Page 45 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The limits of discursive control 33
film episodes, in what came to seem—for all the occasional bizarre
disparities—a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings.
(Williams 1974:91–2)

On his part, American researcher Thomas McCain had no less severe problems with
adjusting to the typically more irregular rhythm of European television programming:

We moved to Dublin and I watched British and Irish television for one
month with no small amount of puzzlement, amazement and frustration.
Television was not very convenient to watch; programmes changed at
odd, rather than predictable hours. Series seemed to be only a few weeks
long; just as we came to enjoy or understand a character or
programme…it was gone from the schedule. The news was on in the
middle of the evening rather than later and earlier. The schedule or
sequencing of programmes was most peculiar; a movie early in the
evening, the British programme In Search of the Wild Asparagus,
followed by a situation comedy and then a late evening documentary on
pigeons…. It was a change of routine we had not anticipated, though we
liked it. Having left Columbus, Ohio and the Qube cable system with 30
channels of nearly round the clock programming available, television had
become an almost magnetic part of our lives, the television set drawing us
to its field of fancy and frivolity with regularity of embarrassing
proportions. But this European television was different. My initial
reaction was that it was rather pretentious, quite dull and occasionally
brilliant. Our family stopped ‘watching television’ and started viewing
programmes.
(McCain 1985:74)

Williams’s and McCain’s stories indicate the very real effects of specific institutional
arrangements of broadcasting, not only upon what kinds of television material audiences
are enabled to watch, but also more generally upon the structuring of everyday television
experience as such. This is a form of control, but a rather indirect one. It does not consist
of overt coercion, of imposing explicit rules and regulations, of commanding obedience
and submission, but is a matter of structuration discursively mediated by the assumptions
made about which programmes are most appropriate to tie the audience to the specific
institutional arrangement concerned: schematically, assumptions about ‘what the
audience wants’ in the case of commercial television, and about ‘what the audience
needs’ in the case of public service television.
However, despite the massive amount of available knowledge about ‘television
audience’ on which the programming assumptions are based, the discursive control
emanating from it is still not sufficient to efface the uncertainty faced by the institutions.
Indeed, the large emphasis usually given to the figures and calculations of audience
measurement only obscures the fact that television institutions remain, for all the
information they have at their disposal, in constant wonder of the best ways in which to
address the audience. What has to be stressed here then is the ultimate lack of control.
Even the executives of American commercial television depend as much upon intuition