Chapter ten

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Approaching the audience:

The elderly

John Tulloch

 

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Recent work I have done with the sicence fiction audience provides a point of departure for analysing the characteristics of elderly television audiences. The elderly soap viewer differs from the younger science fiction fan in a number of ways. First, he or she is unlikely to be part of an organized audience community, and so is much less likely to adopt a position of discursive power in relation to an interviewer. Doctor Who fans have regular conferences where episodes from the archives are rescreened, and where knock-out quizzes based on intensive knowledge of the minutiae of the program's history produce a confident understanding of what the show is “about.” In interview situations this intensive history dominates, and except where called into discussion the interviewer ceases to exist to a degree I have not experienced in any other audience group.¹ The elderly I interviewed, in contrast to the science fiction fans, are isolated in small domestic units, have fewer opportunities for group conversation about their favorite shows, and (when confident about the interviewer) will want to talk (often during the show you are watching with them). Often they will call the interviewer back later on to say something they had forgotten to say on the first occasion.

Second, then, the elderly are particularly keen to discuss their favorite shows, not only having fewer community gatherings, but also far less space in general where they can engage with television, unlike children who may act out their favorite soap in the playground, talk about it in the classroom, write fan letters to stars, discuss it at fan clubs, and so on. Writing to the producers of the show is one of the few ways in which the elderly do engage with the show, and analysis of these letters indicates that they regard the show just as much as theirs as do the young science fiction fans, though in a different way, with references out to their own experience rather than inwards to the show's mythography. Here, for instance, is a letter from an elderly English viewer of A Country Practice:

How I enjoy it! I feel I've got to know all of you now, as I must not miss it. It's cold here now, and getting dark between 3 pm and 4 pm when I switch on to look at you all. I am a widowed pensioner and have been enjoying each programme as I sit in my comfy armchair (with my knitting) and prepare to be wafted away to the other side of the world. My husband would like to have come over to Australia way back in 1945 to start a new life after “the War.” We had lost everything, house, all possessions and I was evacuated to a safe part of Britain with our baby son only 3 months of age. Having seen our home in ruins and loss of near and dear neighbours my husband was all for us going, but I was afraid of the uncertainty. No job, no home and a baby so we never came. Our son is 38 now and although buying his own house 50 miles away is kind and attentive to me. I get lonely as I've been alone now for 9 years. My darling died very quickly aged 57 & he knew how I loved TV although he was a Radio Ham enthusiast in touch with many countries and Radio Stations. Must finish off now as I'm apt to go on and on (even talk to myself). I'm happy to see you all and thought I'd let you know. Hope you get this alright. Good health.²

In addition to this personal memory emphasis, letters from the elderly to JNP (the production company of A Country Practice) tend to underline the “clean” and “nice” aspects of the show in contrast to the “constant obscenities, cruelty and violence” seen on television generally. In these letters, the producers are asked to

please keep this show as nice as it mostly is, then you will never get complaints – only commendations. Please do not try to make our littlies “grow up” too quickly – let them know instead what nice things are on offer in this world. Knowledge should be kept for those mature enough to bear it.³

Sometimes commendation of the show for its wholesomeness comes with implied threats of discontinuing viewing, as in the case of the viewer who had read in a newspaper that the young romantic leads, Simon and Vicky, would get divorced:

I am one who hopes that the marriage doesn't end in divorce, mainly because this seems to happen so often in “Soapies.”… Marriage is damned hard work and each partner has to learn to give as well as to take. One only gets out of a marriage what one puts into it. I don't usually write letters like this but I feel so strongly about T.V. shows where marriage usually ends in divorce. I only hope this one will not go that way. I feel I write on behalf of a lot of viewers.⁴

Quite explicit in this elderly woman viewer's letter is the opinion that fans have earned the right, through their loyalty to the show, to expect the marriage to last. Their investment of time and emotion has made it their show, to the degree of asking the producers to ensure the stability of marriage. Here the words “I feel I write on behalf of a lot of viewers” is an attempt to mobilize a collectivity of viewers out of a disparate and isolated viewing situation. Unlike science fiction fans who orchestrate the media and organize massive letter-writing campaigns when there is a threat of their show being taken off, the elderly soap viewer haslittle power; and is doubly weak in that whereas science fiction is a mega-buck, currently “in” genre with the advertiser-desired younger audience, shows liked primarily by older audiences are constantly under threat. Feuer, for instance, talks of the network war for young adult demographics in the US in the early 1970s leading to the cancellation of “demographically impoverished” shows that appealed to the elderly;⁵ and in Australia Car son's Law, a period soap with a strong older audience but few younger viewers, was taken off, while A Country Practice (which also appealed to the elderly but was protected by broad audience demographics) continued.

Further, where elderly people's favorite shows are protected in this way by broad demographics, there is yet another threat. Under ratings pressure (for instance when a number of major stars leave the show, as happened with A Country Practice), there may be a new narrative shift toward the younger viewer. As the executive producer told me, at these times (when other channels mount a campaign to attack a top-rating show at its moment of weakness), the program gives the committed older viewer “enough to keep them happy” and “concentrates on the swinging voter.”⁶ “Young people's themes” (teenage sexuality, drugs, etc.) are introduced quite consciously, and these may disturb the older viewer's comfortable relationship with the show. A number of elderly viewers, for instance, told me that they were disturbed by the English soap EastEnders (which they originally liked) introducing “punk” and teenage sex themes.

However, in the case of A Country Practice it seems that this emphasis on young people and “romance” is contained successfully for the elderly within the rhythm of the show. The executive producer spoke of the way in which Vicky and Simon were

originally brought … into the show as young romantic leads, but you can't stay a young romantic lead. You have to develop the characters. After two years they got married, and after another year they had children, and after another year they were written out. So we have to replace the romantic stream. We are going back to the early … situation and starting again.⁷

Provided that they were written out together (i.e. are not divorced) most elderly people I spoke with were sorry but not distressed; as one said, it is like “normal family life” where the young grow up and leave home.

Far more disturbing to elderly viewers was when their favorite soaps dispensed with older characters; in interview after interview they said that Crossroads, Coronation Street, Emmerdale Farm, The Sullivans had “gone off” since the older regulars died or left. To some extent this was a reminder of their own lives and mortality:

“It's strange when they all start dying, one starts going, then another.”

“Well, actually, when you come to work it out, they become part of your life. They're in your room.”

