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Inventing Television Culture: Men, Women and the Box
New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television and Digital Media in the United States
Janet Thumim, Inventing Television Culture: Men, Women and the Box. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 218 pp.
William Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television and Digital Media in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 184 pp.
The Oxford Television Studies series has consistently produced books that address matters pertinent to the field of television studies, filling in lacunas and proposing ways forward for those involved in the discipline. With the recent addition of these two publications, the series is beginning to have the feel of an important corpus for television studies, providing any reader with a comprehensive overview of the development of television's forms, the debates and issues it raises. To this end Thumim's discussion of early television culture, together with Jason Jacobs's earlier work in this area1, and Boddy's historical account of television's transition to a digital technology, might be thought of as neatly ‘book ending’ this important collection in relation to the chronological survey the series provides. Both books challenge ‘natural’ assumptions about television that conceive it as an inherently passive, gendered, live and ephemeral medium. By investigating various intertextual ephemera (ranging from advertising to archived interviews and from production notes to popular fictions) from different periods in the development of television, these two histories provide rich material for understanding television's positioning within cultural life, particularly at this pertinent moment of digitalization in both the USA and UK.
Thumim's book seeks to examine the formative period of UK broadcasting, between 1955 and 1965, detailing the development of particular production practices, presumptions about audiences, aesthetics and the insertion of television into everyday life. Her overarching concern is with gender and her concluding remarks on the continued inferior treatment of women represented in and on television reverberate loudly as television enters the digital age. Whilst Thumim sets out to challenge some of the prevailing assumptions about early television, interestingly Inventing Television Culture tends to describe many of these, giving the reader a historically grounded account of how some of the widespread presuppositions about television as a media technology have taken hold. In particular, her extensive use of written archival material to detail the displacement of the feminine from factual programming dovetails usefully with the apparent rise in popular drama's address to this audience.
Organized into chapters that broadly reflect these themes (the rise of competition, women, drama and factual programming), Inventing Television Culture marks an increasing concern within television studies to dust off the wealth of archival material in existence in the UK. This retrieval illustrates that whilst there are nuances to be observed in the prevailing assumptions that exist about this period of television's history, attitudes on display in the archival sources do generally reinforce and confirm how we think issues of class and gender played out in the production of particular genres and, indeed, production cultures of television organizations. Although Thumim wants our assumptions about how these issues structured production cultures to be unfounded, her use of archival sources (newspaper reviews, written archives from the BBC and ITV, scheduling, viewer responses and occasional television texts, although these often only in transcript) gradually reveals how the BBC often took an elitist tone and production cultures more generally remained overwhelmingly male-dominated. Initially, she reluctantly admits that, between the BBC's and ITV's approaches to their audiences, although ‘class as a differentiating factor was rarely, if ever, mentioned explicitly ... [it] was a constant presence underlying the competitive war of words between supporters and detractors of the rival broadcasting systems as well as in criticism of particular programming’ (p. 28). This is often realized in the uncovering of some fascinating archival sources, most notably from Eric Maschwitz, BBC Head of Light Entertainment Television (in submission to the Pilkington Committee) who, in denouncing ITV, asserted ‘Commercial TV dare [sic] very seldom risk such adventures into the "avant garde"; its peasant audience does not respond to adventure of this kind’ (emphasis added, p. 72).
Later in the book, her research points to the unsurprising marginalization of women in the production sphere, particularly in factual programming. Ironically, however, exploring the position of various high-profile women in television (particularly the BBC) leads Thumim to draw out the often painful dynamic whereby women working in a robustly defended ‘male world’ inevitably reproduce this rhetoric. Thus, whilst Grace Wyndham Goldie (Assistant Head of Talks) was brought into the BBC by Mary Adams, she replicated the gendered specificity of working roles, nurturing a group of young professional men labelled ‘Gracie's Boys’ to run the corporation's current affairs programming. The example of Goldie is paradigmatic of Thumim's overall argument, which traces the unease with which the female audience and workforce were treated by television, thus creating and maintaining a distinct contrast between drama and factual programming and their differently ‘gendered’ address. Interestingly, her discussion of the latter of these ‘genres’ points to the importance and prominence that the magazine format has always had on television. The characterization of early current affairs as belonging to the magazine format makes a particularly compelling case study for understanding the establishment of a dichotomy between hard, serious, masculine programming and entertaining, frivolous female programming. As she concludes,
the magazine form attempted to secure audiences through deployment of variety in content and address, and as popular drama increasingly allowed the foregrounding of (some) female experience, the current affairs operation became ever more masculinist, allying itself with news at the very centre of the television institution (p. 188).Despite this, Thumim wants to believe in the transformatory powers of television, arguing that ‘television contributed more substantially than any other cultural form to changes in expectations of, and attitudes to, women's place in British society’ (p. 193).
