
class can be made to see their problems
from the perspective of objective expert/
consultants who will stress performance
and character rather than anything else.
The aim thus becomes … erasing the
unacceptable signs of lower class origins
and making them respectable merely by
looking respectable.
¤ Palmer, 2008: 4
13
15. Crisis and the ‘new man’
¤ Traditional masculinity understood as being in transition
1. Second wave feminism triggered numerous social and
political changes
2. Transformation of the labour market in response to
global capitalism
15
16. 3 general views
1. Masculinity as intrinsically pathological, in
constant need of management and
correction.
2. Accounts of masculine defeat (eg Faludi’s
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man).
These see men as victims of social forces out
of their control
3. The sceptical view - questions the actuality
of a masculinity crisis – feminists point out
that men still have disproportionate wealth,
authority and power
¤ Heartfield 2002, 8–10
16
18. Metrosexuality
¤ ‘the variegated male body was up for
grabs as both sexual icon and
commodity consumer, in ways that
borrowed from but also exceeded the
longstanding commodification of the
male form’
¤ Miller in Heller, 2006, 106
18
20. Men today…
¤ Men are now ‘subjected to new forms
of governance and commodification’.
The metrosexual constitutes ‘a
neoliberal subject who must govern
himself as a new aesthete, generated
from shifting relations of power and
finance’
¤ Miller in Heller, 2006, 106-112.
20
22. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
¤ 3 key ingredients in the reshaping of traditional
masculinity:
1. class,
2. sexuality and
3. consumer culture
22
23. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
¤ ‘Cosmopolitan queers descend on
these hapless bridge-and-tunnel
people ... [these] male losers in the
suburban reaches of the tristate area
(New York, New Jersey, and
Connecticut) who are awaiting a
transformation from ordinary men into
hipsters’
¤ Miller 2006, 115.
23
26. Governmentality;
The Fashion Police
¤ In a world where ‘it is now widely agreed and
understood that “appearance is everything”’,
‘people now understand television as an active
agent of transformation’.
¤ (Palmer, 2004: 184, 189)
¤ Michel Foucault – Governmentality
¤ Operations of power in modern society
26
28. Governmentality
¤ ‘Television seems to teach us, our only option is to listen
humbly as our design skills, sense of style, or musical
talents are scrutinized and dissected, our homes
remodelled, our identities reformatted, and our intimate
histories laid bare...’
28
29. Governmentality
¤ Governmentality depends upon our consent, and whilst
these factors are powerful forces, ‘the option always
remains to throw off the selves that lifestyle television
creates for us, to be who we want to be, to think for
ourselves’.
29