In particular, they valued the family, and the role of the mother in holding the family together. When the mother in The Sullivans died:

“There's no story there now, really. She kept it together.”

“She reminded me of normal family life. The family drift apart when the mother dies.”

In one case, an elderly viewer, thinking I had some power to influence what happened in Australian soaps, tried to mobilize the interview situation to change things:

“I watch The Sullivans which I like very, very much – I really do. The wife, she was supposed to be killed, isn't she, in England in the war, and I would like her, really, to come back, only she had sort of lost her memory and in hospital or whatever, and then to come back into the series when she had regained her memory. I'd like that, because I thought she was a very good actress and it makes a very startling thing to bring in another character again, and it would be nice for the father. I think the father is so nice that he's not complete without a wife really, and it might make a bit of a surprise if she came back that way. People during the war did lose their memories, they were dug out, and for some time didn't regain it, and when they did it was possible to pick up the old traces.”

This elderly woman had not been included in my original schedule of interviews, had waylaid me in the corridor on the way to another flat, drew me into her unit, and began with the comments just quoted. Then, after discussing her likes and dislikes generally, she returned to the same theme as I left, calling for the reinstatement of The Sullivans' mother.

The elderly, I am arguing, have neither the formal spaces for wide discussion of their favorite shows, nor the economic resources to control television's direction and future. But they often generate what public discourse they can, either in letters to the production house, or, when the situation arises, in enthusiastic discussion with researchers.

The Bournemouth study

My approach to the elderly in Bournemouth (England) was not designed as an ethnographic study in itself. I had been researching and co-writing a study of A Country Practice, which included an audience section. Here we examined the show “at home,” “at school,” and “at work,” covering all the broadly targeted audiences except the elderly.⁸ We tried (by publicity in the press and by personal visits to social events for elderly people at a shopping center) to get access to elderly people at home. The press publicity (in a widely read article about the show) attracted only one letter, that of an 80-year-old lady who excused herself on the grounds of “old age and dilatoriness” from responding further. In addition,

I don't feel that I could undertake to watch any programme on a commercial channel regularly, as I find the interruptions so irritating – I should say maddening … I am really more interested in radio than TV, both classical music and talks and commentaries, and have a few TV programmes which I follow.

Obviously our publicity had not attracted even one regular A Country Practice viewer. At the shopping center there were many A Country Practice viewers, but none was prepared to invite us home as researchers. They were “frightened of strangers” and their rooms were “too small.” Our attempt to find out about their “other family” of soap opera was threatening the very same domestic world of closeness and security which the program generated.

During the time of the research, A Country Practice (together with other Australian soaps – Sons and Daughters, The Young Doctors, The Sullivans, and later Neighbors) began to screen regularly in England. Bournemouth is an English town noted for its elderly population (as a southern seaside town with a mild climate). My own elderly family lived there, and my uncle and aunt (both in their late seventies) lived in a Shaftesbury Home, which catered solely for the elderly, with a live-in warden and custom-designed facilities for the physically handicapped. Its residents would see it as one cut above the town's “old people's homes.”

I chose this particular home for a reason. Ien Ang has usefully questioned the positivist tendency of relegating the audience “to the status of exotic ‘other’ -merely interesting in so far as ‘we s as researchers use ‘them s as ‘objects s of study, and about whom ‘we s have the privileged position to know the perfect truth.”⁹ In the Bournemouth study, neither I nor the elderly audience was “other” in this way. My uncle arranged the majority of the interviews among people he knew; I was first of all “Douglas s nephew” to the old people I spoke with, and second “an Australian researcher about television.” And my intention was to share, as far as possible, the “mutual knowledge” about television of these old people, a task made easier by many years of sharing television with my own elderly family and relatives in Bournemouth.

The first set of interviews (with the twenty elderly people who consented to be interviewed) took place in November 1985 during a short research trip to England, and consisted of my visiting people (introduced by my uncle) in their flats and discussing with them over the space of one to two hours their television likes and dislikes, their viewing habits, daily routine, and a little of their past background. The second set of interviews took place in November 1986, during which time I sat with each set of interviewees for a couple of hours on a Wednesday evening, noting (and taping) their reactions to television shows, their choices of show, their conversation, and talking with them when they wanted to. There were fewer groups this time; one couple were too sick to see me, one old man had died, and others I had interviewed the first time who did not, by and large, watch television were not relevant to this stage of the research.

I began by asking them about Australian soaps, then broadened out to include English and US soaps and other genres. All the elderly people who watched soaps were very forthcoming (they all especially liked the Australian soaps). Those who did not watch soaps were also very revealing, elaborating without prompting on their daily activities and leisure pursuits, and on why they did not watch soaps.

On the second visit, I chose the evening when Dallas was screening, because it had been the focus of most recent soap/audience research, and I was interested in comparing these findings where the major emphasis was on younger women and homemakers, with my work on the elderly.¹⁰ In fact, too few watched Dallas for me to make any systematic comments about this age group; however, some meaningful responses (in terms of gender and class) did emerge, which I will discuss later.

The elderly: Habits of viewing

For some old people, who live alone in specially designed, labor-saving units, and have little to fill their time, the preoccupation with soap opera characters is both intense and catholic, as with Mrs McLaughlan who “likes them all”:

“I have The Sullivans at 12.30 – I switch the set on for that. And then I have the news, and I've just had cookery and… short story…. And now it's Take the High Road – I always watch that, the Scottish one. I like that one as well because it's a family, and I love Scotland, it's partly my home. Then we go on to Young Doctors today. Well, then, when that one finishes at 4 o'clock … I switch off and I go on again for, like yesterday, Sons and Daughters…. And most of the evening I have it on, after that.”

But other old people in the same units see things differently. Miss Harring (an elderly lady who is physically handicapped and confined to a wheelchair) responded similarly to the 80-year-old who wrote to us in Australia:

“I normally don't watch the television in the daytime hardly at all, unless there's something like a coronation or a royal wedding or something special…. When you get to this stage, you're so slow about everything that, you know, there are priorities. And I never have really been a great television fan. I think there's a lot on it now that is good; more the documentaries I suppose. And I do, I'm afraid, fall for it occasionally. I watch it from bed at night. I go to bed early and watch it, and sometimes – I'm either waiting for something I want to come on and there is some other basically rubbishy stuff, and I sort of put up with it. And occasionally I fall for it afterwards. But I usually put it on at six for the news. … That's on BBC…. I can't stand ITV, basically because I can-not bear being interrupted constantly by these adverts. The first time I ever saw ITV I was very untelevision-minded. This is going back twenty years, and I went to stay with friends who put on the television… on ITV. … Suddenly it seemed to sort of not make sense. … We'd gone into an advert and I hadn't realized it.”

