The Nationwide Television Studies

THE NATIONWIDE TELEVISION STUDIES The ‘Nationwide’ Television Studies brings together for the first time David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon’s classic texts Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’ and The ‘Nationwide’ Audience. Originally published in 1978 and 1980 these two research projects combine innovative textual readings and audience analysis of the BBC’s current affairs news magazine Nationwide. In a specially written introduction, Brunsdon and Morley clarify the origins of the two books and trace the history of the original Nationwide project. Detailing research carried out at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, Brunsdon and Morley recount the internal and external histories of the project and the development of media research and audience analysis theories. In a final section The ‘Nationwide’ Television Studies reprints reviews and responses to Everyday Television and The ‘Nationwide’ Audience including comments by Michael Barratt, the main presenter of Nationwide. David Morley is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, London. Charlotte Brunsdon teaches film and television at the University of Warwick. ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN CULTURAL AND MEDIA STUDIES Series Advisers: David Morley and James Curran 1 VIDEO, WAR AND THE DIASPORIC IMAGINATION Dona Kolar-Panov 2 REPORTING THE ISRAELI-ARAB CONFLICT How hegemony works Tamar Liebes 3 KARAOKE AROUND THE WORLD Global technology, local singing Edited by Tōru Mitsui and ShūheiHosokawa 4 NEWS OF THE WORLD World cultures look at television news Edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen 5 FROM SATELLITE TO SINGLE MARKET New communication technology and European public service Richard Collins 6 THE NATIONWIDE TELEVISION STUDIES David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon THE NATIONWIDE TELEVISION STUDIES David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon London and New York First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1999 David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’ © British Film Institute 1978 The ‘Nationwide’ Audience © British Film Institute 1980 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-98336-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-14879-0 (Print Edition) For Ian Connell (1949–1998), who always preferred Newsnight CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii Introduction (1997) 1 CHARLOTTE BRUNSDONDAVID MORLEY PART I Everyday Television: Nationwide (1978) 19 CHARLOTTE BRUNSDONDAVID MORLEY Contents 20 Acknowledgements 22 Preface 23 1 Going Nationwide 25 2 The World of Nationwide Discourse 1975–7 35 3 Linking and Framing: Nationwide in Action 19/5/76 63 4 ‘A nation of families…’ 93 Bibliography 115 PART II The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding (1980) 117 DAVID MORLEY Contents 118 Preface 119 1 Audience Research: The Traditional Paradigms 120 2 ‘What people do with the media’: Uses, Gratifications, 131 Meanings 3 Classes, Codes, Correspondences 136 4 Problems of Technique and Method 143 5 Responses to Nationwide 158 6 Comparative Analysis of Differential Group Decodings266 vii 7 Decoding Television: Theorising Determinations 280 Afterword 297 Bibliography 299 PART III Responses 303 Michael Barratt, ‘It’s all just codswallop’ 304 John O.Thompson, ‘A Nation Wooed’ 305 Graham Wade, review of Everyday Television: 314 ‘Nationwide’ Michael Tracey, ‘Obfuscated by epiphenomena’ 316 John Corner, review of The ‘Nationwide’ Audience 322 Index 327 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As the text makes clear, our first obligations are to colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, in the 1970s— particularly Stuart Hall. Ed Buscombe, then of the British Film Institute, funded part and published all of these studies—our thanks to him, and to Rebecca Barden, the current publisher, for her very considerable patience. We also thank Michael Barratt, Graham Wade, Michael Tracey and John O.Thompson and the publishers listed below for permission to reprint responses to Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’ and to The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: Structure and Decoding. The excerpt from ‘Profile: Michael Barratt’ appears by permission of Michael Barratt, Graham Wade and the publishers of Video. Graham Wade’s review of Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’ which was first published in Film and Video International appears by permission of the audior and King Publications Inc. Michael Tracey’s review appears by permission of the author and Broadcast. John O. Thompson’s review appears by permission of the author and Screen Education. John Corner’s review appears by permission of the author and Media, Culture and Society. INTRODUCTION The Nationwide project: long ago and far away… The two books reprinted here together, Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’ (1978) and The ‘Nationwide’ Audience (1980), were first published separately nearly twenty years ago. Each took its title from an early evening television news magazine programme broadcast on BBC 1 between 6.00 and 7.00 pm on weekday evenings from 1969 to 1984. Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’ (henceforth ETN) was a detailed textual reading of the programme, focusing on one edition from 19th May 1976, but drawing on a year’s viewing. The ‘Nationwide’ Audience (henceforth NWA) reported the findings of audience research in which the same (19/5/76) programme was shown to a range of different audience groups for discussion. Both were published by the British Film Institute, as part of their innovatory Television Monographs series, launched in 1973 by Christopher Williams with the publication of Nicholas Garnham’s Structures of Television, and continued by Ed Buscombe when he became head of BFI Publishing Division. Indeed, it was Ed Buscombe who had authorised the BFI’s funding for the empirical audience research which provided the material for the NWA book. The history of the research which generated these books is somewhat convoluted, and they have had a strange post-publication life, in which they have been much referred to but mainly out of print and frequently muddled up with each other (see, for example, the introduction to Camera Obscura, No. 20–21, where the editors of this special issue on ‘The female spectator’ conflate the two different books—Bergstrom and Doane, 1990:11). As will become clear in the narrative we recount below, the re-conceptualising of the television audience which saw publication, eventually, as NWA began some years before the analysis of the television programme Nationwide which was published first (ETN). Some part of our intention here is to clarify the origins of these two books and the relations of the two parts of the project which they represent. As will also become clear as this narrative unfolds, in its different phases, the work on which these books were based was done over a long period, by a large number of people besides the two of us whose names are most commonly associated with it. Again, part of our intention is to paint back in some of the background against which these two texts originally stood. Both of these texts have now been unavailable in their original form for a considerable time and while they have continued to enjoy some belated 2 THE NATIONWIDE TELEVISION STUDIES reputation (for various contextual reasons, the NWA book more particularly so) this has always been primarily at second hand. At the moment of their first appearance it was ETN which commanded more attention (though largely hostile —see the reviews reprinted in the Appendix). The programme analysis was an early example of a critical engagement with ‘ordinary television’ and spoke to a then burgeoning debate about the significance of textual analysis, which was developing fast under the influence of the work of the British Film Institute (and most particularly its Education Department) both through its influential annual Summer Schools (at that time a must for anyone teaching in this field) and through the work of the BFI-funded journals Screen and Screen Education. Indeed, the BFI played a crucial role in this connection. It was through the BFI’s investment in Film Studies and its subsequent concern with structural methods of textual analysis that continental work on semiology/semiotics (particularly the work of Guy Gauthier, 1976) was first translated and made available to an English readership, at a time when the world of scholarship associated with the sociology of mass communications had hardly begun to grapple with questions of textual meaning or methods of textual analysis. Conversely, the NWA book emerged initially to a deafening silence (except for one percipient review by John Corner, 1981). At that time there was very little interest in matters of audience studies. From the perspective of film theory, even to do empirical audience work at all was to be caught

Load more