Reality TV, Wife Swap and the drama of banality

Screen

Volumn 45, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 273-286

  Piper, Helen ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63149148688     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/45.4.273     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 3.
2. John Arlidge, 'Cruelty TV', The Observer, 18 May 2003, p. 18.
3. See, for example, Dai Vaughan, 'Notes on the ascent of a fictitious mountain', in John Corner (ed.), Documentary and the Mass Media (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), pp. 161-75.
4. Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 11.
5. Richard Kilborn, Staging the Real: Factual TV Programming in the Age of Big Brother (New York, NY and Manchester Manchester University Press, 2003).
6. See URL: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/entertainment/tv-and-radio/2683793. stm. Wife Swap series one, tx 10 January to 28 January 2003; series two, to 30 September to 11 November 2003; series three, tx 29 June to 27 July 2004.
7. Andrew Billen, The ratings war', New Statesman, 15-30 December 2003, p. 107.
8. Caughie, Television Drama, p. 111.
9. Dovey, Freakshow, p. 113.
10. The latter concept is originally of Judith Butler's coinage, although Janet Harbord deploys it rather effectively to demonstrate the unpredictability of film reception. See Janet Harbord, Film Cultures (London: Sage 2002).
11. Ian Goode, Value and television aesthetics', Screen, vol. 44, no. 1 (2003), p. 103.
12. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 58.
13. Nikolas Evreinoff, The Theatre In Life, cited in Marvin Carlson, Performance: a Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 35.
14. See John Corner, 'Television, documentary and the category of the aesthetic', Screen vol. 44, no. 1 (2003), p. 99.
15. Kilborn, Staging the Real, p. 156.
16. Carlson, Performance, p. 5.
17. When asked this question, Diane responded that 'we thought it would be a bit of a laugh'. Ann claimed (during her webchat) to have been 'inquisitive about how other people run their homes', and on another occasion, that it offered 'a little bit of excitement'. The Observer, 26 January 2003, p. 14.
18. The Observer, 26 July 1998, Review section, p. 11.
19. John Gray, 'Icons of evil', New Statesman, 2 February 2004, p. 39.
20. Daily Telegraph, 8 January 2003.
21. BSC report, 'Dramatic licence: fact or fiction'. URL: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/bsc/plain/pubs.htm [1 October 2004].
22. David Aaronovitch, 'Why we love Wife Swap', The Observer, 5 October 2003, p. 23.
23. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 554.
24. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 161.
25. For a comprehensive and syncretic account of this, see Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences (London: Sage 1998).
26. A proposition originally developed in Raymond Williams, 'Drama in a dramatised society', and subsequently taken further by Baz Kershaw in his inaugural lecture 'Dramas of the performative society', published in New Theatre Quarterly, no. 67, vol. 17 (2001), pp. 3-11.
27. Paul Ricoeur, 'Life: a story in search of a narrator', reprinted in Marios Valdés (ed.), A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 435.