This difference between Mrs McLaughlan and Miss Harring, a continuous and a “discriminating” viewer, matches closely Nancy Wood Bliese's experience of the elderly. “Some older persons, like Sarah, are so busy that they do not have much time for television or other media use; others, especially the homebound, used media to fill time.”¹¹ Sarah

has little time for television. She usually watches one or two programs a day, which she chooses for their informative or cultural enrichment characteristics. She … is too busy to bother watching “trash” programs. … She has a very busy schedule of volunteer work during the day and her evenings are spent catching up on correspondence with friends, doing necessary housework, engaging in her hobby of needlepoint, or curling up with a good book.¹²

My experience with the Bournemouth elderly suggests it is “high culture” values rather than not being homebound which determines the “continuous versus discriminating” distinction. Miss Harring, for instance, is seriously disabled and confined indoors to a wheelchair. Yet, when friends rented a television set for her one Christmas, Miss Harring

It was in writing and receiving letters that Miss Harring “purchased” that need which other old people describe as “knowing another family” via soaps. The interpersonal relationships that one old person uses soap operas for, another constructs by way of letters. These daily “books” were, in a sense, Miss Harring's own soap opera. As for television, it had its place only when this important task of relating to friends was done, and then she would watch news and current affairs, but never Coronation Street, EastEnders or things “I cannot waste time on.”

Bliese rests content with using her example of Sarah to challenge the stereotype of the elderly as “passive” consumers of media. In fact, the difference in television viewing habits between Mrs McLaughlan and Miss Harring is worth exploring further. Miss Harring's use of television, and her preferences, were very similar to another Bournemouth pair, mother and daughter, Eileen and Judith Oldfellow. Judith suffers from an unknown virus with similar effects to MS and, in middle age, is looked after by her mother. Like Miss Harring, the Oldfellows are too busy to be “drawn into these love affairs that are going on all the time, everywhere” in soaps. Again:

“The trouble is, we can't really sit for long enough. Unless there's something very interesting that holds us there, we're finding something else to do. Writing letters, or reading.”

“We go abroad quite a lot. But I don't know, there's so much to see if you look. But a lot of people don't look, do they? And we go off up to the forest.”

“RSPB, bird watching.”

“And also for the disabled club.”

“Yes. Access to various places. We spent a few days on the Isle of Wight, surveying… toilets… to see what access is like…. We had two community nurses with us who we met by accident; they didn't have a clue. They said, ‘Oh well, a wheelchair can get into that toilet,' and it was only across a field and up a step!… Even with people on sticks, or frail people, you see: how do they get in and out of these places?…”

“We don't just sit and watch anything.”

“You see, some people have television on all day, don't they?”

“It's a time waster.”

“Yes, it is.”

“But it's good for people who are shut in.”

“And you do learn, certain things.”

For the Oldfellows “learning certain things” depended on watching programs based on “fact”: “News, current affairs, and travel,” and they were disappointed that the Australian dramas don't show a lot “about Australia: Australian life … The way they live … the customs… .We like things like that, interesting.” As for television dramas, they were prepared to give A Country Practice a try when they heard it had stories about MS and mentally handicapped children (Judith works voluntarily at a mentally handicapped children's school); and they liked Tenko:

“Again, it was based on fact.”

“That happened.”

“Yes, it did happen unfortunately. I knew several women who came home from these camps in Burma, and they said it was absolutely true to life. And The Flame Trees of Thika; anything that's based on fact, I like. I don't like -fantasy; perhaps we don't need it.”

For these women Tenko and The Flame Trees of Thika combined their search for “facts, interesting things” with travel and knowledge of other cultures. Clearly there was an important class element in this; the Oldfellows were well enough placed financially to “travel a lot,” and so be able to speak knowledgeably about Canadian, Dutch, and Italian television. Similarly, Miss Harring's put-down of soaps and “rather grotty” serials was from a high-culture position.

Yet, Miss Harring's account of a program she particularly liked revealed areas where she, too, had been disadvantaged: as a woman.

“I've tried to watch Triumph of the West. I only understand about half of it, but at least I'm sort of trying to understand it … It's about how the development of the western civilization has sort of taken over – it's become so powerful. Going right back – the Christian wars and all that sort of thing, bringing it right up to date. I must say, it does make one feel rather ashamed, the way we have behaved. But it's really a little bit beyond me. I want to go on a bit or something…. I am basically extremely ignorant. … I had a nicely private education, where I was taught deportment more than anything else, you know…. And I think perhaps I'm missing out on it now.”

Clearly, these texts (Tenko, Triumph of the West, The Flame Trees of Thika) had some continuity of information content, in that they were all about the interaction of western with eastern or so-called “primitive” cultures. There were also differences between them in the degree to which they problematized the meaning of this interaction in terms of western imperialism. However, for Miss Harring, such texts operated by way of a more personal meaning, which had to do with her own condition of disability and exploitation as reader of the text. Not any text would do (as all these non-regular television watchers insisted), and certainly the influence of the aesthetic and academic discourses that Robert Allen, Ien Ang, and others have described seemed clear in these women's definition of the “grotty” and the “waste of time.” Nevertheless, their pleasures in television drama were no less functions of their daily routines than those who watched soaps all afternoon and evening.

Miss Harring's account of how she actually did get “hooked” on a soap – the radio serial, The Archers – is an interesting example of the complexity of “needs” that are part of the social experience of the audience.

The Archers was, like A Country Practice, an “information” and “country issues”-oriented drama, which might account for why Miss Harring listened to it long enough to “want to put it on the next day to see what happened.” But even for people stridently opposed to it as a “waste of time” like Miss Harring, soap opera clearly can have, as Cassata and Skill point out, “the uncanny ability to create characters and situations which hook the viewer into a willing complicity in the life that it offers.”¹³ How is this?

