Reading Television ‘This understanding of television is not a simple analysis but it is an extremely rich and convincing one. And in putting it forward the authors provide much of the necessary theory that anyone who wishes to challenge the role of the medium has to comprehend. You don’t want to challenge that role? After reading Reading Television you should do.’ Time Out How is it that television has come to play such an important role in our culture? What does TV tell us, and how do we make sense of its content? How does what’s on telly relate to the culture of the people watching it? What is it that we find so satisfying in the format of TV crime shows, or in quiz or sports programmes, that we enjoy watching them again and again? Reading Television addresses these questions, providing a sympathetic but systematic method of analysis from which critical readings of television can be made. The book’s overall approach – recognizable now as cultural studies – became widely influential when Reading Television was first pub- lished in 1978, and it continues to shape the field internationally. In this edition, John Hartley reflects on the development of tele- vision studies since then and provides invaluable new suggestions for further reading. His fascinating foreword both underlines and ensures the continuing relevance of this foundational text, which provides the ideal entry point for anyone wanting to understand the place of television within contemporary culture. John Fiske was formerly Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. John Hartley is Dean of the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. IN THE SAME SERIES Alternative Shakespeares 1, Ed. John Drakakis Alternative Shakespeares 2, Ed. Terence Hawkes Post-Colonial Shakespeares, Ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin Re-reading English, Ed. Peter Widdowson Rewriting English, Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, R. O’Rouke and Chris Weedon English and Englishness, B. Doyle Linguistics and the Novel, Roger Fowler Language and Style, E. L. Epstein The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Keir Elam Structuralism and Semiotics, Terence Hawkes Superstructuralism, Richard Harland Deconstruction ed. 2, Christopher Norris Formalism and Marxism, Tony Bennett Critical Practice, Catherine Belsey Dialogism, Michael Holquist Dialogue and Difference: English for the Nineties, Ed. Peter Brooker/Peter Humm Literature, Politics and Theory, Ed. F. Barker, P. Hulme, M. Iversen and D. Loxley Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History, Ed. Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson Criticism and Society, Ed. Imre Salusinszky Fantasy, Rosemary Jackson Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching, Patrick Parrinder Sexual Fiction, Maurice Charney Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Patricia Waugh Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction, Steven Cohan and Linda Shires Poetry as Discourse, Anthony Easthope The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon Subculture, ed. 2, Dick Hebdige Reading Television, John Fiske and John Hartley Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong Adult Comics, An Introduction, Roger Sabin The Unusable Past, Russell J. Reising The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin Translation Studies ed. 2, Susan Bassnett Studying British Cultures, Susan Bassnett Literature and Propaganda, A. P. Foulkes Reception Theory, Robert C. Holub Psychoanalytic Criticism, Elizabeth Wright The Return of the Reader, Elizabeth Freund Sexual/Textual Politics, Toril Moi Making a Difference, Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn AVAILABLE AS A COMPLETE SET (in Hardback only): ISBN 0415–29116–X John John Fiske Hartley Reading Television with a new Foreword by John Hartley First published 1978 by Methuen & Co. Ltd 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001 This edition first published 2003 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, 2004. Foreword and Further Reading © 2003 John Hartley All other text © 1978, 2003 John Fiske and John Hartley 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 has been requested ISBN 0-203-35662-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-38730-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–32353–3(Print Edition) CONTENTS General Editor’s Preface vii Foreword: ‘Reading’ television studies ix 1 ‘Reading’ television 1 2 Content analysis 8 3 The signs of television 22 4 The codes of television 41 5 The functions of television 49 6 Bardic television 64 7 Audiences 78 8 The modes of television 85 9 Dance 101 10 Competition 113 11 Television realism 127 12 A policeman’s lot 138 Conclusion: something completely different? 154 References 160 Further Reading 164 Index 169 GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE No doubt a third General Editor’s Preface to New Accents seems hard to justify. What is there left to say? Twenty-five years ago, the series began with a very clear purpose. Its major concern was the newly perplexed world of academic literary studies, where hectic monsters called ‘The- ory’, ‘Linguistics’ and ‘Politics’ ranged. In particular, it aimed itself at those undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who were either learning to come to terms with the new developments or were being sternly warned against them. New Accents deliberately took sides. Thus the first Preface spoke darkly, in 1977, of ‘a time of rapid and radical social change’, of the ‘erosion of the assumptions and presuppositions’ central to the study of litera- ture. ‘Modes and categories inherited from the past’ it announced, ‘no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation’. The aim of each volume would be to ‘encourage rather than resist the process of change’ by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of new ideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel- opments. If mystification (or downright demonisation) was the enemy, lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stake there) became a friend. If a ‘distinctive discourse of the future’ beckoned, we wanted at least to be able to understand it. With the apocalypse duly noted, the second Preface proceeded viii general editor’s preface piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might stagger portentously from the rubble. ‘How can we recognise or deal with the new?’, it complained, reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance of ‘a host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuring names’ and promising a programme of wary surveillance at ‘the boundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable’. Its conclusion, ‘the unthinkable, after all, is that which covertly shapes our thoughts’ may rank as a truism. But in so far as it offered some sort of useable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties, it is not to be blushed for. In the circumstances, any subsequent, and surely final, effort can only modestly look back, marvelling that the series is still here, and not unreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outlet for what turned, over the years, into some of the distinctive voices and topics in literary studies. But the volumes now re-presented have more than a mere historical interest. As their authors indicate, the issues they raised are still potent, the arguments with which they engaged are still disturbing. In short, we weren’t wrong. Academic study did change rapidly and radically to match, even to help to generate, wide-reaching social changes. A new set of discourses was developed to negotiate those upheavals. Nor has the process ceased. In our deliquescent world, what was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those years ago now seems regularly to come to pass. Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning of, maps for, guides to, or nudges in the direction of this new terrain is scarcely for me to say. Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivating the sense that it was there. The only justification for a reluctant third attempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is. TERENCE HAWKES READING TELEVISION AFTER 25 YEARS: A NEW FOREWORD BY JOHN HARTLEY THAT WAS THEN Reading Television was published in July 1978. It was an ordinary month. There were coups d’état in Mauritania, Ghana and Bolivia, following a communist coup in Afghanistan in May. The Clash were in the middle of their ‘On Parole’ tour of Britain. They came to Cardiff (where I lived at the time), but were banned in London’s East End for local fears of a ‘distasteful audience’. The Tom Robinson Band appeared in Los Angeles, provoking one reviewer to wonder what a ‘homosexual audi- ence’ looked like. The Black and White Minstrel Show, featuring a blacked-up chorus singing popular ballads, ended a 20-year run on BBC-TV after persistent protests about its racial politics. President Carter visited Bonn for an economic summit with President Giscard d’Estaing, Chancellor Schmidt and Prime Ministers Fukuda, Callaghan, Andreotti and Trudeau, while in Switzerland Secretary of State Cyrus Vance held talks with Andrei Gromyko, Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, about strategic arms limitation. On The Young and the Restless, Lorie worried about choosing between literary stardom and her marriage (we sympa- thized!) – little knowing that husband Lance had just made sister Leslie pregnant (later, however, Leslie married Lance’s brother Lucas). Grease was top of the charts in the USA, Karen Morton was 295th Playmate of