FAMILY TELEVISION: CULTURAL POWER AND DOMESTIC LEISURE by David Morley A Comedia book published by Routledge London and New York First published 1986 by Comedia Publishing Group Reprinted 1988, 1993, 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group 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.” © 1986 Comedia and David Morley 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 catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-98904-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-03970-3 (Print Edition) Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the help and support given to me by a number of people, without whom this book would not have been written—although that does not mean that any of them are to blame for the inadequacies of the final product. First, I must thank the IBA, and Bob Towler in particular, for funding my research when no other agency was prepared to do so. I must also thank Philip Corrigan, with whom a number of the initial ideas were formulated; Richard Paterson, Valerie Walkerdine and Charlotte Brunsdon, all of whom offered valuable comments and criticisms of earlier drafts; and Stuart Hall, whose encouragement has always been invaluable. I must also thank everyone at Comedia for their support during the very long period of gestation of this book, but especially Sue Field Reid, who has retyped it so often that she could probably recite large chunks of it in her sleep. Finally, my thanks must also go to the families who cooperated with me in the research. Contents Introduction v Foreword ix 1. Understanding the uses of television 1 2. Television in the family 7 3. Research development: from ‘decoding’ to viewing 29 context 4. Objectives, methodology and sample design 39 5. Family interviews 45 (i) Unemployed families 45 (ii) C2 families 76 (iii) C1 families 102 (iv) B families 117 6. Television and gender 139 Afterword 169 Notes 171 Introduction In spite of its modest claims, this is in fact a seminal piece of research into the question of the social uses of television. It delivers new insights and genuinely provides what many other studies misleadingly label as “findings”. More significantly, it makes us look again at what we thought was obvious, thereby opening up new questions. Like all good research, it does not appear out of the blue but is part of an unfolding project of work on which David Morley has been engaged for over a decade. Those not already familiar with its earlier stages will want to set this latest instalment in the context of the study of Nationwide, with Charlotte Brunsdon (BFI Monograph, 1978: Brunsdon and Morley), Morley’s own follow-up, The Nationwide Audience (also a BFI Monograph, 1980) and the article in Culture, Media, Language (1980) entitled “Texts, Readers, Subjects”, which critically reflected on the evolving theoretical line of argument. This body of work helped to bring about the long-overdue demise of old-style audience surveys, with their monolithic conception of “the viewer” and simple-minded notion of message, meaning and influence, which for so long dominated media studies. It helped to inaugurate a new set of interests in a more active conception of the audience and of the codes and competences involved in establishing variant readings. This approach was differentiated from other work on “texts” (from which it nevertheless learned a good deal) by its persistent attention to the social dimensions of viewing and interpretation, alongside the textual aspects. Despite this suggestive line of inquiry, Morley has had to hustle around to persuade anyone that the project was worth funding, and the whole line of inquiry has thus been subject to unnecessary and damaging fits and starts—an episode which does little credit to those organisations which currently dispose of research funding in the field. The fact that the pilot research for this monograph was completed at all is due to the support of Bob Towler, director of research at the IBA, to whom credit is due; and, of course, to Comedia, which Morley vi helped to found and which, far from being simply the publisher of the report, is itself part of the whole project in a larger sense. Morley has now considerably extended the range of research traditions on which he is drawing. This current piece of research shows the influence, inter alia, of recent work on texts, readers and discourse, further work on the encoding-decoding model, feminist work on romance, family studies—as well as more “mainstream” work on leisure activities, time budgets and the factors which influence viewer commitment, choice and “switching”. The central idea behind this piece of work was simply to explore further “the increasingly varied uses to which the television set can now be put”. Television viewing has to be seen less and less as an isolated and individual, more and more as a social, even a collective, activity. Typically, it takes place in families (or whatever intimate social group now substitutes for them). However, we know next to nothing about how this everyday domestic context influences what we view, how we view, or what sense we make of it. We know almost as little about what role television plays in family relationships—how family interactions influence the choices we make about viewing or the uses to which we put what we view. We know even less, if this is possible, about how we actually behave (as opposed to how we would like to think we behave) when the set is on—either our conduct towards the screen or towards each other. David Morley has tried to find out by interviewing in depth a sample of families from different social backgrounds. Suspecting, quite rightly, that the standard techniques—fixed-choice questionnaire, sample survey and self-recorded diary—would tell us more about what producers and advertisers wanted to hear than what was actually going on, he has gone instead for the extended, unstructured interview and a qualitative methodology. The monograph reports, in a clear but necessarily tentative way, what he discovered, setting it succinctly in the context of related research (much of it new to critical researchers, who are sometimes too impatient of “mainstream” work) and giving us the benefit of extensive verbatim quotes from the interviewees so that we can see for ourselves how they framed, in their own words, the viewing experience. Television viewing, the choices which shape it and the many social uses to which we put it, now turn out to be irrevocably active and social processes. People don’t passively absorb subliminal “inputs” from the screen. They discursively “make sense” of or produce “readings” of what they see. Moreover, the “sense” they make is related to a pattern of choices about what and when to view which is constructed within a set of relationships constituted by the domestic and familial settings in which it is taking place. The “rational vii consumer in a free and perfect market”, so beloved of advertisers, audience research departments and rational-choice economists alike, is a myth. The activity has to be understood, analysed and explained in terms of the everyday domestic settings in which it characteristically occurs. In this way, Morley very suggestively brings together two lines of critical inquiry which have tended to be kept in strict isolation—“questions of interpretation and questions of use”. Viewing, he insists, has to be seen as a constitutive part of the “familial or domestic relations through which we construct our lives”. This point is reinforced by the variety of uses other than “viewing” to which we put the set—and the variety of other activities we seem perfectly capable of sustaining while we view. Viewing is almost always accompanied by argument, comment, debate and discussion. Programmes are surrounded, if not totally submerged, by an incessant flow of other activity and talk, only some of it television-related. The “talk” about television is both critical—it is comment on and about something we do not in any simple way “confuse” with reality—and at the same time sustains involvement and identification (in varying degrees of intensity) with what is on the screen, as well as maintaining interactions with other people. These different dimen-sions and modes of viewing—contrary to received psychological wisdom—are not mutually incompatible. Moreover, the comment, far from destroying pleasurable identification, seems to be actually part of the pleasure: we enjoy the way the televisual flow is incorporated into the “flows” of everyday domestic life. This should oblige us to rethink many of our common-sense ideas about the so-called confusions between “reality” and “fantasy” in television. People seem to be perfectly well aware of the fact that EastEnders is not “real life”. However, this does not seem in any way to diminish their capacity for involvement in the fabricated worlds of fictional television.