This final point notwithstanding, part of the problem with Inventing Television Culture is that the story told is a familiar one, although this should not negate the value of the detail of the research produced to uncover material that provides a basis for many assumptions about television. However, it is worth commenting on the problems with this type of historical work, particularly in relation to the discussion of television texts themselves. Thumim's discussion of drama, particularly ‘developing the televisual’ and ‘fitness for screen and audience’, has a close relationship to Jason Jacobs's work on early television drama, the book with which this volume might easily be paired, following on, as it does, from Jacobs's period of study. Television's characterization as a passive medium has owed much to the assumptions made about early television programming and reception in the period that Thumim examines. She challenges both the entwinement of this assumption with discourses of the feminine and the conception of television as simply a ‘relay technology’ and thus aesthetically uninteresting. In turn, she thereby contributes to the growing interest in, and defence of, television aesthetics within the field of television studies, the value of her work in this area complementing Jacobs's assertion that innovation and quality production practices have always been a part of the television landscape.
However, given her criticism of Jacobs's conclusions as to television's relationship with live theatre and his assertions of quality drama's concern with ‘majority concerns’, it is somewhat disappointing that her own material in this area is not more convincing. Whilst her unearthing of material from the archives is interesting, valuable and engaging work, the reliance on newspaper reviews and interview notes with producers seems particularly problematic in these sections. At times, therefore, we are given fascinating insights into the cultural history of the two defining corporations within the British television landscape, but these are often left to stand as ends in themselves. When Thumim does move beyond the mere recounting of such material, her work becomes more engaging and her positioning of the Rochdale by-election as a key event in British television history deserves due prominence. As such, the problems I am identifying are often not with Thumim's own work so much as the way in which the book reveals the problems with such archival work, particularly where the TV texts themselves no longer exist or are not widely available; and here Jacobs's work is exemplary of the results possible. In some senses, therefore, this book stands as a call to action for television scholars to pressure for greater opening up of the television archive, particularly as held by the BBC and the BFI.
In contrast to Thumim's detailed account of one period, Boddy's New Media and Popular Imagination examines television not only across a number of pertinent moments in its development but also in relation to other media. Boddy marshals an impressive range of television ephemera to construct an argument that convincingly posits the current moment of digitalization as one in a line of many that need to be considered together in order to understand both the meaning of our own era's prospects and choices as well as the interests involved in shaping such choices. Taking Carolyn Marvin's twin understandings that ‘media are not fixed natural objects’ and that technologies have a special relationship to each other at the moment they are new, Boddy essentially provides an evolutionary account of twentieth-century media technologies.2 From radio to cinema, cinema to television and television to digital media, his argument de-familiarizes our current understanding of each technology to show that a familiar set of fantasies and fears are articulated as new technologies emerge.
Similarly to Thumim, Boddy's account of these technologies has a particular interest in the address to and the construction of a gendered audience. In line with Hugh Mackay's work, which points to the need for all new domestic technologies to win time and space in the home, and Thumim's evidence, which demonstrates the female audience's importance in domesticating television (since women ordered the domestic sphere), Boddy's account is suggestive of the kind of tensions around gender that have proliferated across the history of consumer electronics.3 Brian Winston's earlier account of media technologies described how radio's development as a broadcast technology was borne out of recognizing that ‘a major perceived fault of the technology, that anybody could listen in, was actually its raison d'etre’.4 Boddy's achievement here is to clearly detail the disappointment with which this transition was met by the early male radio enthusiast, who, having taken to radio as ‘hobbyist’, positioned its use as a masculine pastime, ‘fishing’ for signals from other enthusiasts. Boddy traces, in a cycle that repeats itself across the history of television and its ancillary technologies, the feminization of the medium as the technological language of the enthusiast was replaced with both an appeal in marketing strategies to ideals of feminine emotion and a concern within trade and sales magazines to address the question of finding a space for the radio in the family home.