I want to suggest that there are at least two important reasons for this willing complicity. The first has to do with the enormous shared knowledge that regular soap viewers quickly build up; the second, with the interaction between soap text and the viewer's practical consciousness.¹⁴

Shared knowledge and paradigmatic complexity

Robert Allen argues that the high degree of narrative redundancy in soaps invokes a “paradigmatic network.” Whereas “high culture” viewers see this as “an endless string of excruciatingly retarded subplots,” to “the experienced reader … soap opera's distinctive networks of character relationships open up major sources of signifying potential that are simply unreadable to the naïve reader.”¹⁵ It is the lack of appropriate cultural capital to enter and use soaps (to compare and contrast, with the minutest discrimination) which leads the naïve reader to say she “can't get into it,” is “sort of out of the picture,” and complain of an episode of A Country Practice that

“There's nothing going on, excepting a whole bunch of people talking on here and there yesterday. We saw one man in one bed in a room, and he had his brother there. He'd had an accident – and that is all. And then we saw the two doctors – they were off duty – sitting in their canteen, having tea. And we saw another one at the end, just came in, put his coat on, off he went.”

Naïve readers, by the way, are not necessarily “high-culture” ones; the elderly lady quoted here was in fact an avid watcher of other soaps. But it is high-culture readers who habitually make their criticism visibly discursive (in “quality” newspapers, university literature courses, etc.), and place that criticism (legitimated by talk about cardboard stereotypes and banality) within the discourse of “mass culture” ideology.¹⁶

It is because of its syntagmatic redundancy that critics who want their television to connect them very directly with the real world, like Miss Harring, complain that soap isn't “getting you any further, is it?” And it is because of its paradigmatic complexity that viewers who, like the Oldfellows and Miss Harring, “can't really sit still for long enough” to watch it (and so are unable to acquire the cultural capital to make fine distinctions of character and place) define soaps as “these love affairs, that's going on all the time everywhere.” But, when for very specific experiential reasons (such as Miss Harring's disability and daily routine) the critic becomes the fan, aesthetic complaints about soap redundancy turn into narrative urgency: “I did get that I wanted to put it on the next day to see what happened.”

Soaps and practical consciousness

In the case of one elderly woman (who had an extremely poor short-term memory but a good long-term one) afternoon soaps seemed to give her the focus on her daily affairs that was otherwise lacking. Her memory was too poor to complete efficiently household tasks like cooking (her husband did that); instead she sat in her chair watching each soap opera in turn, whistling or humming the signature tune of each one, and smiling a lot at the storylines. Sitting in her familiar room, among familiar characters and tunes, she more confidently organized her day; in the evenings she frequently organized it differently, recalling in detail her family past.

To take the question of the relationship between soap pleasures and practical consciousness further, consider the daily routine of a couple who, like the McLaughlans, were “continuous” television viewers. Mr and Mrs Mallard's preference for medical soaps illustrates how television drama is part of a daily life pattern, and how this routine is determined by ageing.

Mr Mallard enjoys A Country Practice “because I've got diabetes, and on there they talk about it”; for Mrs Mallard “it's our favorite” because there is a close parallel between the caring nature of people in the show and her own daily routine. She described how she would nurse her husband, lying awake between his prescribed 9 o'clock bedtime and 10 o'clock Complan, reading (usually a medical biography); and how she would organize people to take her shopping in accordance with the needs of her husband and timing of her favorite “medical” soap.

“And then we come back, because the bus only runs every hour. … And when I come back on Tuesday, A Country Practice is on, so I'm back in time for that…. I have to get back for lunchtime because Harry has to have his meals at certain times every day, so we get back in time for that.”

“Getting back in time for that” refers to both Harry Mallard's special lunch and A Country Practice. It is not simply that television watching has to be carefully positioned by elderly people who cannot afford VCRs and are reliant on other people to take them shopping (I heard frequent comments that an elderly woman couldn't watch The Sullivans or A Country Practice because she was preparing the lunch, or Sons and Daughters because she was preparing tea). It is also that the themes of some soaps are part of the daily experience of the elderly. For these old people soaps were firmly placed within a routine of organization and caring – by the center's warden, by younger family and friends with cars, by Mrs Mallard herself; similarly their favorite programs were about professional organization and caring. In that sense, soaps became part of their practical consciousness, their competence in caring or being cared for. These things were of no less life-and-death significance than the information on the news (which the Mallards disliked); they were simply more manageable, and became part of their day in an experiential way. In an important sense, soaps are generically defined by these old people as the non-news, non-current affairs (and therefore more manageable) world of daily living and dying.¹⁷

Television drama texts are defined as much by the regime of watching as by their conditions of production, and have effect as part of the domestic routine. As Fiske says, “such texts not only mean but do” and he draws on Barthes' metaphor of the economy of the text “by which he refers to the text's function, not meaning, and this function is as a coin of exchange by which the reader purchases something which he or she needs as part of his/her cultural identity.”¹⁸ This places Terry Lovell's notion of the use value of the text within the daily routine of its audience.¹⁹ For the Mallards, medical soaps (and books) were used and gave pleasure within the “care” routine of the elderly.

The main emphasis of the first phase of my interviews with the elderly was to examine television (and non-television) use as part of daily routine. Here I was allowing them to tell me their story, and afterwards place it in a critical perspective. In the second phase I spent more time with elderly people whom I had interviewed the year before, whom I either already knew or whom, through their friendship patterns, I came to know better. In this stage of analysis I wanted to go further into mutual knowledge, and also to take more account of my position as interviewer.

Case studies: Generational values

In her “uses and functions” approach to media and the elderly, Nancy Wood Bliese points to the fact that the “range of types of media used, functions of those uses, and amount of usage seems to be very similar to the range for all adults over thirty-five,” although there may be more intense use of particular media forms by the elderly because of problems of eyesight or budget.²⁰ Thus, for instance, I found much less negotiation about, and pre-planning of, the week's television than Morley did in his home audience study.²¹ Many of the elderly could not afford the TV Times, and so would use that day's newspaper to decide what to view, or, alternatively, would simply leave the television switched on, remembering the day and channel of their favorite programs. In the Gilroys' home the newspaper was used to check memory rather than to pre-plan, and the television set was left running.

Far from this continuous flow of television being used to “disengage” or “substitute” for reality, however, it was used actively and with discrimination. In the first place, even in the smallest flats, where the television was running constantly, the elderly would vote with their feet or with their attention.

