Personality Presenters

Television's Intermediaries with Viewers

Frances Bonner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317081814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Television presenters are key to the sociability of the medium, speaking directly to viewers as intermediaries between audiences and those who are interviewed, perform or compete on screen. As targets of both great affection and derision from viewers and the subjects of radio, internet, magazine and newspaper coverage, many have careers that have lasted almost as long as post-war television itself. Nevertheless, as a profession, television presenting has received little scholarly attention. Personality Presenters explores the role of the television presenter, analysing the distinct skills possessed by different categories of host and the expectations and difficulties that exist with regard to the promotion of the various films, books, consumer and cultural products with which they are associated. The close involvement of presenters with the content that they present is examined, while the impact of the presenters' own celebrity on the tasks that they perform is scrutinised. With a focus on non-fiction entertainment shows such as game shows, lifestyle and reality shows, chat, daytime and talk shows, this book explores issues of consumer culture, advertising and celebrity, as well as the connection of presenters with ethical issues. Offering detailed case studies of internationally recognised presenters, as well comparisons between national presenters from the UK and Australia, Personality Presenters provides a rich discussion of television presenters as significant conduits in the movement of ideas. As such, it will appeal to sociologists as well as those working in the fields of popular culture, cultural and media studies and cultural theory.

PART IThe People Who Lead Programmes

Chapter 1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315600178-2

This is a book about television presenters and it refers to the programmes on which they appear by the industrial term ‘presenter-led’. This is a very useful term indicating the first of the tasks of a presenter – to lead the programme, to guide it from the front, but also to lead it to the viewers and the viewers to it. Certainly once a presenter becomes well-known, he or she can draw viewers to a new show, but what about unknown presenters? One of the tasks of this book will be to look at where presenters come from. By the time they arrive on the main terrestrial broadcast channels and certainly in prime time, very few of them are completely unknown and so they can do this latter mode of leading, even if they are themselves moving over from another field or section of it, as the professional sports figures who take up commentary and hosting do.

Presenter-led programmes constitute a significant proportion of the television schedule, even if this is not apparent from the focus of most television studies, which prefers to consider scripted fictions of various kinds – dramas, soaps and sitcoms. The proliferation of television channels consequent on the growth in pay services and the shift to digital broadcasting has meant an increase in presenter-led shows because by and large they are cheaper than dramas. Of course there is the occasional high profile presenter like Jonathan Ross, whose £6,000,000 annual contract with the BBC could be cited to demonstrate otherwise (and was a focus of the 2009 BBC inquiry into whether the Corporation was paying too much money for people whose specific talents could not easily be identified), but for the most part presenter-led programming is cost-effective – comparatively cheap, popular and able to deliver many hours of programmes. Even during the various discussions of the 2009 move of American presenter Jay Leno to prime time and his replacement by Conan O'Brien in the late night chat show slot, the comparative cheapness of presenter-led programming was commented on. Apparently an episode of The Jay Leno Show cost NBC $US400,000 compared to an (unspecified but presumably high end) scripted drama which could cost up to US$3 million (Farhi and Moraes 2010: 11).

It is not customary to consider the news or current affairs programmes or blue chip documentaries as presenter-led, nor as particularly cheap, but they will be considered here because individual people move between these programmes and the ‘lighter’ formats that fit the term more easily, and because the work that is done by newsreaders, political reporters and expert commentators like David Attenborough or David Starkey is remarkably similar in many respects to that of the more than 100 people around the world who have fronted Who Wants to be a Millionaire? or the smaller number who guide the evictions of Big Brother contestants, or to television cooks like Nigella Lawson and Bill Granger. They are intermediaries between the programme and the viewers, cultural intermediaries even, bringing information about (slightly) new ways of being and thinking to the attention of the television audience. When Pierre Bourdieu introduced the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ in Distinction, he named television presenting among the occupations engaged in promulgating information about the ‘art of living’ (1984: 359), although he did not expand on the activities involved explicitly and he was far from approving about the whole category.

The programmes at the heart of this study will be ordinary television ones (Bonner 2003): gameshows, chat shows and talkshows, lifestyle and reality shows, time of day shows whether morning, afternoon or evening/tonight ones. The frequency with which the less respectful term ‘show’ appears in the genre terms is indicative. Like many writers on television, I alternate ‘programme’ and ‘show’ to provide a bit of variety to the prose, but in the formal language of television producers, schedulers and senior network executives, the distinction is meaningful. Presenter-led shows of these kinds do not represent the prestige side of television and senior executives in the field have shown astonishment that an academic would want to pay attention to such programmes and people. Their prevalence here is for several reasons; their presenters are expected to work from and display their personalities far more than is the case on news or blue chip documentaries; they occupy more of that part of the schedule which is presenter-led; and the presenters operate as cultural intermediaries to a much greater extent than do those on other presenter-led programmes.

