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‘It's a woman!’: the question of gender on Who Wants to be a Millionaire
Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Kent. Her key research interests are in the early relations between British television and film culture, celebrity, reality TV, and popular television more generally. She is author of British Television and Film Culture in the 1950s: Coming to a TV Near You! (Intellect, 2005), and coeditor of Understanding Reality Television (Routledge, 2004)
This article examines the construction of gender on the UK version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire – where women have arguably been notable by their absence. The dearth of female contestants on a show regarded as the most successful quiz format of all time – and the impact of this on its construction of gender – raises some serious issues for feminist analysis, particularly when it has had very little to say about the sexual politics of the quiz show at all. ‘It's a woman!’ is the exclamation offered by host Chris Tarrant when a woman does make it into the chair, a phrase which marks women as spectacle, different, special, but above all, other in the arena of Millionaire. The exclamation is intended to function simply as a statement of fact, but my interest here is in the discursive concept of ‘woman’ that the programme brings into being. Here, I consider how gender is mediated in Millionaire through its discursive construction of family, production and consumption. The article ultimately suggests that the programme's highly dichotomised construction of gender roles function to play down what (for the quiz show) may be the potentially more divisive boundaries of class.
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