A common practice in my parents' home would be for my father (who, unusually among the elderly I observed, has always done most of the cooking) to potter around in the kitchen whenever soaps come on, with the stern instruction to “call me for the news.” When his brother visited, they would stand talking (usually about politics) in the kitchen even if there was no cooking or washing up to be done. When the situation was reversed, in my uncle's smaller flat, they would stay in the living-room talking, while my aunt would place her chair close to the television set, intermittently watching it while the soaps were on. Similarly, my uncle (who doesn't cook) would play the “male” host role when visitors (including myself as interviewer) came, pottering in and out of the kitchen with beer or Scotch. As he told me, “I can't stick Coronation Street – I mean, I look at it sometimes, but, you know, when it comes on think ‘Oh law,’ and I go into the kitchen to wash up.”

Second, even when sitting still in front of the screen, the elderly actively engage with it; my father and uncle vent their anti-trade union anger consistently during the news – which they watch so ritually (every news broadcast on BBC radio and television during the day and evening) and with so much irritation as to constitute one of the main means of regulating their day and the tenor of their emotions. In this case their main engagement is with the screen; no one in the room normally discusses their comments about unions.

In other cases, criticism arising from a show is more personal, and more amenable to negotiation. Bliese is right to argue that the elderly particularly enjoy game shows for the intellectual stimulation and challenge. This in itself is a matter for discussion, which they flesh out with the personalities of the contestants and the jokes of the quiz master. The Savages had a quite precise set of distinctions for quiz celebrities they liked “as a laugh” or thought were “too noisy and over the top”; and they would engage in their own character hermeneutic running parallel to the fortunes of the game show itself. The night I watched Strike It Lucky with them, for instance, one of the female contestants wore an outrageously tight dress to draw attention to her breasts and figure, so that it was difficult for her to walk comfortably up the steps to her position in front of the boxes.

Bliese noted that 29 per cent of her sample of elderly people mentioned watching specific programs that their friends also watched so that they could use the program as a topic for conversation. This “interpersonal interaction” use of television is, in fact, prepared for by ongoing comment and discussion between an elderly couple during a program, to the extent that they find no difficulty at all in airing their views with an interviewer. The only problem, Mr Gilroy felt, was remembering everything he wanted to say during the space of the interview; and he was one of the people who called for me to come back so that he could say some more.

What is particularly noticeable with the elderly as a group is the way in which they engage with television (and the interviewer) in terms of “their generation's values.” Watching television with the Savages, for instance, was to hear constantly about “the older people.” We were watching This Is Your Life:

Again, they mentioned enjoying “the Royal Variety Performance this time…. Nearly all old stars. Vera Lynn was on it”; and also Name That Tune for “its memories.”

I have argued elsewhere that the elderly, deprived through their low appeal to advertisers of programs of their own choice, “must carve out their pleasure as a kind of guerilla activity, weaving together another temporal zone out of genres as different (or even apparently opposed) as Name That Tune, Minder, and Till Death Us Do Part”²² and further that sitcoms are enduringly popular because structured in terms of the comedy of generational difference. As such, they help center for the elderly their memories, their “other” maps of place, time, language, and value. Soap opera helps do this in a different way, since, as one elderly man said of the older characters in A Country Practice, “things are centered round them. Because no matter what happens, it always seems more or less to come back to them – Frank and Shirley.”

“I think it would be more of a problem if Frank and Shirl left than the younger ones. That would spoil it. It's like Crossroads – we used to love that, but I can't get so interested in it now that it's changed like that… because we lost two good older characters.”²³

I found no case of the elderly complaining about the portrayal of older people in soaps, as Bliese did for commercials and other programs.²⁴ The elderly see older people in soaps as a privileged point of narrative transmission; it is only when they die or disappear that they switch off.

The working-class Savages focused this most clearly in terms of being comfortable with characters and places.

The kind of “guerilla activity” I'm describing is the selecting out from different programs, different narratives, a particular space for “older people” – pleasure as a bricolage of generic appropriations. And frequently the principle of selection for this bricolage is a mix of gender and class as well as age. As the Savages told me, the genre which they (and most old people they talk to) particularly like is quiz shows “because the majority of them are down to our level.” Similarly, soaps work “at our level,” while the news carries a degree of violence that is frightening because “beyond us. We've reached a stage now where it sickens us. It's not our way of life, so obviously we don't want to know about it.”

Bliese links her “functions” of media usage among the elderly loosely to television genres. For instance: “For intellectual stimulation and challenge (e.g., game shows). As a less costly substitute for other media (e.g., television news instead of a newspaper) …. For self-improvement (e.g., exercise programs, language lessons).²⁵ In contrast, other uses and gratifications approaches found that various television genres could fulfill most of the “needs” analysed, to different degrees among different people.²⁶ My point, though, is not to legislate between different uses and gratifications conclusions, but rather to criticize the approach generally on the grounds (familiar enough within cultural studies) that it is altogether too atomistic and psychologistic in its approach to the elderly. It ignores subcultural difference (the elderly are very articulate about their generational difference, as we have seen), and within this generational set of likes and dislikes, it ignores the different ways in which members of the same elderly cohort sharing different class and gender positions will interpret a set of messages differently.

By and large, the gender differences I found tended to support what other theorists have already described;²⁷ the old people themselves were particularly clear about these differences between “male” genres (news, “cowboys”) and “female” ones (“I like a good romance”),²⁸ though in some cases elderly men had begun to “not want to know” about the news. However, I also found that class patterns related to gender in complex experiential ways. I describe elsewhere how generational memory (and perceptions of “the real”) relate to class differences;²⁹ here I will conclude by looking briefly at class/gender differences I found by contrasting two families (the upper middle-class Tollards and working-class Gilroys) as an indication of the kind of analysis available to ethnographic research, while still taking account of the role of the interviewer. It is perhaps important to mention here my observation that the power exchange in the Tollard interview seemed less that between interviewer and respondents than between husband (using the interview as a chance to criticize soaps) and wife. The man who always went into the kitchen when Coronation Street was on was only too keen to interrupt my discussion with his wife of her favorite soaps with “I don't know if you're interested in what I have to say.” He then proceeded to dominate the conversation.

