Studio Brussel's Dream Team and Papa
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Faculty of Arts & Philosophy Winne Bats Studio Brussel’s Dream Team and Papa Was A Rolling Stone: credibility and power in radio interviews Promotoren: Prof. dr. Stef Slembrouck Vakgroep Engels Decaan: Prof. dr. Freddy Mortier Rector: Prof. dr. Paul Van Cauwenberge 1 2 3 4 Faculty of Arts & Philosophy Winne Bats Studio Brussel’s Dream Team and Papa Was A Rolling Stone: credibility and power in radio interviews Promotoren: Prof. dr. Stef Slembrouck Vakgroep Engels Decaan: Prof. dr. Freddy Mortier Rector: Prof. dr. Paul Van Cauwenberge 5 6 Table of contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 11 Transcription key ............................................................................................................ 15 Methodology ................................................................................................................... 17 1. Erving Goffman: frame analysis and theatricality......................................................... 20 2. Conversation Analysis................................................................................................. 30 2.1 Conversation analysis............................................................................................. 30 2.2 Storytelling.............................................................................................................. 47 3. Broadcast talk ............................................................................................................. 53 3.1 Broadcast talk....................................................................................................... 53 3.2 Studio Brussel’s Dream Team and Papa Was A Rolling Stone as kinds of broadcast talk ............................................................................................................................. 55 4. General Overviews ..................................................................................................... 61 4.1 Dream Team ........................................................................................................ 61 4.1.1 Context ......................................................................................................... 61 4.1.2 The show’s course ........................................................................................ 63 4.2 Papa Was A Rolling Stone ................................................................................... 76 4.2.1 Context ......................................................................................................... 76 4.2.2 The show’s course ........................................................................................ 79 5. Credibility .................................................................................................................... 93 5.1 Dream Team ........................................................................................................ 94 5.2 Papa Was A Rolling Stone ................................................................................... 108 5.3 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 131 5.4 Credibility of the host ............................................................................................ 132 6. Power ......................................................................................................................... 135 6.1 Dream Team ........................................................................................................ 136 6.1.1 Institutional roles of questioner and answerer ............................................... 136 6.1.2 Topic initiation ............................................................................................... 143 6.1.3 Formulating ................................................................................................... 144 6.1.4 Turn allocation and interruption ..................................................................... 146 6.1.5 Dispreferred seconds .................................................................................... 151 6.1.6 Opening and closing the conversation .......................................................... 153 6.2 Papa Was A Rolling Stone ................................................................................... 155 6.2.1 Institutional roles of questioner and answerer ............................................... 155 6.2.2 Topic initiation................................................................................................. 162 6.2.3 Formulating ................................................................................................... 165 6.2.4 Turn allocation and interruption ..................................................................... 167 6.2.5 Dispreferred seconds……………………………………………………………… 171 6.2.6 Opening and closing the conversation............................................................ 173 6.3 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 174 7. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 177 Appendices ..................................................................................................................... 188 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 348 7 8 List of diagrams Adjacency pairs ................................................................................................ 39 Storytelling ................................................................................................ 49, 181 Dream Team .................................................................................................... 63 Dream Team conversations ..............................................................63, 137, 179 Papa Was A Rolling Stone ............................................................................... 80 Papa Was A Rolling Stone conversations ........................................................ 80 Diagram 1 ................................................................................................. 82, 180 Diagram 2 ..........................................................................................82, 171, 180 Diagram 3 ................................................................................................. 83, 180 9 10 Introduction Some time ago, I decided to send in my Dream Team to Studio Brussel. With a bit of luck they would call me, I would get to talk about my favourite music on air, and they would play that music, too. A few days later, after the short phone call, little was left of my dreams of fifteen minutes of fame. During those I would tell impressive anecdotes about the songs of my choice and ensure that the world would finally recognize what a music expert I really was. But the song about which I had the most impressive anecdote had not been played and I had not been able to bring across what the songs that had been featured really meant to me. I had not understood one of the host’s questions and instead of asking him what he meant, I gave a vague reply. I felt that I did not have the right to ask questions, even if they aimed to clarify the host’s position. I also felt that I had to keep talking for a certain amount of time, because silence on the radio would be ‘bad’. The conversation had not gone the way I had imagined it would go. This experience for me provoked a whole range of questions about the relationships between radio hosts and their interviewees in interactions such as those in Dream Team. First of all, who is allowed to appear on the show? Why are they allowed to have their say on national radio, and about what are they required or expected to be talking? Do the interviewees on both programmes come across as credible? Is it the host or an interviewee that is in power during the interaction? To answer these questions an investigation of the form and the constrictions of these conversations is needed. What form does this (kind of) interaction take? What are the restrictions on turns taken by both host and interviewee, and are there any ways to bypass these restrictions? If interviewees come across as credible, how have they achieved this? How is power brought about? The aim of this paper is to deal with all of the questions above to come to a conclusion about power in the Dream Team interactions. The results of the Dream Team analysis will then be compared with those of Papa Was A Rolling Stone. This is another Studio Brussel show, and it will be analyzed in the same way as Dream Team. The reason for comparing these two programmes with each other is that the general idea behind them is the same: to have someone other than the host or other members of the radio station’s staff choose what songs should be played, and to 11 have this someone explain why they chose those particular songs. On Dream Team, ‘ordinary’ people choose songs and have their say on the radio via a short telephone conversation. On Papa Was A Rolling Stone, two interviewees come to the studio to talk about their choices during an hour long broadcast, and at least one of the two interviewees is a local celebrity. The theoretical principles underlying the analysis are those of conversation analysis, complemented with insights from Erving Goffman.