A review of Media Teaching: Language, Audience, Production

The book "Media Teaching" has received a very positive review on the NATE website. The review was written by Andy Goodwyn and can be found at
http://www.nate.org.uk/index.php?page=3&rev=387
Hopefully it will be helpful to people who may be thinking about using the book.

TV Drama, Manuelgate and the Paradox of Public Broadcasting

First of all a big thankyou and hello to all those students and teachers who have commented on the TV Drama article. I didn't have any idea when I wrote it that it would provoke such a response, but I guess now that the TV Drama topic at A-Level has become really popular it is inevitable. All the comments from students at Reigate College, Wood Green High and other institutions are really interesting, - if you go to the comments tab at the bottom of that article, I've written a response to some of them, and would welcome further discussion.Also, your comments give me an opportunity to throw out some other ideas that people might want to consider right now. I'm writing this at the back end of a week which has seen two seemingly unrelated events demonstrate the paradoxical nature of public broadcasting. The first relatively insignificant one is the first airing of Little Dorrit, the BBC's new Dickens adaptation. A big budget affair with an expensive cast that brings a touch of Eastenders to the Victoriana we have got used to seeing on a Sunday night. One might say that this is what the BBC is meant to do. High quality, well intentioned period drama, with a few good looking stars (a la Matthew McFadyen) to get the interest of the young 'uns. Seemingly unconnected to this is the monumental fuss made over what the Daily Mirror has christened (with a startling lack of imagination) "Manuelgate"- aka Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand being naughty little school boys and making prank calls to the answerphone of actor Andrew Sachs, originally of Fawlty Towers fame, but now Mr Voiceover.

Both these events illustrate what I would call the "paradox of the public service broadcaster". A PSB like the BBC is a publicly funded body, paid for through the licence fee. As such it is meant to be free from the shackles of commercial pressure and should feel free to be as radical, experimental, edgy or downright rude as it likes, because it does not have to please advertisers. However, because it is publicly funded, the great British public have paid for it and hence feel that it shoud be accountable to them. And so it is trapped - it encourages its talent (and I don't really mean people like Brand here, who I personally think couldn't tell a proper gag to save his life, but rather its writers and producers) to do stuff that is innovative and new, but then is forced into abysmal self-flagellation when some sections of the public, stirred up by the blue-rinsers at the Daily Mail, get upset and complain.



So what does the BBC do? One could argue that it should stick to stuff like Little Dorrit. After all, as many of you have commented on the TV Drama article, the Americans don't seem to be able to do that sort of stuff at all way (or at least not without British help). This seems a bit limited though, as a lot of the stuff that has really had an impact on the public consciousness ovr the last twenty years has come out of the BBC giving people a chance and letting them make a few mistakes first. Blackadder, Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and the Mighty Boosh are all examples of things that commercial TV would never have touched with a ten foot pole. And it's not just comedy. Check out Edge of Darkness, State of Play and the televising of Jerry Springer the Opera which are all things that both ask questions of the establishment and yet at the same time play to a mainstream audience. This then, is the real paradox of public broadcasting - that a PSB can both narrowcast and broadcast at the same time, appealing to both mass and niche audiences - while all along justifying a lot of public money.

Heroes and Other Foreigners

This week, an article I wrote about Battlestar Galactica for Media Magazine some 6 months ago is finally published. (The delay was quite deliberate - they were saving it as this issue is a "Small Screen special") Its publication is quite timely, firstly because BG is about to reappear for its fourth - and possibly final series in the new year, but also because the treatment it has given to certain themes is being echoed in that other great televisual event of the moment, namely the last episodes of the first series of Heroes on BBC2.

This weekend John Patterson, TV critic at The Guardian described Heroes, as well some others of its ilk (see my comments on "enigma TV" in the BG Article, Media Magazine 22) as having "ambitions (that are) not equalled by execution, and whose immense complexity often proves self-defeating". I am interested in this, not because I agree with it, but because I think that it shows that TV critics often miss the point of viewing in their hurry to get to the end of their sentence. When watching both Battlestar Galactica and Heroes, I am often reminded of that phrase "it is better to travel that to arrive", because the most pleasurable thing about watching them is to live in that moment which is the episode itself; to just think about the excitement of watching what will happen and to just consider it not as an overarching narrative but to think about it as a single slice of TV.

The "Five Years Gone" episode of Heroes, in which Hiro travelled to a possible future in which he met his future self and realised that he had failed to stop the destruction of New York was a beautifully crafted piece of dystopia that could quite easily have been viewed entirely indpendently of the rest of the series. In and of its self it featured so many motifs and tropes which highlight the fact that Heroes, like Battlestar is a place where America is working out its own issues with itself.