Prior to this I had observed Mrs Tollard watching television, choosing each soap opera as it came on – Crossroads, Coronation Street, Dallas – with considerable enjoyment. Her laughter with favorite characters while watching was in marked contrast to her more muted “Well, I do like them” at the beginning of the interview, and her “Well, it's a bit common, isn't it?” after her husband's attack on Coronation Street. Within the extended and acutely class-conscious Tollard family, Mrs Tollard had never been recognized as “of the same class” as her husband, and it seemed that in her almost private communication with Coronation Street (her chair pulled close to the screen while Mr Tollard pottered in and out of the kitchen) she was enjoying that “vicarious, evanescent … alternative reality” that James Lull describes as part of television's function in “helping married couples maintain satisfactory relationships.”³⁰ As such, it was an almost silent alternative world except for Mrs Tollard's laughter. In the interpersonal situation of the interview she avoided dramatizing her alternative world since this might well have caused conflict with her husband. Instead, she mediated her view in terms of her husband's class values, playing a conciliatory role which recognized his competence and dominance, while ensuring their solidarity as a couple. This negotiation was particularly marked when, after Mr Tollard railed against a strike in Crossroads as both “unreal” and the sort of thing “I can't stand,” she tried to fill out the causes of the strike, finishing (when he was still unsatisfied) with “still, it's all over now, isn't it?”

Mr Tollard was one who consistently mobilized “my generation” in his discussion of television programs that he liked or disliked. His sense of current television drama is that it consistently “knocked down” his class, its heroes and values. He disliked Coronation Street as typical “working-class” fare (“why can't they have something that is middle class, that is decent English?”); and he hated people who promoted strikes in Coronation Street and Crossroads, fearing they were more in tune with the present than he was. “Our world was a different world. We can't adjust ourselves, the other people can.”

In contrast to the Tollards whose family had been “officers and gentlemen” in the British Raj for over 200 years, the Gilroys were working class; and clear class and gender differences were apparent both in their television pleasures and in their interpersonal interaction around the television set. Mr Gilroy, a Cockney, had been forced on to the streets early as a barrow boy. “The only way I knew how to eat was to go out and try and earn it. I played truant from school and never went at all – just to eat.” Becoming a bookie, Mr Gilroy was “a very quick learner, I was quick at anything. I used to get in with people, like millionaires although I never had tuppence.” Some of these were in organized crime, like the Kray twins, and Mr Gilroy (who particularly liked boxing on television) discussed the shooting of former world light-heavyweight boxing champion Freddy Mills in relation to this: “I knew that feller, he was an angel of a man … wouldn't hurt a soul … Somebody shot him, put the gun inside the car and said he'd shot himself.”

Unlike Mr Tollard who disliked Dallas (“all they can think about is parties and sex. … And of course it's the same with everything now practically. … Not only television, it's life itself'), Mr Gilroy liked it, because he saw the big-money characters in Dallas as similar to people he had known. But he told the Freddy Mills story to distinguish the ones “on the fiddle” whom he approved of from those whom he didn't.

In contrast to Mrs Tollard, Mrs Gilroy was not at all self-conscious about her watching of soaps. Like her husband, she wove current pleasures through her past. She argued that Mr Gilroy liked soaps where people were “fiddling the money,” such as EastEnders and Dallas, because he would dearly like to go from the world of one to the other. “You like the richness of Dallas, which you'll never have.” He didn't, she said, like any soaps “in the middle – like Sons and Daughters” whereas she did because of the “everybody knows everybody” gossip they contained. “This is more the story of my life. I was brought up in Bournemouth, and this place was a little village when I was born you see. This is how we lived, all sort of everybody knew everybody, all intertwined.”

Characteristically her discussion of Freddy Mills was as someone who was part of her close-knit Bournemouth community.

“Freddy was my age, near enough. … He came from here, I call him a local boy. See, Chrissie his sister's still alive. I know her. With Freddy and Chrissie and all them lot I went to school. … But them Londoners, they're terrible – I think they're a cruel lot.”

It is clear from this discussion that the Gilroys had a perfectly clear understanding of their likes and dislikes, and a way of “making sense” of it within their own cultural space. They used shows like Dallas, EastEnders, Sons and Daughters (as well as boxing heroes) to understand their past and present difference (as between London and Bournemouth working class). Both class and gender differences were mobilized in their discussion with me to explain their preferences; and there was no sense here, as there was in Mrs Tollard's case, of a pleasure that was acceptable only as long as it was not discussed. Mrs Gilroy regarded her television pleasures as of equal status with those of her husband.

My role as interviewer was partly to try to understand and so share this mutual knowledge, partly to make it discursive. In doing so I was inevitably at times bringing my own “second-order” concepts to the situation, through questions like: “So maybe the big-money characters in things like Dallas are a bit like, but on a bigger scale, people you did know?” But these were questions which derived from mutual knowledge they were sharing with me, and the questions could then be accepted and elaborated, disagreed with, or modified. In this case, my question generated the discussion about Freddy Mills, and their different discursive positioning of this “star.” This then led on to Mrs Gilroy's thoughts about “roughness,” and the difference of positioning between herself (as small-community “local”) and her husband (as “rough” Londoner) in relation to television soaps.

My point is that there is no objectively neutral way for an observer or interviewer to gain understanding from an audience; he or she is part of the process of “making meaning,” of making practical consciousness discursive, of “getting to know what actors already know, and have to know, to ‘go on’ in the daily activities of social life.” The division between practical and discursive consciousness (the difference between the Gilroys' perhaps non-conscious grounding of their pleasures in different social experience and their discussion of it with me) can be altered by all kinds of learning experience, including in this case the research process itself. There is nothing artificial about this; equally it might have occurred over drinks with their friends, the Tollards. It is the way all living proceeds.³¹

Approaching the observer³²

I have described two phases of my audience research with the elderly, the first stage concerned with questions of daily routine and practical consciousness, the second trying to draw out the relationship of interviewer to the (practical and discursive) consciousness of the audience. There is a third phase of research still to be done. I want to describe briefly here what its parameters will be.

