Page 122 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 110
Dynasty were at the top of their popularity], but wants to serve as
counterpoise by putting other gripping, exciting and surprising elements
of Dutch culture on the screen. For ordinary people. No artistic
expressions that only few can understand. By reproletarization we thus
mean the effecting of a lower and narrower level of interest by a one-sided
supply of programming.
(VARA 1983b)

Discursively speaking, then, the ‘ordinary people’ are a deus ex machina, a handy
rhetorical device that enables VARA to renew its waning bond with a ‘natural
constituency’ by reconciling the normative and the pragmatic, the reformist and the
entertaining, public mission and market exigencies, paternalist populism and audience
maximization. The category of ‘ordinary people’ is not just a market segment, it is also
an imaginary construct of ‘television audience’ with political bearings, reminiscent of,
although certainly not derived from, Gramsci’s concept of ‘the people’ as those who are
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excluded from the realm of political and ideological power.
On the basis of this formulation of VARA’s ideal-typical audience, the managers
developed a totalitarian scheme of qualitative criteria for VARA programming policy
which looked like this
accessible
understandable
Popular—ordinary ‘close to the people’

pedantic
cynical
—quality: love for the ordinary man: NOT
tiresome

militant making
elevating
Left—identity: emacipatory

(unsigned internal report, 7 May 1984)
Such a scheme betrays a desire to totally control the way VARA programmes should
address and influence the audience; and indeed, the management announced the intention
to quantify this set of criteria, in order to be able to submit all VARA products and all
VARA personnel to rigorous evaluative measurement of performance. Panels consisting
of representatives of the target group (the ‘ordinary people’) were suggested, information
about audience needs and interests in general were now considered indespensible (VARA
1983b). Articulated here is a bold managerial attempt to rationalize, formalize and
objectify ad absurdum the relationship between VARA and the ‘ordinary people’. And
although the plan eventually failed to be implemented, it did pave the way for a change of
direction in VARA discourse which more forthrightly than before legitimated the