Television for Women: Generation, Gender and the Everyday
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Television for Women: Generation, Gender and the Everyday Study submitted in part fulfilment of the requirement for the award of PhD Hazel Collie March, 2014 To be awarded by De Montfort University, and undertaken in collaboration with the University of Warwick. Sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council 1 Declaration I declare that this is my own, original work and that all sources used have been cited. Name: Hazel Collie Signed: Date: 2 Abstract This study is part of the AHRC funded project “A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989”. The research is based upon the data gathered from interviews carried out with thirty geographically and generationally dispersed women about their memories of watching television in Britain between 1947 and 1989. I have used generation and gender as analytical categories, and have paid particular attention to the role of memory work in this type of historical research. This thesis aims to build upon previous work which has investigated the connection between generation and interaction with popular culture, but which has not theorised those relationships (Press, 1991; Moseley, 2002). The shifts and, indeed, continuities in the lives of different generations of British women are considered to gain a sense of the importance of generation in the production of identity. Significant differences arose between generations in terms of reflexivity and around questions of quality, value and taste as generations intersected with feminist and neoliberal cultures at different life stages. What was particularly interesting, however, was that despite the dramatic social change wrought by this post-war period, the narratives of women of different generations were surprisingly similar in terms of their everyday lives. Their memories largely centred around domestic relationships, and the women’s role as mother was often central to these. Following my investigation of the significance of motherhood to women’s production of gendered identity I consider the moments which disrupted that pattern and where women are enabled to conceive of an identity outside their familial role. Talk around pop music programming and desire had generational significance in the production of individual identities, again pointing to the importance of generation as an analytical category. Parts of this thesis have been previously published as articles in Screen and VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture and as a book chapter in Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches, edited by Laura Mee and Johnny Walker. These are included in full in the appendices. 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my daughters, May and Martha, for the patience they have shown me over the three and half years that it has taken me to complete this research. You both continue to be an inspiration and a joy. Thanks to my parents, Pat and Stuart, and my father in law, John, for the continuous supply of generously offered childcare. I know it has not always been easy. My supervisory team Helen Wood, Rachel Moseley and Tim O’Sullivan have given me more time and extended my knowledge further than I could ever have believed possible. I thank them all for their efforts, optimism and ability to never make me feel (too) ignorant. Thanks, too, to my project colleagues Helen Wheatley and Mary Irwin who have both doled out support and encouragement at times when it has been much needed. Special thanks to Helen, Helen and Rachel, too, for taking what was a big chance on me as a PhD student. I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity you have offered me. My thanks must also go to members of the Midlands Television Research Group for stimulating conversation which has informed some of the content of this thesis and has made me think outside the boundaries of my own research. My postgraduate colleagues in the CATH centre, Laure Mee, Jilly Boyce Kay, Charley Meakin, Cat Mahoney and Caitlin Shaw, all deserve thanks for the cake, support, laughter and more fun with Facebook message stickers than anyone should be able to have. I don’t know what I would do without you all. Thanks also to my departmental colleagues Steve Chibnall, Jo Whitehouse Hart, Jim Russell and Stuart Hanson for help and encouragement. My eternal thanks go to the thirty women who generously gave me their time and memories. Without their help, this thesis would never have existed. Finally, thank you to Mike for believing that I could do it before I did. 4 Contents 1. Introduction 6 2. Literature Review 12 3. Method 32 4. Generation 59 5. Taste, Value and Judgement 85 6. Memory, Nostalgia, Narrative 104 7. Music Programmes and Adolescent Identity 128 8. Women, Television and Desire 154 9. Conclusion 174 Bibliography 185 Appendices Appendix 1 207 Appendix 2 209 Appendix 3 210 Appendix 4 212 Appendix 5 222 Appendix 6 250 Appendix 7 Disc 5 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION When I first started this research, I thought that it was going to be a very traditional audience research project concerning particular gendered texts and genres, considering how generic shifts occur across generation. I believed its cornerstone would be conversation about the programmes which had particularly resonated with women and which they saw as being ‘for them’. In fact, this thesis has become something quite different, instead examining the ways that thirty British women of different generations have talked to me about the role of television in their everyday lives, the way that the medium has installed itself as a staple of that everyday and the very significant ways that this relationship differs across generations. In talking around television the women I spoke to said much about their role in the domestic sphere and the family and how stable this identity has been across the second half of the twentieth century. My historical audience research has asked women to recount their past viewing, and throughout their narratives the women I spoke to persistently placed both the technology and themselves firmly within the private domestic sphere, often incorporating their own subjectivities into broader “family” identities. What I present here is an analysis of how those conversations around the medium give meaning and value to their domestic roles, with television becoming a space to enact value and identity, and how these outcomes might be influenced by their generational positioning. Television has always been important in my own life. I grew up in a traditionally gendered British home in the sense that my father worked and my mother stayed at home. It was a less traditional British home for the first seven years of my life, which were spent in various nations in the Middle East. English programming was absent from the television broadcast, and my televisual diet was restricted to Sesame Street and Bollywood films, which I consumed avidly with my mum. The television was always on even though frequently we had the most limited understanding of what was being broadcast. When we moved back to Britain in the summer of 1983, I discovered British children’s television, and it is no exaggeration to say that it rocked my world. The television was still always on, and I spent that whole summer glued to it, mouth slightly open as I gazed upon the wonders that were forthcoming, all that television that had 6 been specifically designed for me as a child. I greedily consumed every morsel, even the programmes that were for a much younger audience. My parents may have hoped that it was a brief phase and that in future I would spend the summer holidays playing outside, but they were to be disappointed. That summer spent consuming classic British childrens’ programming like Why Don’t You? (BBC1, 1973-1995), Bagpuss (BBC, 1974), Let’s Pretend (ITV, 1982-1988) and Chockablock (BBC,1981) set me up for a lifetime of viewing, and a career as a researcher for a commercial media research organisation. I came to this doctoral research through the AHRC funded project “A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989”, which had a very specific focus on the “for” rather than “by” in its understanding of what is meant by “women’s television”. While a significant body of extant work attends to the relationships between television’s position as a domestic technology and the nature of gender roles and relations, this has typically proceeded with a contemporary focus, certainly in the British context. A few significant pieces of work have pointed to British women’s historical viewing (Hallam, 2005) and to the inadequate attention paid to the history of women’s television (Leman, 1987; Thumim, 2004; Moseley and Wheatley, 2008). However, surprisingly little work has considered how this relationship might have shifted during a period which is often acknowledged, whether implicitly or explicitly, as one in which gender relations and domestic organisation underwent a radical overhaul. The period of investigation encompasses the return to sustained television broadcasting in 1947 following its hiatus during the Second World War, and continues through to 1989, when exclusively terrestrial broadcast television ended. This is a significant era in terms of British television history, taking in as it does the end of monopoly and the introduction of independent television in 1955, BBC2 in 1964 and Channel 4 in 1982.The period is also significant from a sociocultural perspective: the United Kingdom witnessed the reorganisation of family life during the post-war period of austerity, the creation of the welfare state, the emergence of a new consumer culture during the relative affluence of the 1950s, the women’s liberation and civil rights movements, the shadow cast by the iron curtain and the seemingly unstoppable march of Neoliberal politics. The project’s aim, then, was to begin a feminist historiography of women’s television in Britain during this period which, despite the feminist origins and agendas of Television Studies, has as yet barely begun.