As I said before, a major focus of old people's negotiation of television is via generational memory. In his discussion of memory, Giddens argues:

Discursive consciousness connotes those forms of recall which the actor is able to express verbally. Practical consciousness involves recall to which the agent has access in the durée of action without being able to express what he or she thereby “knows.” The unconscious refers to modes of recall to which the agent does not have direct access because there is a negative “bar” of some kind inhibiting its unmediated incorporation within the reflexive monitoring of conduct and, more particularly, within discursive consciousness.³³

I have not examined unconscious “memory” in this paper. I have emphasized instead the relationship of practical to discursive consciousness (and of both to memory) because of their significance to ethnographic research, in so far as practical consciousness consists of that active “knowing” of the rules and procedures which constitute daily social life (of which television watching is part); and discursive consciousness is the daily process of recalling that “knowing” in words (a process of which the interviewer is part). Also, I agree with Giddens that recent psychoanalytical theories which have tried to show the foundation of institutions in the unconscious are guilty of two forms of reductionism, failing to take serious account of the operation of historical social forces and of the reflexive control (at both practical and discursive levels) that agents have over their conduct. This double reductionism has led psychoanalytically inspired film theory that is concerned with the “positioning of the subject” to leave us with the sense of a determined and passive audience. Consequently, it is not surprising that ethnographically oriented research concerned with the culturally active agent has tended to ignore the unconscious.

Nevertheless, the relationship of discursive consciousness, practical consciousness, and unconscious is a crucial one for current social theory, replacing, as Giddens says, that older psychoanalytical triad of ego, super-ego, and id.³⁴ Just as important as the discursive relationship between interviewer and audience is the unconscious one. Valerie Walkerdine (in the best analysis of this relationship that I know³⁵) speaks of the “voyeurism of the theorist” in her discussion of her experience of watching a working-class family watch a video of Rocky II.

In the first step of her analysis, Walkerdine relates their voyeurism (of violence) to class and gender patterns within the family, in particular to the fantasy of the working-class male.

The fantasy of the fighter is the fantasy of a working-class male omnipotence over the forces of humiliating oppression which mutilate and break the body in manual labor … Mr Cole is a very small man. Fighting is a way of gaining power, of celebrating … that which is constituent of oppression.³⁶

As a conscious “fighter” for his class Mr Cole is quite discursive, urging his children to fight against both middle-class teachers and their peers. However,

latent beneath Mr Cole's conscious self-identification as a fighter may lurk the fear of a small man whose greatest fear is his cowardice and his femininity. It is this which has to be displaced by projection on to, and investment in, others (his wife, Joanne) who can be the objects of his protection and for whom he fights.³⁷

His daughter Joanne (“Dodo”) is stretched across this world of conscious struggle and unconscious fear and fantasy: encouraged as a “tomboy” to fight like her brother, she is also infantilized by her father's nickname and his determination to be “her Other – the big man, the protector.” The gender positioning within their practice of television/video viewing thus “reveals the complexity of his identification with, and investment in, her as he makes her simultaneously his feminine ward to be protected … and his masculinized working-class fighter, like her brothers.”³⁸

In the second step, Walkerdine relates her voyeurism (as the observer who was initially shocked and disgusted at working-class “violence” and “sexism” as Mr Cole replayed the most brutal boxing sequence again and again) to the history of her own subjectivity. This included her relationship with her own working-class father as “Other, his forbidden femininity, the powerless child;”³⁹ her experiential desire to “be that fairy – small, protected, adored and never growing up;”⁴⁰ and her ability to use her mind rather than body (unlike Mr Cole) to “fight” out of the working class and become, as academic, a “Surveillant Other” in her turn.

The great value of Walkerdine's analysis is in relating psychoanalysis to ethnographic work by rejecting the quest for the unobtrusive observer, and instead foregrounding the social regulatory power of intellectualization. On the one hand there is the “will to truth” that “designates the social scientist as an expert in the bourgeois order which produces this intellectuality.” This is the role of “theorist/voyeur” (which was Walkerdine's position at the start of the research) who “expresses shame and disgust at the ‘animal passions’ which have to be monitored and regulated.”⁴¹ On the other hand there is the observer's movement toward knowledge by way of recognizing her own fantasies.

I wanted to use my own fantasied position within those practices as a way of engaging with their unconscious and conscious relations of desire and the plays of anxiety and meaning. Often when interviewing the participants I felt that I “knew what they meant,” that I recognized how the practices were regulated or that I understood what it was like to be a participant.⁴²

Walkerdine became aware of the relation (in class, gender, and interviewer/interviewee terms) between Mr Cole's “desperate retreat to the body” and her own desperate retreat to the mind – both as ways to “become bourgeois.”⁴³

My study of the elderly audience in Bournemouth was not designed to examine the kinds of problem that Walkerdine poses: a much more focused analysis of individual television programs and individual viewer responses than I had time for would be required. Walkerdine herself only examines one film text (Rocky II) and one family watching it on one occasion. Moreover, her class, age, and gender relationship with her audience was very different from mine, generating quite different possibilities of “mutuality.” Unlike her, I was a male interviewer, and much younger than my (mixed working- and middle-class) audience group. I was also (unlike Walkerdine) middle class by birth as well as by academic aspiration. My “memories” (unconscious, practical, and discursive) are very different from hers. How then to understand my positioning as observer in (to use Walkerdine's words) that “fantasy space” which constitutes knowledge of my audience? As I have said, this requires a third phase of research not yet done; but in concluding I briefly want to indicate the direction this kind of analysis could take.

It would start with my uncle: the point of mediation between the elderly people and me, their “observer” and “young friend.” While discussing (and criticizing) the “realism” of television drama during the second period of interviews, he mentioned his strong dislike of socialist playwright Trevor Griffiths' recent demystification of the “Scott of the Antarctic” legend in the series The Last Place on Earth; adding: “I would never follow a man like that. Whereas the Scott that I imagine would be rather like your uncle Cromarty, whom one would follow – at least, I would.”

My uncle here was putting together a personal and a public history. Indeed, several histories intersected in his words:⁴⁴ Trevor Griffiths' own critique in the series of the conventional empiricism of television historiography; the intertextual history of the Scott family's rebuttal (as circulated very visibly in newspaper previews) of The Last Place on Earth, with particular emphasis on Lord Kennet's words, “no such man as that portrayed here could have held a polar expedition together”; my uncle's own history as the youngest, least sporting, least “macho” brother in a proud imperialist family, in which his brother Cromarty (holder, like me, of the sign of our history – a family name traceable to the fourteenth century) was supreme emblem; my uncle's positioning (while at his exclusive English public school) within the history of a Boy's Own reading formation that did so much to generate, circulate, and refurbish the Scott myth; my own history as the first generation to “fail” the family by going to a state secondary school, partially recuperated in my uncle's eyes through my studying history at Cambridge, and later lost to him again through the experience of May ′68 and radical sociology; my very recent history as an academic, talking with Trevor Griffiths and watching him at work making a film with Ken Loach.

