Grand Designs

Consumer Markets and Home-Making

Aneta Podkalicka, Esther Milne, Jenny Kennedy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781137578983
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This is the first academic book to examine the long running hit series Grand Designs, which occupies a significant place in the popular imagination internationally.
The authors apply an empirically grounded, critical perspective to the study of television to reveal how people use the program in their everyday lives. The emphasis on everyday uses and meanings combines creatively with understanding the program theoretically, textually and in terms of its production structures. This position challenges framings of the popular lifestyle and factual television genre that has been dominated by a neoliberal or governmentality perspective for many years.
Presented by British designer and writer, Kevin McCloud, Grand Designs follows the progress of home owners as they embark on design, renovation and building projects at almost always dizzying scales of endeavour. Understanding the program as both a text to analyse and a site ofmaterial impact, the book draws on interviews with production members, home renovators, building practitioners and audiences, as well as references to associated media formats to provide contextual depth to the analysis. The authors argue that, as a cultural object, the program is both shaped by and enacts social discourses of home-making, design value and taste. Navigating public, commercial and promotional logics, Grand Designs sparks new forms of cultural production and consumer markets.

© The Author(s) 2018

Aneta Podkalicka, Esther Milne and Jenny KennedyGrand Designshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57898-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Aneta Podkalicka¹ , Esther Milne² and Jenny Kennedy³

(1)

School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

(2)

Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

(3)

School of Media and Communication, RMIT, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Aneta Podkalicka (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Esther Milne

Email: [email protected]

Jenny Kennedy

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Grand Designs has been on air since it was first broadcast on British television in April 1999. It is produced by Boundless Productions, a subsidiary of FremantleMedia UK, and screens internationally in more than over 100 territories including Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa and Taiwan. Presented by British designer and writer, Kevin McCloud, the highly successful program follows the progress of homeowners as they embark on design, renovation and building projects at almost always dizzying scales of endeavour. McCloud himself is crucial to the enduring popularity of the series. His closing soliloquies, gentle sense of humour and charisma have become an integral branding strategy for the program. Its market reach expands to multi-platform spin-offs and franchises such as Grand Designs Abroad, Grand Design Trade Secrets, Grand Designs Australia, Grand Designs New Zealand, the Grand Design Magazine and The Grand Design Live Exhibitions held biannually in London and Birmingham since 2008, which have also been held in Sydney and Melbourne. In addition, McCloud has published numerous books such as Kevin McCloud’s Complete Book of Paint and Decorative Techniques (1997), Grand Designs Handbook: The Blueprint for Building Your Dream Home (2006), and Principles of Home: Making a Place to Live (2011), created and presented the program Kevin McCloud’s Man Made Home, and in 2007 launched the crowd-invested company ‘Happiness Architecture Beauty’ (HAB). The aim of this venture is to ‘challenge the way identikit volume housing’ is constructed in the UK by helping people to buy, rent and, in some cases, design and ‘self-build’ homes that are ‘sustainable, beautiful and a pleasure to live in’ (HAB 2014). Its first initiative established a housing estate of 42 homes located in Swindon called ‘The Triangle’ which itself became the subject of a Channel 4 two-part special entitled Kevin’s Grand Design.

Our story begins not with McCloud, however, but with the title music that precedes him. Written by British composer and producer David Lowe, whose other scores include the iconic audio branding of the BBC News credits, the Grand Designs distinctive signature theme is a pastoral, joyful mix of choir and strings. No less pastoral, or instantly recognisable, is the title sequence which accompanies the score. It opens on a sweeping view of the countryside inviting us to embark on a tour of the British landscape with the background shifting from country to coast. Aerial shots scale clifftops, zoom in on agricultural fields, skim forests of green and burnished brown. But this is not simply a celebration of the quiet beauty of British scenery. Because now we can see small framed images begin to emerge depicting the energetic construction process. Here is a pallet of timber; there we catch glimpses of site personnel working on a rooftop and beyond are the beautiful buildings we are yet to meet in their various stages of progress. Criss-crossing these images and barely discernible at first are the faint grid lines of architectural plans. As the music swells, the letters of the title start to come into focus, appearing almost as if being built from the blueprints. And as shown in Fig. 1.1, we now alight from our British tour with the final shot of the logo ‘Grand Designs’ fully realised from the plans and occupying the foreground of the screen. At the time of writing, the opening title sequence is designed by Matt Lawrence who was tasked with giving the titles a ‘refresh’ in 2016 during his time working with production company Envy. As he explains, ‘my concept was a construction of scenes in a schematic style – much like an architectural drawing – leading into a schematic logo reveal’ (Matt Lawrence, email message to authors, May 27, 2018). Before Lawrence, London-based company Huge Designs was responsible for the credit sequence. What hasn’t changed in nearly 20 years is the signature musical score. Indeed, so evocative and popular is it that Lowe has extended the track into a piece entitled ‘Wedding Bells’ in response to requests by fans of the program to use as their wedding song (Lowe 2014).