The prestigious programmes will be paid some attention: not only the news and current affairs ones (which are never publicly referred to as presenter-led), but sport and occasionally science and business. Some reference will also be made to children's programmes, though the more specialised aspects of this category are beyond my expertise. For the most part though, if there is a named person speaking on-screen directly to viewers, it fits the brief. Most examples will be drawn from the United Kingdom and Australia. Occasional American instances will expand an observation, but usually only when the programme involved has screened in the UK or Australia and even so only when drawing on academic commentary about it. The web of reference within which television presenters operate is too varied for more than two cultures, similar and both familiar to me, to be drawn on. Presenters operate as sites for media convergence and did so long before the internet arrived. Books and magazine articles promoted their programmes and extended their presence from the very start of broadcasting and continue to do so now, in company with websites and online streaming. Personal appearances and scandals help and hinder careers and programmes and some knowledge of these and of the more mundane day-to-day press mentions, as well as the ephemeral bits of ‘public opinion’ overheard on buses or in queues or in ‘water-cooler’ chat also feed in to the picture and word of mouth circulating about a presenter. A rich understanding of this material is needed to underpin analysis.

Although my main focus will be on people and programmes from the 1990s and the subsequent decade, some earlier examples will be drawn on for two related reasons. On the one hand my interest in where presenters prominent in that period come from and how the role of television presenters came to be, will send me back further, on the other and even more important is a very specific interest in presenters who have managed long careers on television. It is my belief that such instances can be extremely informative about the whole field, and so in some instances programmes from the 1950s and 1960s will be discussed. Jonathan Bignell has written about the consequences of choosing particular examples in the production of narratives and pedagogical practices centred on television drama (2005). The tension between representativeness and exceptionalness he discusses needs acknowledgement here, although not all of his suggested components of a desirably reflexive practice can be followed for this study. The potential corpus of examples is huge and has to be managed in ways that combine a degree of transparency of the methods employed, with an attempt to balance my own viewing practices with elements of representativeness. More examples will be drawn from the UK than from Australia, not only because of the greater population, greater number of television channels and longer history of television broadcasting, but also because more British originating programmes are screened on Australian television, than Australian ones in the UK, thus British programmes are an intrinsic part of Australian television in a way that Australian programmes (pace the teen soaps) are not of British. As far as possible though I will avoid giving detailed consideration to presenters whose work I have not seen in its country of origin.

Presenter-led television is less evident in DVD releases generally and in those catering either to nostalgia or to educational markets than is the case for scripted fictional programming. Some presenter-led material is screened only once, while others seem to have a very extended afterlife on pay channels. Infotainment like cooking programmes provide examples of repeated programmes also available on DVD, while time-of-day programmes, like morning shows, demonstrate the reverse. Far more than was the case in what John Ellis calls the age of availability (2000), the production date of a programme identifies merely the start of its circulation, as the practices of American syndication which have long seen programmes live on for decades as a matter of course, come to be applicable to British and Australian situations. ‘Canned’ programmes, those sold internationally for screening ‘as-is’, often long after their original release date, have long screened on the old free-to-air channels, but now pay and digital channels keep such a mix of old and new in circulation that dating shows to more than a decade seems rather meaningless.

Certain programmes and presenters will be drawn on quite heavily and I will mention a couple here to indicate further the kind of factors influencing my choices. As a scholar whose research areas encompass ordinary television, celebrity and women's magazines, I am very familiar with arguing the significance of apparently trivial everyday material, yet even so, when I announced my intention to study the work of Rolf Harris, I was surprised at the extent to which I needed to defend my decision. Both as a British-resident Australian and as a presenter with over 50 years on-screen, Harris was over-determined as a case study for this project. He proved enormously fruitful, both representatively and as an exceptional case. Trisha Goddard was also valuably both British and Australian, though unlike Harris, almost all of whose programmes are British made, she has had significant separate careers in each country. The last three sentences have also raised another problem, perhaps too small to be termed methodological. It is though a problem of nomenclature. The domestic familiarity of presenters means that referring to them formally by their surnames often seems false; Rolf is Rolf, usefully immediately identifiable, while Harris could be anyone, but consistency in naming practices across all presenters mentioned will not be achievable. David Attenborough will never be David, but his brother's prominence in a related field means he cannot immediately just be Attenborough. Here the distinction between ordinary presenter-led and more serious programmes will probably be visible. More presenters referred to will travel under their first than their family names after the first full reference. Some academic respectability will be employed though; despite its useful distinctiveness, I will not be calling Bruce Forsyth ‘Brucie’. Another nomenclature problem comes from the noun and verb ‘host’. Its gendered character makes ‘presenter’ and ‘present’ always preferable, but sentences can become overloaded with words developed from ‘present’, so sometimes, even when the gendered specificity of ‘host’ is not required, it will be used for variety. ‘Hostess’ will be used only when required for historical accuracy.

One of the programmes that I will be referring to repeatedly is the motoring show Top Gear. There are several reasons for this. It is a long running show, and in its current version has been running throughout the latter half of my chosen focus period. It is arguably the most watched programme in the world (that debate is engaged in Bonner 2010a). It was popular as an imported programme in Australia before a local format was made and the mapping of the Australian presenters onto qualities of the British originals through three different variations proved very informative about presenting and the creation of personae from which to do it. Finally, the operation of a three-man presenting team, all of whom are presenters addressing the camera directly, but who operate nonetheless within a recognised hierarchy led me to take further my analysis of presenting teams, which will be a significant component of what is to come. In nomenclature terms, it provides a fine demonstration of naming inconsistency. Popular discussion of the show tends to refer to Jeremy, Hammond and May – one first name and two surnames, reflecting neither what one might expect from the internal hierarchy, nor the class distinctions evident for British viewers.

