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The cultural context of media interpretation 333

less acceptable, so the character choosing not to have an abortion was approved
of by the viewers. Acosta-Alzuru (2003) argued that this showed the relation-
ship between Venezuelan culture and the programme – and controversial issues,
that were not part of the public debate, produced a concern in the audience. The
stories and characters in the telenovelas are features of public discourse with
friends and fellow workers, and hence the viewers felt discomfort when un-
spoken issues (such as sexual harassment) entered the public domain through
the telenovela.
We can see a second example of the cultural links for the home culture in the
Japanese drama, Oshin (the name of the central female character). This was
highly successful in Japan in the 1980s and also in over forty other countries
(Harvey 1995). The story spans the life of Oshin from her birth in 1901 to the
1980s, and charts her trials and tribulations through life. Thus, it can be enjoyed
as the triumph of the female character over adversity during the most turbulent
periods of the 20th century. However, as Harvey (1995) points out, there are
covert meanings within the programme provided for a Japanese audience. The
central character’s strength, contrary to the Western stereotype of the Japanese
woman, but clearly identifiable to the Japanese viewer, embodies the iconic
quality of ‘endurance’, a quality that is seen as a key feature of the Japanese
themselves in their progress though the 20th century. As Harvey (1995) shows,
the central character is Japan and her life is a mirror of Japanese history. Within
the programme the audience is provided with explanations for aspects of their
own history through the experiences of Oshin.
Returning to the success of The Rich Also Cry in Russia, Baldwin (1995)
links this to the contemporary culture of the host nation. “What the show’s
popularity can tell us about Russian culture in and on the post-communist stage
is that the switch of a good/evil paradigm from that of communist/capitalist
to capitalist/communist marks a radical change in the way knowledge about
gender in contemporary Russia is socially constructed” (Baldwin 1995: 287).
The programme was cheap to buy and came at a time when the Russian audience
had little experience of this form of television. Yet the viewers took on the story
of the female central character ‘as their own’. As Kotzeva (2001: 78) acknowl-
edges for the Bulgarian women viewers of telenovelas: “A post-communist
reading of gender through construction of melodramatic identifications of fe-
male viewers could be further linked to the opening up of the nation to a consu-
merist global TV world”.
In both Russia and Bulgaria the telenovela phenomenon extended beyond the
personal in that the arrival of actors from the programmes led to huge numbers of
fans turning out to see them and politicians meeting them (Kotzeva 2001; Bald-
win 1995). Even the Russian President Boris Yeltsin met Veronica Castro, star of
The Rich Also Cry when she visited the country in 1992 (Baldwin 1995). This, in
itself, becomes an interesting cultural phenomenon in its own right. Hence, the