Fig. 1.1

Opening title sequence of Grand Designs

Although walking down the aisle to Grand Designs might not appeal to everyone, it is compelling evidence of the affective and commercial poignancy of the program. To a significant degree, its narrative tension is produced through distinctions of taste—aesthetic, financial and environmental—drawn by both audience and participants. One could also add ‘generic’ to the list of distinctions. Grand Designs moves, not quite effortlessly, between documentary film, reality programming and property TV, its vernacular both an ode to ethical consumption and a celebration of excess. Illustrating how the program functions as a contested site over questions of taste is, on the one hand, McCloud’s regular insistence that the program is not about property, ‘I never use the P word’ he says (McCloud cited in Collinson 2011), and on the other hand, tabloid media’s almost visceral condemnation of it. The Daily Mail, in particular, persistently features stories of what it calls ‘the Curse of Grand Designs’ (Williams 2013). With a palpable sense of derision, one episode review put it like this:

As the rain washes away their traditionally built walls and the builders insist on eco-unfriendly concrete, their idealism crumbles faster than you can say freethinking, self-sufficient twats. By the middle of January the following year, they are still on a building site and the money’s run out. There’s no option but to sack the builders and do it themselves. Ha. (Daily Mail, n.d.)

In this book, we explore how narratives of consumption and innovation both shape and are shaped by Grand Designs. We want to capture something of the passion and disquiet this program produces. What it means to be a homeowner amidst economic uncertainties and growing concerns for the environment presents an interesting conundrum for participants and viewers of this genre around the world. Aspirations to design, build and own homes prevail despite financial precarity lingering from the global financial crisis. Grand Designs: Consumer markets and home-making is the first book-length study to consider the program. Indeed, scholarship specifically focussed on Grand Designs is relatively sparse; this invisibility, we argue, speaks to its particular generic patterns of consumption and production. In order to redress the gap, this book brings into dialogue a number of critical fields which help to situate the program’s reception, production regimes and symbolic systems of meaning. We now turn to a survey of the critical terrain into which our book intervenes. Of particular concern in this section is to offer some thoughts about what might account for the absence of sustained academic interest in Grand Designs when its cultural impact is undisputed, as an economic player and as an intensely popular pastime. We conclude the introduction with a chapter summary.

Critical Fields

This study takes as its scholarly frame a number of distinct yet interrelated disciplinary fields: reality TV; lifestyle media, in particular the programs dealing with property and real estate TV; consumption studies, including ethical and sustainable consumption and the emerging figure of the moral entrepreneur, thrift and austerity cultures. These areas are vast, of course, but the critical engagement with them is necessary as we seek to forge a meaningful link between media research and the current challenges of contemporary lifestyles. The introductory section charts a critical path through the literature to identify key debates and foci that help to situate Grand Designs.

Reality TV

Reality TV, ‘one of the most influential, controversial, and provoking media genres in contemporary culture’ (Negra et al. 2013, 187) has been a dominant form of television programming for the last 15 years although many media scholars look further back to the 1970s, 1950s and earlier for its formal and social underpinnings (e.g. Berenstein 2002; Hatch 2002; McCarthy 2004; Marcus 2014). Over the years, its descriptions have included: ‘documentary as diversion’ (Corner 2002); ‘confrontainment’ (Grindstaff 1995); ‘reality based programming’ (Friedman 2000); ‘docusoap’ (Dovey 2000); the circulation of ‘global formats’ (Holmes and Jermyn 2004); ‘popular factual television’ (Hill 2005); ‘ordinary people engaged in unscripted action and interaction’ (Nabi 2007, 373); ‘the fusion of popular entertainment with a self-conscious claim to the discourse of the real’ (Murray and Ouellette 2004); and ‘possessive individualism, hyper-competitiveness, and commodification’ (Miller and Kraidy 2016, 176).

Recognising the need to refine these broad definitions, scholars have attempted to categorise reality TV into subgenres and formats. The influential typology developed by Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette identifies eight groupings: gamedocs, dating programs, makeover/lifestyle, docusoaps, talent contests, court programs, reality sitcoms and celebrity-based programs (Murray and Ouellette 2004, 3–4). Further studies have revised these types using different methods and criteria such as the audience survey material employed by Robin Nabi who distils previous classifications to identify ‘romance and competition’ as the two fundamental characteristics ‘most salient to audiences when thinking about reality based programming’ (2007, 383). Other researchers look to the formal or representational elements arguing, as Daniel Beck, Lea Hellmueller and Nina Aeschbacher do, it is the performative dimensions that calibrate the genre. Their schema uses plot-like descriptors such as ‘Getting Along in New Settings’, ‘Living History Programs’ and the ‘Making a Dream Come True’ narrative (2012, 1–43).

Finally, the political economy and industrial contexts of reality TV have been emphasised to highlight how surveillance or neoliberalism bifurcate and organise the genre. Chad Raphael coins the term ‘Reali-TV’ to illustrate that the economic needs of the industry are inseparable from the manner in which reality is represented through the medium. The point of departure for Raphael is the degree to which a particular format will rely on ‘non-traditional’ or professional modes of labour for ‘story development, writing, performing and camerawork’ and for its production contributions. While some formats use a hybrid of paid and amateur workers (such as The Real World which employs professional camera crew and non-professional actors), others rely almost entirely on a non-unionised, unpaid labour force for user generated content (such as America’s Funniest Home Videos) (Raphael 2004).

For Mark A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Production: Visual Style, Narrative Structure and the Viewer Renovator
• 3. Home: Ideas of Home and the Work of Home-Making
• 4. Consumption: The Ethical and the Extravagant
• 5. Innovation: From Represented Novelty to Transformation in Practice
• 6. Markets: Creating Value in Media Industries and Consumption Cultures
• 7. Conclusions
• Back Matter