'It's a woman!': The question of gender on Who Wants to be a Millionaire

Screen

Volumn 46, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 155-173

  Holmes, Su ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 28144455588     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/46.2.155     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. Alan Hamilton, Michael Horsell and Adam Sherwin, 'Millionaire plotters thought they had the final answer'. The Times, 8 April 2003, p. 11
2. Millionaire: a Major Fraud (ITV1, tx 21 April 2003)
3. Zoe Williams, 'Where's the real crime here', Now, 7 May 2003, p. 72
4. Hamilton et al., 'Millionaire plotters thought they had the final answer', p. 11
5. See Bill Lewis, 'TV games: people as performers', in Len Masterman (ed.), Television Mythologies (London: Comedia, 1984), pp. 42-6
6. John Fiske, 'Quizzical pleasures', in Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 265-80
7. See John Tulloch, 'Gradgrind's heirs: the presentation of "knowledge" on British quiz shows'. Screen Education (Summer 1976), pp. 3-13
8. Adam Mills and Phil Rice, 'Quizzing the popular', Screen Education, no. 41 (Winter/Spring 1982), pp. 15-25
9. Fiske, 'Quizzical pleasures'
10. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1986)
11. See Fiske, Television Culture, and 'Women and quiz shows: consumerism, patriarchy and resisting pleasures', in Mary Ellen Brown (ed.), Television and Women's Culture: the Politics of the Popular (London: Sage, 1990), pp. 131-43
12. William Boddy, 'Quiz shows', in Glen Creeber (ed.), The Television Genre Book (London: British Film Institute, 2001), pp. 79-80
13. Frances Bonner 'Confession time: women and game shows', in Frances Bonner, Lizabeth Goodman, Richard Allen, Linda James and Catherine King (eds), Imagining Women: Cultural Representations and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 237
14. See Fiske, 'Women and quiz shows'
15. Bonner 'Confession time', p. 237
16. Peter Bazalgette, 'Big Brother and beyond', Television (October 2001), p. 22
17. In fact, initial information on the demographics for the show revealed that 10% more women than men watched Millionaire. Mike Wayne, 'Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?: contextual analysis and the endgame of public service television', in Dan Fleming (ed.), Formations: a 21st Century Media Studies Textbook (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 215
18. Anita Chaudhuri, 'Women: who wants to be a quiz show contestant?', The Guardian, 29 November 1999, p. 6
19. Chris Tarrant, cited in Lynn Barber, 'The successful format', The Observer, 2 April 2000, p. 33
20. Sheila Brownlow, Rebecca Whitener and Janet M. Rupert, "I'll take gender differences for $1000!: domain-specific intellectual success on "Jeopardy"', Sex Roles, vol. 38, nos 3-4 (1998), pp. 269-85
21. Judith E. Larkin, 'Gender and risk in public performance', Sex Roles, vol. 49, nos 5-6 (2003)
22. See Frances Bonner, Ordinary Television (London: Sage, 2002)
23. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (eds), Understanding Reality Television (London: Routledge, 2004)
24. Chaudhuri, 'Women: who wants to be a quiz show contestant?', p. 6
25. Edward Cohn, 'Are men's fingers fastest?', The American Prospect, vol. 11, no. 11 (2000). As Cohn notes, the 'grand dame' of television quiz shows, Jeopardy!, has long since been male-dominated in terms of the top-winning contestants, while NBC's Twenty-One and Fox's Greed have avoided this gender imbalance by casting participants
26. Cohn, 'Are men's fingers fastest?'
27. Tulloch, 'Gradgrind's heirs'; Fiske, 'Quizzical pleasures'; Garry Whannel, The price is right but the moments are sticky: television, quiz and game shows and popular culture', in Dominic Strinati and Stephen Wagg (eds), Come on Down?: Popular Culture in Postwar Britain [London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 179-201
28. See Su Holmes, 'Not the final answer revisiting critical approaches to the quiz show and Who Wants to be a Millionaire'. European Journal of Cultural Studies (forthcoming)
29. Euan Ferguson, 'Millionaire - the big win', The Observer, 26 November 2000, p. 11
30. Wayne, 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?', p. 209. Wayne explains the institutional conception of the programme in more detail