The above mentioned episode shows a future in which the heroes - those possessed of superhuman powers- are regarded as terrorists and sent to Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay. They are blamed for the destruction of New York - in itself, a 9/11 style inferno which razed tall buildings to the ground. This idenification of the Heroes as "other" - it is clear that it is not just Muslims, but anybody who is seen as different - is one of the ways in which the show seeks to give voice to the feelings that America has about itsef in its post-9/11 existence. In the same way in which the crew of the Galactica rediscover their old religion and turn into "insurgents" on the surface of New Caprica, the Heroes travel in small groups, operate in cells and convince each other that they will build a new society. In other words the Heroes and the the colonists are as complicated, diverse and contradictory as Americans are.

So what we have then, is a situation in which these TV shows demonstrate an America that is talking to itself. Within them are views both liberal (Suresh) and conservative (Bennett), insular(Sprague) and global (Hiro), American (Nathan) and profoundly un-American (Sylar). While these ideas are buried deep in a labyrinthine plot and wrapped up in many enigmas, their complexity should show us that America itself is often more complex than we might give it credit for.

©Steve Connolly 2007

Introducing Diploma Watch

Hello again! After a year long hiatus - mainly forced by getting a new job - I am back and blogging again. I've got lots of articles in the pipeline to post up here, especially aimed at media teachers and undergraduates. This first post though, is aimed at telling you about another blog, namely DiplomaWatch. As a member of the MEA Executive I've been asked to gather people's views and opinions on the new Creative and Media Diploma which will be piloted from 2008. As a Senior Leader involved in the bidding process, I do have my own experiences which I am recording, but if any teachers (or for that matter students) have any opinions on it, then follow the link on the right of this page to the diploma watch blog. There you can read about how the development of the diploma is proceeding from my own point of view, and you can chip in with your own experiences. Check it out....

Textual Value: An addendum

A recent email from Roy Stafford (editor of the excellent In the Picture magazine, amongst other notable achievements) has offered some more perspective on Julian McDougall's arguments about textual perspective discussed in the last post. Roy was one of the people who quizzed Julian about his views when The Media Teachers Book first came out, and asked him for his views about textual value. Roy writes:

"I'd just like to say that I concur with your posting in general terms, but I'd put some of the points a little differently. I agree that all texts are available for analysis and that it is worthwhile to study them. But it is clear to me that different texts are interesting for different reasons. I think that the issue is diversity. Students should be exposed to and engage with a wide range of texts. The analogy with food is quite interesting. All foodstuffs have nutritional value and a good diet has a mix of different kinds of foods. Someone fed on a diet of just one sort of food is malnourished. I can see that some would argue that some food is junk and other food is 'wholesome'. I don't buy that for single texts, but I do for too much of one kind of food. My argument with Julian is simply that media teachers have a responsibility to make sure that their students have sufficient diversity in their cultural diet (without being dogmatic about what the mix should be). I agree that there are no single texts that students have to study, but also that only mainstream films or gameshows is a poor diet - as is only art films or HBO programmes."

I should say that Roy is of course, absolutely right and I may not have made it clear enough that I wasn't in any way undervaluing or devaluing Jane Austen or Art Films or any kind of cultural text - of course these texts are of the utmost importance. What I wanted to do was say that there can be equal value in texts that seem to be of no value at all (the soap opera, the pop video, the viral advert). Diversity is, as Roy says, the key, and it is interesting to note that I, like him, see the breadth of Media Studies as its strength. This is quite opposed to the views espoused by many critics of the subject who see this as a weakness - but I am convinced that the wider the range of texts we study the more we challenge and prepare our students to interrogate the media texts that they use and find around them.

Two final things: for anyone interested at all in media education, Julian McDougall's book is essential. Go buy it now. It's called The Media Teacher's Book and is published by Hodder Arnold. It will make us all into better teachers. Secondly, I've added a link below to the ITP magazine blog, which Roy is trying to make more of a forum for discussion about media education issues. I am quite ashamed that I have not added a link to it before now, but perhaps I can make up for my reticence by encouraging everyone who reads this page to click on it when you finish here.

Big Macs and Jane Austen: Media Teachers and “Textual Emotivism”

Julian McDougall’s comments on the recent pages of "In The Picture" Magazine have led to some interesting discussions in my school and with other colleagues about the idea of textual value – or the idea that one media text is necessarily any more valuable or worthy of study than any other media text. In schools. One might expect English teachers to uphold notions of textual value, as English Literature requires that students concentrate on some texts while ignoring others, but I am often surprised by the number of media and film teachers who also espouse that view. I have worked with teachers who have told me that students shouldn’t be watching certain types of film because they were “trash”. I once sat at a conference, not far away from Julian McDougall, as it happens, and listened to a lengthy monologue delivered by a teacher who thought that having students study gameshows was an example of how the subject was being dumbed-down. I have written at some length (cf. “Goodfellas and the Problem of Popular Culture” ) about why texts from popular culture have value, but not necessarily canonical value. What I want do here is outline some of the philosophical and educational reasons why I don’t believe in a hierarchy of texts with an implicit sense of any one text being more valuable than any other.

