Talking alone : Reality TV, emotions and authenticity

This article examines reality TV as an illustration of contemporary confessional culture in which the key attraction is the disclosure of true emotions. This article hopes to contribute to the understanding of the production of self-disclosure through a formal analysis of international and domestic dating, adventure and lifestyle-oriented reality shows broadcast on Finnish television between 2002 and 2004. The diverse programmes verify that reality TV shows capitalize on a variety of talk situations within one programme, but it is the monologue that is used as a truth-sign of direct access to the authentic. We also suggest that the power of monologue in the reality genre promotes the transformation of television from a mass medium to first-person medium addressing masses of individuals.Peer reviewe

Religion as a makeover : reality, lifestyle and spiritual transformation

In this article I discuss the relationship between religion, spirituality and processes of makeover and transformation as presented in a number of British reality television shows. Programmes including The Monastery, The Convent and Make Me a Muslim placed participants in scenarios where they experimented with adopting religious or spiritual practices as part of their journey of self-transformation. I argue that the nature of transformation in these programmes is in line with standard reality and makeover television practices. However, it also makes a claim to be more ‘authentic’ than these because of its unfolding within the more traditional environs of religious communities from which makeover culture’s narratives of transgression, repentance and salvation were originally derived

Popular news in the 21st century: Time for a new critical approach?

This paper is a brief review and critique of the main scholarly approaches to thinking about popular forms of news in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly in regards to broadcast television. Rather than advocating the merits of either popular or ‘hard’ news, it will discuss the possibility of finding (or revisiting) a critical approach to popular news and current affairs journalism that charts a suitable middle-ground: one that can accommodate the emergence of popular informational programs (e.g. The Awful Truth, The Daily Show) and one that moves away from the sometimes too simplistic binary discourses that have tended to become characteristic of recent debates over ‘tabloidisation’

Television and cultural studies: Unfinished business

This introductory article argues that the current state of debate on television within cultural studies is marked by considerable areas of theoretical and political uncertainty. The spread of deregulatory and privatizing public policies in relation to television, and the disarticulation of television from the idea of the national community and from the role of the citizen, have posed new problems for theorizing the relation between television and its audiences. In this article I survey a number of key areas of debate: the relation between television, the nation and the state; television and the citizen/consumer, television content and performance, and the likely future(s) of television