‘In shape and mind transformed’? Televised teaching and learning Shakespeare

Reality television offers the BBC the opportunity to fulfil its dual imperatives of education and entertainment, frequently constructed as anathematic. This article considers three recent examples of televised teaching and learning Shakespeare: When Romeo Met Juliet, Macbeth, the movie star and me, and Off By Heart: Shakespeare. It demonstrates the programmes’ fit with the reality genre through their common ingredients of authenticity, contained locations, hybridity, experts, fallible and flawed participants, articulation and reconciliation of social difference. Moreover, all three share an emphasis on a reality television staple: transformation, in terms of the participants’ knowledge, skills and personal growth, but also in relation to television audiences and the British education system. The programmes might thus usefully be understood as part of a reality television subgenre, evolving in Britain since the late 1970s, of Shmake-over. This article is published as part of a collection to commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death

New insight into mutable collagenous tissue : work in progress and applied perspectives in Paracentrotus lividus

The mechanically adaptable connective tissue of echinoderms (Mutable Collagenous Tissue, MCT), which can undergo drastic nervously-mediated changes in stiffness, tensile strength and viscosity, represents a promising model for biomaterial design and biomedical applications. MCT could be a source of inspiration for new composite materials whose molecular interactions and structural conformation can be changed in response to external stimuli. MCT is composed of collagen fibrils comparable to those of mammals plus other fibrillar structures, proteoglycans and glycoproteins. According to literature, the extracellular matrix of holothurians includes at least two glycoproteins, stiparin and tensilin, that can modulate the aggregation of collagen fibrils and their capacity for reciprocal sliding. This contribution presents the latest results of a detailed analysis of MCT components in Paracentrotus lividus: focusing on biochemical characterization of the fibrillar components (extraction, purification and quantification) and biomolecular analysis of the glycoprotein components. The final aims will be to confirm the presence and the role of these glycoproteins in echinoids and to manipulate simpler components in order to produce a composite with mutable mechanical properties. In the long term, MCT could provide inspiration for biomimetic materials and offer great potential for economically relevant biotechnological and clinical applications that require the controlled and reversible plasticization and/or stiffening of connective tissue

Negotiating stance within discourses of class: reactions to Benefits Street

In this article, we examine the way that audiences respond to particular representations of poverty. Using clips from the Channel 4 television programme Benefits Street we conducted focus groups in four locations across the UK, working with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds who had different experiences with the benefits system. Benefits Street (2014) is an example of reality television where members of the public are followed by film crews as they perform everyday tasks and routines. Our choice to focus on this particular programme was prompted by the huge media response that it received when it was broadcast; Benefits Street generated 950 complaints to regulatory watchdog Ofcom (2014) and was referred to as ‘poverty porn’ (Clark, 2014). We focus on the way that viewers of this programme produce assessments of those on benefits, analysing the discursive strategies used by our participants when evaluating representations of those on benefits. Specifically, we consider how the participants in our study construct their own stance and attribute stance to others through naming and agency practices, the negotiation of opinion, and stake inoculation. We invited our participants to judge the people they saw on screen, but they went beyond this. They used clips of the programme as stimuli to collaboratively construct an overarchingly-negative stereotype of those on benefits. We conclude that Benefits Street is not just an entertainment programme, but is rather a site for ideological construction and the perpetuation of existing stereotypes about benefit claimants. The programme (and others like it) invites negative evaluations of those on benefits and is thus a worthy site for critical linguistic analysis

Star image, celebrity reality television and the fame cycle

In this article, I discuss the phenomenon of celebrity reality television and explore its function for those participating in it. Drawing on the success of their non-celebrity counterparts, programmes such as Celebrity Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here and Dancing With the Stars have become popular globally and, although arguably no longer at their peak, continue to attract large audiences and significant amounts of publicity. In the article I discuss the role these shows can serve for celebrities at different levels of their careers. I argue that reality television appeals in different ways to celebrities at different points in the fame ‘cycle’: ‘ordinary’ people or ‘pre-celebrities’ seeking to become known through it; proto-celebrities who wish to expand their fame; celebrities engaged in the work of promotion for their other endeavours; celebrities who wish to remake their existing star image through using reality television as a rehabilitative strategy or an opportunity to develop new skills; and those whose careers are in a period of ‘post-celebrity’ who seek to renew their fame. I explore how a successful reality show cast is one that combines celebrities who are at a range of points in the fame cycle as the interactions between the cast members and their debates about fame and hierarchy prove a key attraction for audiences

I feel your pain: Celebrity do-gooding, cosmopolitan caring and the globalised soul

Offering support for global charities has become practically part of the contemporary celebrity job description and a hallmark of the established star. Locating the expansion of this phenomenon within the post-Fordist cultural turn, this paper explores how public displays of support for “the afflicted” can be a way for celebrities to appear to raise their profile above the zone of the crudely commercial into the sanctified, quasi-religious realm of altruism and charity, whilst revealing or constructing an added dimension of personality: of compassion and caring. The paper suggests that investigating the communicative cultural flows circulating between the celebrity, their impoverished “Others” and the non-destitute, non-celebrity “ordinary” subject can tell us something both about how such power relationships are maintained and how the possibilities of change to global injustices are imagined or disavowed. To theorise these interconnections, the paper links together conceptions of the social power of celebrity with debates around cosmopolitanism, work on the mediation of distant suffering and Nietzsche's conception of “the soul”

Work, Power and Performance: Analysing the 'reality' game of The Apprentice

This article addresses the relationship between the British version of the reality television programme The Apprentice and the shifting working cultures of contemporary neoliberalism. It explores how the programme enacts, through ritualized play, many skills required by the ‘flexible’ work economy: emotional commitment, entrepreneurial adaptability, a combination of team conformity and personal ambition. In particular, it highlights how newly calibrated requirements of sociality, ‘passion’, and power-as-charisma are negotiated by the programme in relation to broader emergent norms of neoliberal governmentality. However, the article simultaneously argues against overly deterministic deployments of governmentality theory, suggesting it be both supplemented by other tools (media rituals and the affective role of passion), and reoriented back towards a Foucauldian emphasis upon the instability of power. This can, it argues, both enable the programme’s appeal to be more effectively understood and help us comprehend the spaces and places where neoliberal governmentality fails, wholly or partly, to be foregrounded

Mediated Class-ifications: Representations of Class and Culture in Contemporary British Television

This article takes, as its point of departure, recent debates about the representation of working-class life, especially the lives of the 'feckless poor', on reality television in the UK. These issues are contextualized by reference to a set of wider-ranging historical debates about: a) the category of class as a mode of social determination (and as an explanatory model); b) the relations of language, class and culture in educational sociology and in community publishing; and, c) in relation to classical Marxism's theorization of both the 'respectable' working class and the lumpen proletariat. The article concludes with a consideration of debates about the representation of the working class in the contemporary British TV drama series Shameless