I take the view that I do for three reasons. Firstly, I believe that any notion of value in a text is positioned there by the reader and not by a text. Meanings, ideas and values are all largely generated by the reader. The person who watches an episode of Eastenders, derives their own set of meanings from that viewing experience. That experience may or may not be the experience that the producer of that programme intended them to have, but what is certain is that there is not a uniform experience. For example if I see the same Freudian overtones in Ruby Allen’s relationship with her father as I see in King Lear, the relative status of the text (in terms of what has cultural value and what doesn’t) becomes irrelevant. I am using the text for my own ends and taking control of it rather than it controlling me by making me feel inferior or superior for reading it. I don’t believe this is too strong a way of putting it, either. The idea of a canon, in which certain texts are seen as superior to others is a means of controlling not only what gets read or watched, but also who gets to read or watch it. Media Studies should be about popular culture and about what occupies and forms culture right now. It should only be limited by the limits of what people experience as culture.

Secondly, I believe that what we should be attempting to find out in Media and Cultural Studies is where texts come from, how they operate on their audiences and why they operate in that way. Studying something just because people think it is good idea to, is a fairly pointless exercise because it doesn’t really tell you anything about the people who made it or the institutional pressures that they were exposed to. The example of this I always use with teachers (who are usually enraged by it) and students is of the Big Mac. The Big Mac is a cultural product and as such is as worthy of study as Pride and Prejudice. Why ? Well think for a moment of the number of discourses that the Big Mac sits at the heart of ; America, industrialisation, capitalism, the obesity epidemic, Fordism, economic prosperity and agronomy to name but a few. The discourses that Pride and Prejudice sits within are no less significant (Feminism, 19th Century Literature, Victorian Society etc) but much more time is spent on them in classrooms from secondary level upwards.

Now, before someone from the Daily Mail gets hold of this and starts accusing me of suggesting that we start Big Mac studies courses at your local University, I want to emphasise that it is not the text, but the approach that is wrong. The fact is that even when we do study things like Pride and Prejudice or Battleship Potemkin, we often don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the conditions in which they were produced and the discourses that this involved. I am quite happy to have students work on Austen provided that they are made aware of the way that books were published at the time – a vital piece of knowledge if we are to understand why Austen became popular. At the same time, this is what makes the Big Mac as worthy of study as the novel. After all, neither the novel or the burger has any inherent value - the worth of both is entirely socially negotiated.

Thirdly, it is obvious to me that most of the time, people’s pronouncements on textual value are usually really about approval or disapproval. To explain this further, I would borrow an idea from philosophy, which might explain why ideas about the relative superiority or inferiority of textual value don’t really work.

A J Ayer, amongst others was of the view that statements about morality (as well as theology and aesthetics) were not ones that could be proved to be true or false, but were simply statements of approval. Thus Ayer interpreted the statement “Killing people is wrong” to mean “Killing People? Boo!” or the statement “Helping people is good” to mean “Helping people? Hooray!”. This idea is easily transferable to statements of textual value. When someone says “Citizen Kane is a film that all young people should be made to watch” (Which I have heard come from Media teachers lips on more than one occasion) what they are really saying is “Citizen Kane. Hooray – I want everyone else to share my approval”. This is, I believe all that people like Harold Bloom mean when they say things like this : “Feminist or Marxist readings of Hamlet, for example, would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but nothing about Hamlet itself, and Hamlet is good whether a majority of readers enjoy it or not.”. Bloom is just expressing his approval of Hamlet as a text and his ignorance of the reader.

So where should this leave media teachers and students? Hopefully with a good deal more freedom to pursue a wider range of texts. Remember, I’m not saying that texts have no value, but rather that ideas about a hierarchy of values are often misplaced, because people ignore the role of the reader and the position of the text within any number of other discourses. It is better not to have any sense of a hierarchy of value but rather to suggest that value is something created by the reader or audience. It is this which makes media and pop culture texts so valuable, because as I have noted here before, they tell us as much about people as they do about themselves.

Media Matters Report

Some teachers were asking me recently where they could get their hands on the big QCA report into Media Studies which came out last year, entitled Media Matters. Lots of people were involved in putting it together (including me) and while it is a bit flawed in places - which is more to do with the QCA format for reports rather than the intention of the authors, I should hasten to add - it does provide a good snapshot of Media Education right now and makes some interesting recommendations. You can find it on-line at

http://orderline.qca.org.uk/gempdf/1847212999.pdf

Happy hunting!