This cycle of tension between the address to a male or female audience then repeats itself as television enters the home and thus, by the time Boddy addresses the current discourses surrounding new technology, such rhetoric is convincingly positioned as ‘not so new’. As a result the fantasized mobility that accompanies digital technologies, such as TiVo and VR, is shown as repetitious of discourses of mobility and activity that had accompanied both radio and analogue television's initial address to a male audience. Perhaps one criticism of Boddy's work is that the distinction he wants to achieve between television and cinema leads to a failure to link these discourses of television's technological mobility with similar rhetoric accompanying early cinema technologies, as discussed in Alison Griffiths's and Anne Friedberg's work.5 However, the chronological structure of the book, tracing the re-emergence of these cycles of fantasy and fear, makes convincing reading. Indeed, the gendered cycle of new technologies is evident in the current UK television landscape, where interactive television's initial address to the male consumer, first trialled and promoted through sporting events, has recently shifted its attention to the female audience as SkyActive's 2005 rebrand depicts interactive television as a cosy space, filled with shopping, gossip and Gail Porter.
Importantly, New Media and Popular Imagination is not restricted simply to the representations that surround new technologies' inception, but casts its net much wider, bringing in economic, political and legal discourses that help the reader understand their shaping. The attention to legal regulation, spectrum use and allocation and, particularly in the final chapter, intellectual property issues, elucidates a field of research that is all too thinly covered by television studies. The digitalization of traditional forms of content, such as music, television and cinema, has resulted in a battlefield mentality by content owners, who are arguably using their economic, legal and industrial clout to restrict technological innovation and jeopardize legal doctrines such as ‘fair use’. Whilst Boddy is cautious of championing one cause over another, his historical overview does demonstrate that
these rhetorical antipodes of the passive and neutered domestic appliance versus the heroic and adventurous electronic tool have their roots ... in the earliest conflicts between radio amateurs and early commercial broadcasters (p. 159).
However, this is not simply a case of retelling yet another aspect of the cycle of new media development. Rather, as he concludes in this chapter, the voracious ‘protection’ of copyright by content owners threatens not only ‘the widespread consumer practices of time- and space-shifting ... but also many of the quotidian and fundamental practices undertaken by media scholars and educators’ (p. 164). Thus, similarly to Thumim, Boddy's book can also be read as a call to action for media scholars to engage in these debates lest we become, as Boddy terms it, copyright's ‘most conspicuous victims’ (p. 164).
Histories of the social shaping of television are not new within the field; Lynn Spigel, Jeffrey Sconce, Brian Winston and William Uricchio have all written detailed accounts of the various imaginings, positioning and exploitation of the medium.6 Boddy's research clearly fits alongside such work and his investigation of these significant moments of rupture and contestation is original and deserving of critical attention. Overall, what the book points to is the enduring relevance of Raymond Williams's work to the field of television studies, as it his work that all these historians recognize as indicating the way in which the introduction of any new media is a site of ‘contestation’ and ‘choice’ for old business and regulatory models, viewing patterns and everyday life.7 Boddy's book therefore provides a useful starting point for beginning to understand the challenges and contestations that will accompany the switchover to digital television in the USA and the UK.
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A Lecturer at London Metropolitan University. He is author of ‘From museum to interactive television, spectacle to education: organizing the navigable space of natural history display’, in Lyons and Plunkett (eds), Optical to Digital: Excavating multimedia histories (2006). He is currently completing his PhD on digital television, interactivity and public service broadcasting. He is chair of the Midlands Television Research Group
1 Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000). 
2 Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 8.
3 Hugh Mackay, ‘Consuming communication technologies in the home’, in Hugh Mackay (ed.), Consumption and Everyday Life (London: Sage, 1997).
4 Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society: A History: From The Telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 75.
5 Alison Griffiths, ‘Journeys for those who can not travel: promenade cinema and the museum life group’, Wide Angle, vol. 18, no.3 (1996), pp. 53–84; Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and Postmodernism (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
6 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000); Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society: A History – From The Telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge, 1998); and William Uricchio, ‘Old media as new media: television’, in Dan Harries (ed.), The New Media Book (London: BFI Publishing, 2002).
7 Raymond Williams, Communications (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962).
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