Sparkling|Light Your World

One of the most general complaints about TV is that most if not all of it is ‘rubbish’. This is indeed true, but only if rubbish is the discarded once-important stuff of everyday existence. Rubbish is what remains after something has been consumed, like food wrappings and leftovers. Rubbish is material that was once important but has since lost its importance. Last week’s news and last month’s breakfast chat show, last year’s editions of soaps and sports events from even a few weeks back are at best nostalgic relics to the viewers who were once eager to see them, perhaps to the point of arranging their day to make it possible. TV is an everyday medium, used and then discarded. TV programmes are a part of the texture of everyday life. They are scheduled to appear at the same time each day or week in a regular pattern that echoes the patterns of everyday life for most people. One characteristic of the everyday is its repetition of the same basic patterns and timings of getting up, going to work, eating, going to bed. Television schedules consciously respond to these patterns, providing different kinds of programming suited to the different ‘day-parts’ as they are known in the industry. 38 Television is moulded to, and moulds, everyday life.

It sits in our living spaces, with 25.3 million homes in the UK having at least one TV in 2005. This is virtually all the households in the country, which had a population of around 59.6 million in 2003. In the UK, forty-four per cent of households have three sets or more, including twelve per cent with a set in the kitchen. Virtually everyone watches them too, with ninety-five per cent of the British population watching TV in any one week. In the USA in 2006, Nielsen Media Research estimates that there were 111,348,110 households with TV sets (an increase of 326,719 on 2005). A top-rated network show like Desperate Housewives, Gray’s Anatomy or NBC Sunday Night Football is seen by twenty to twenty-two million people on its first run, meaning that over ten per cent of the adult population are watching the same show on the same channel. TV characters can become almost as familiar as family members. TV has worked on increasing this effect. The decline of single dramas and documentaries in favour of series, a long-term trend in European TV, is the result of television taking its place at the heart of everyday life. We are familiar with a large group of magazine programme presenters, lead characters in fictional series and individuals in factual series who return week after week. Many of the actors move from one format to another, but play essentially the same person, like David Jason in the UK and David Caruso in the USA. This familiarity is a key part of the everydayness of television, but with this familiarity always comes something novel: the new situation, the new story, the new challenge for our familiar characters.

TV is not just another familiar household item. It brings extra dimensions into the everyday life of households: the dimension of the public as well as the dimension of fiction. If it behaved just like another member of the family, it would appeal only to those deprived of everyday domestic human contact. TV brings in the outside world, the world of other people in all their difference from us; the world of politics and public events over which we have no real control. It brings things we would rather not watch or know about, as well as things which give immense pleasure. It also brings a sense that we individuals in front of their screens are not alone. We are watching what other people are watching. TV programmes provide easy subjects for conversation and sharing. TV channels work by creating a sense of togetherness in separation, by using what Paddy Scannell defined as a ‘for anyone as someone’ structure. All the voices of TV – its presenters, its factual commentators, its continuity announcers – use particular forms of language which give an individual viewer the feeling that they are being spoken to as an individual. But at the same time this address is consciously universalised as much as possible. The language habitually refers to the present moment, the shared moment of reception, using terms like ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘we’ and ‘you’, all of which depend on a shared context for their meaning. In this way, television mediates the public world of events and issues into the private and domestic world of individuals. It puts the public in personal terms, dramatises issues into individual stories, and stolidly asserts the ordinary in the face of the extraordinary.

This is TV’s strength but also its undoing. The executives responsible for TV output have a difficult balancing act to perform between the two contradictory pulls of TV. One is its familiar and mundane domestic aspect, and the other its ability to uncover the exceptional, the new and the unacceptable. TV brings the exceptional into the space of the everyday, literally because it is watched in the space of everyone’s homes. TV is often seen as a meretricious medium, as rubbish, simply because it is an everyday medium. In western culture, the everyday has been regarded as unimportant precisely because it happens every day, as does television. Western culture has traditionally made a series of distinctions between the mundane and the exceptional. Historically, everyday life has been seen as the grind of existence, the tedious business of struggling to stay alive, which is lightened by special moments of joy, of deep or transcendental feeling. This is a fundamental aspect of much religious and philosophical thought. Some more ascetic trends seek to liberate the chosen few from the trammels of the everyday, whether they are monks, celebrities or academics who seek to escape from ‘administration’. All require ‘someone else’ to do the mundane things, so that they can concentrate on the ‘more important’. Other more puritanical trends emphasise the importance of the grind of the everyday as the gateway to the sublime. For this tendency, the road to enlightenment involves hard work and mutual support. Measured by this standard, too, TV falls short because the medium is deceptively simple to watch and enjoy. It seems to involve no effort on the part of its audience, unlike other forms of culture which require a work of initiation before they can be enjoyed. Both variants of this view, which is deeply ingrained in western culture, make the same basic distinction: everyday life is less important than the exceptional or the transcendent. Such attitudes lie behind the accusation that TV as a medium is rubbish. It is intimately a part of the everyday, and since everyday life has traditionally been seen as trivial or unimportant, then so must TV be valueless.

Consumer society has blurred such distinctions by making everyday life more acceptable and more comfortable for the majority in the western world. Some of the tedium of everyday tasks has been reduced by the use of domestic appliances and new materials for clothing. And many routine tasks have been invested with an amount of glamour, and a promise of passing pleasure. TV advertising (and programming) has been a powerful contributor to this process. Contemporary consumerism tries to heighten the everyday activities of consumption, and to invest them with a trace of the transcendental. Comedy sketches about advertising have seized on this, exaggerating the disparity between a humble product like a shower gel and the orgasmic response of the female user presented in the TV commercial. Advertising, quick to appropriate any idea, responds with its own self-mockery that amazingly still maintains the essential premise: that there is pleasure or at least satisfaction to be had from the mundane activities of everyday life. The advertising promise has become slightly defensive and apologetic. Recent advertising seems to be saying, ‘Yes, we know that shower gel won’t really get you going to this extent, but just think about it for a moment… you can shower in a more comforting way, in a more, well, enjoyable way if you use our product.’ The promise has the effect of continuing to confirm, despite the irony, that there is something significant about everyday life.

TV is denigrated as a medium because it is everyday and domestic, and mediates the exceptional to the mundane. This is an important social function rather than a reprehensible activity. But it does not mean by any means that everything that TV does is good. There is good TV and bad TV, and there is plain stupid TV. There is memorable TV and eminently forgettable TV, just as some ordinary days are better than others. A lot of TV is consolatory entertainment which by definition is comforting rather than challenging, and is enjoyed rather guiltily. However, there are hours of TV material that seem to exist simply to keep the adverts apart. It is one thing to claim that TV as a whole is not rubbish; quite another to claim that there is no rubbish on TV. There are plenty of badly conceived formats like the tedium of ITV’s Celebrity Love Island or mawkishness of ITV’s Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway. These are programmes that many prefer to forget even whilst watching them.