I have taken the decision that, my concern being television, the presenters to be included need to be both seen and heard. Programmes that only use a voice-over are not regarded here as being presenter-led. Generically then, this means that docusoaps will not be considered. As so often after announcing such a blanket exclusion, there are exceptions. After many years in the standard voice-over form, the very high rating Australian docusoap following Customs and Immigration officers, Border Security, changed to using actor Grant Bowler speaking to camera at the start of each episode and continuing unseen, providing the rest of the narration. The show was so established, that it seemed to make little difference. There will be occasional other instances of docusoaps that move towards being presenter-led. A more substantial exception comes with the case of David Attenborough. Attenborough is a very well known, very serious presenter of nature documentaries and his work will be discussed at various stages throughout the book. As well as appearing very much as the bluest of blue chip presenters for his own series like Life on Earth, he provides the narration for many more natural history programmes filmed and written by other people. On these occasions his is no anonymous voice-over; his highly recognisable voice evokes the whole personality, indeed presence, known through the documentaries and the chat show appearances promoting them, and endows the accompanying programme with gravitas and legitimacy by association.

Attenborough's is an internationally recognised face and voice, at least for English speakers, but some other instances operate only within national boundaries. A familiar voice's ability to evoke the face and demeanour of the speaker may be nationally bounded and if the program is exported it can only function anonymously. A particularly strange related Australian example did something of the reverse. When an Australian commercial network decided to screen the imported You Are What You Eat presented by Gillian Keith, who was completely unknown to Australians, it decided to keep her visual presence and to-camera speaking, but to replace the voice only segments with a male voice-over sporting a very marked Australian accent. It rated reasonably well, but sounded disjointed and lasted just one series on air.

In identifying programmes by the channel on which they were first screened, I am helped by the numerical nomenclature being different in the UK and Australia. The Australian free-to-air commercial channels 7, 9 and 10 – have no direct parallels in the UK and there is no channel 4 or 5 in Australia. ABC here refers always to the public service Australian Broadcasting Corporation and SBS to the Australian Special Broadcasting Service, the public service multicultural network that is partially funded by advertising. ‘Pay’ is the general term for all subscription services whether terrestrial or satellite.

The Current Scholarly State of Play

Several years ago when I was writing Ordinary Television, my study of non-fiction infotainment programmes (2003), I was surprised to find very little written about television presenting and thrown back largely on my own resources. Most ordinary television is presenter-led, but the phenomenon of this standard component of television systems around the world was very little investigated. There were books concerned with individual presenters, most frequently Oprah Winfrey (see most particularly Eva Illouz's 2003 work) and some American newsreaders, as well as some articles about historical figures, but little concerned with the practice itself, how it functioned and what it required. Two articles, by John Langer and by Karen Lury, were exceptions to that and the many citations of them attest to their importance. Langer's 1981 study Television's ‘Personality System’ was truly ground-breaking. He was emphatic about the distinction between stars, phenomena of the cinema, and personalities, the best that television could offer. He produced a whole range of oppositions between stars and personalities based substantially in the characteristics of each medium. Thus film stars were spectacular and larger than life, idealizations to be revered and distant from their audiences, even though, following Richard Dyer and through him Morin and Lowenthal, he admitted a diminution in the extent of their divinity. Personalities meanwhile were a regular, predictable part of life, intimate, immediate and above all familiar (1981: 353–6). They were a lesser form compared to the grandeur of cinematic fame, but comparative ranking is neither my concern nor constant. The terminological hierarchy had precedent, but with film in the lesser place. As Richard de Cordova was to point out, at the beginning of the twentieth century, film performers were called ‘picture personalities’ with ‘star’ being used for the greater magnitude theatrical performers (1990). By the 1980s, the regime of intimacy most evident on television had already had an impact on film and television performers, but stars retained aspects of the extraordinary, while personalities existed only in the domain of the ordinary and everyday (Langer 1981: 355). The distinctions have been reduced by the subsequent intensified operation of celebrity culture (and the expanded use of the word celebrity). So much of the work of celebrity is performed in magazines undifferentiated by medium, where it matters little whether the body castigated as too fat or pregnant, performs primarily in cinema or on television. Nonetheless, much of Langer's analysis remains valid and many analysts, trying to argue for the existence of television stars, still end by talking of personalities.

Lury's article on television performance addresses many more targets, but draws its main distinction between television actors and presenters, while acknowledging that both engage in performances, and that there are many instances of crossovers between the categories. Both, she argues are constrained by casting to ‘type’ (1995/6: 119). With presenters she notes differences between the more authoritative ones like newsreaders and documentary presenters, the more ‘excitable’ current affairs presenters, and those music hall or comedy inflected ones who present game shows and other pieces of light entertainment. In the fifteen years since writ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The People Who Lead Programmes
• Part II The Content of Presentation
• References
• Index