In my interviews with Griffiths a particular history (and mutuality) was mobilized; in my interview with my uncle quite another. Yet that engagement I had with Griffiths (via a post-′68 radical social theory) was one which, in a very different form, my uncle (as the “soft,” non-colonist “intellectual” of the family) had had with Sydney and Beatrice Webb and then with the perceptions of 1930s Russia (Stalin was one of the “heroes” whom, together with Scott and Churchill, he didn't want knocked). In my own case, too, going to university, “staying with the schoolbooks” and so not being “out in the real world,” was regarded ambivalently within the family. So both he and I carried with us a set of desires (to understand beyond our family colonist order) and anxieties (as “soft” near-outsiders to that order) which, as they intersected, became discursive around the discussion of Scott – a mutuality which was at the same time a profound opposition worked through different historical positions (the 1930s, the 1960s).

How this relates to that academic dominance of “Surveillant Other” in the interview discussion of Griffiths is an interesting question; so too are the representations of our relationship that my uncle carried forward to the other elderly people I interviewed. Different fantasies, different desires, different anxieties, different recognitions and memories were made to work with and against each other as I moved, as interviewer, from Trevor Griffiths one week to my uncle in Bournemouth the next, and from my uncle (by way of his mediation) to the Gilroys, the Savages and the Mallards. As interviewing subject I was positioned in multiple sites (as were my elderly audience). A reflexive understanding of that positioning is crucial if we are to avoid what Walkerdine rightly calls the fantasy of intellectualization – a regulatory process that produces audiences as “other” in our quest for knowledge-as-power.

Notes

  1 See John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, “Doctor Who”: The Unfolding Text (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983). Other audience groups examined included mothers and pre-school children, primary and secondary schoolchildren, university students, and others targeted by the show.

  2 John Tulloch and Albert Moran, “A Country Practice”: ‘Quality Soap’ (Sydney: Currency, 1986), pp. 228–9.

  3 ibid., p. 229.

  4 ibid., p. 233.

  5 See Jane Feuer, “MTM Enterprises: An Overview,” in Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi (eds) MTM: “Quality Television” (London: British Film Institute, 1984), pp. 4ff.

  6 See John Tulloch, Television Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

  7 James Davern, interviewed in 1986.

  8 See Tulloch and Moran, “A Country Practice,” chapters 15 and 16.

  9 See Ien Ang's chapter in this volume, pp. 96–115.

10 See for instance Ien Ang, Watching “Dallas”: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London and New York: Methuen, 1985) and the chapter by Seiter et al. in this volume, pp. 223–47.

11 Nancy Wood Bliese, “Media in the Rocking Chair: Media Uses and Functions Among the Elderly,” in Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart (eds) Inter/Media: Inter-Personal Communication in a Media World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 575.

12 ibid., p. 573.

13 Mary Cassata and Thomas Skill, Life On Daytime Television: Tuning-In American Serial Drama (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1983), p. 169.

14 Practical consciousness: “What actors know (believe) about social conditions, including especially the conditions of their own action, but cannot express discursively” (Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 375).

15 Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 71.

16 For further discussion of soap opera and “mass culture” ideology, see Ang, Watching “Dallas”, pp. 86–116.

17 See Tulloch, Television Drama.

18 John Fiske, “Television, Culture and Communication” (paper presented at the Australian Communication Association Conference, August 1985), p. 20.

19 For an elaboration of notions of exchange and use value in relation to soap opera, see Terry Lovell, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure (London: British Film Institute, 1980).

20 Bliese, “Media in the Rocking Chair,” p.575.

21 David Morley, Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure (London: Comedia, 1986).

22 Tulloch, Television Drama.

23 Tulloch and Moran, “A Country Practice”, p. 290.

24 Cassata, Anderson, and Skill note the positive, “stable emotional,” “highly respected” and “opinion leader” qualities of the older soap opera inhabitant when “compared to the overall depiction of the older adult in television as a whole,” projecting “an almost unrealistically ‘good' image of the older person” (Mary Cassata, Patricia Anderson, and Thomas Skill, “Images of Old Age on Daytime,” in Cassata and Skill, Life on Daytime Television, p. 43).

25 Bliese, “Media in the Rocking Chair,” p. 575.

26 For instance, see Denis McQuail, Jay Blumler, and J. R. Brown, “The Television Audience: A Revised Perspective,” in Denis McQuail (ed.) Sociology of Mass Communications (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 153.

27 While the competences necessary for reading soap opera are most likely to have been acquired by those persons culturally constructed through discourses of femininity, the competences necessary for reading current affairs TV are most likely to have been acquired by those persons culturally constructed through discourses of masculinity.

(David Morley, “‘The Nationwide Audience” – A Critical Postscript,” Screen Education 39 (summer 1981): 13)

28 for instance, Mrs Gilroy:

“‘Course women are different to men – we like a good searching soul story … Thornbirds for instance…. Dallas is not a man's scene. It's got too many Joan Collins types and all this business. It's all right for the women, with the dresses and the glamor and the beautiful hair.”

29 John Tulloch, “The TV Audience: Generational Memory and ‘the Real’” (unpublished paper, 1987).

30 James Lull, “The Social Uses of Television,” Human Communication Research 6, no.3 (spring 1980): 204. This is part of the “Affiliation/Avoidance” relational use of television; other relational uses which Lull isolates are “Communication/Facilitation,” “Social Learning,” and “Competence/Dominance,” all of which, in different mixes, are useful in understanding television viewing practices.

31 For a full account of theories of human agency and social structure, see Giddens, Constitution of Society.

32 A longer theoretical section at the beginning of my paper in which I explained the ethnographic approach in my study had to be omitted for publishing reasons.

33 Giddens, Constitution of Society, p. 49.

34 ibid., p. 7.

35 Valerie Walkerdine, “Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy,” in Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (eds) Formations of Fantasy (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 167–99.

36 ibid., pp. 173, 182.

37 ibid., p. 183.

38 ibid., p. 188.

39 ibid., p. 186.

40 ibid., p. 187.

41 ibid., p. 194.

42 ibid., p. 191.

43 ibid., p. 181.

44 This analysis will be elaborated in my forthcoming book, Television Drama.