31. Colman Hutchinson, from personal interview with executive producer of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, 3 August 2003
32. Whannel, 'The price is right but the moments are sticky', p. 197
33. An example of a traditionally male question would be 'Starting with the most, put these countries in order by how many times they have won the Football World Cup'
34. Hutchinson, personal interview, 3 August 2003
35. Millionaire Classic, tx 25 July 2003
36. See Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television (London: Pluto, 2000)
37. This may be in part shaped by the (class-based) British conception that talking so openly about money 'isn't done'. Relatively extensive invocation and coverage of contestant's circumstances was seen early on in the US context with the big quiz shows in the 1950s such as Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question. See Olaf Hoerschelmann, 'Beyond the tailfin: education and the politics of knowledge on big money quiz shows', Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2 (2000), pp. 177-94
38. Bonner, Ordinary Television, p. 181
39. Usually screened after 10 pm, Tarrant on TV takes a very distanced and often mocking look at bizarre television programmes or adverts from around the world - often permeated (in terms of the clips themselves) by an emphasis on the sexual and the risque
40. Barber, 'The successful format', p. 33
41. Victoria de Grazia (ed.), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspectives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 3
42. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001), p. 94
43. See Colin Campbell, 'Shopping, pleasure, shopping and the sex war', in Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell (eds), The Shopping Experience (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 166-76
44. Tim Edwards, Contradictions of Consumption: Concepts, Practices and Politics in Consumer Society (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), p. 132
45. Millionaire, tx 14 January 2001
46. Millionaire, tx 19 March 2003
47. Millionaire, tx 24 April, 2002
48. See Irene Padavic and Barbara Reskin, Women and Men at Work (London: Pine Forge Press, 1994)
49. Jane Root, Open the Box: About Television (London: Comedia, 1985), p. 97
50. Jane Robins, 'Quiz shows: naff old men in sparkly jackets?'. The Independent, 3 November 2000, p. 23
51. John Corn, 'The Weakest Link', The Washington Post, 21 April 2001, p. 12
52. Jeremy Gilbert, 'A class performance: why the class struggle was a really good idea', paper delivered at CongressCATH conference, Leeds University, 2002. URL: www.leeds.ac.uk/ cath/congress/2002/ programme/abs/59.shtml [accessed 15 April 2003]
53. Lewis, 'TV games: people as performers', p. 45
54. Janice Winship, 'New disciplines for women and the rise of the chain store in the 1930s', in Maggie Andrews and Mary M. Talbot (eds), All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth Century Consumer Culture (London: Cassell, 2000), p. 24
55. Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) p. 6
56. Mica Nava, 'Modernity's disavowal: women, the city and the department store', in Mica Nava and Alan O'Shea (eds), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 96
57. Mica Nava, 'Consumerism and its contradictions', Cultural Studies, vol. 1 no. 2 (1987), pp. 204-210
58. Maggie Andrews, 'Butterflies and caustic asides: housewives, comedy and the feminist movement', in Stephen Wagg (ed.), Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 57
59. Andrews and Talbot, All The World and Her Husband, p. 1
60. Nava, 'Modernity's disavowal', p. 97
61. Colin Campbell, 'Shopping, pleasure and the sex war', p. 167
62. John Fiske, 'Everyday quizzes, everyday life', in Reading the Popular (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 133-43
63. Fiske, 'Women and quiz shows', p. 137
64. Andrews, 'Butterflies and caustic asides', p. 55
65. Laraine Porter, 'Tarts, tampons and tyrants: women and representation in British comedy', in Wagg (ed.), Because I Tell a Joke or Two. p. 83
66. Porter, 'Tarts, tampons and tyrants', p. 93
67. Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 136
68. Alison Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990)