TV Transformations

Revealing the Makeover Show

Tania Lewis

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317991588
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Sous-sujet: Historia y crítica de la televisión

The past decade has seen an explosion of lifestyle makeover TV shows. Audiences around the world are being urged to 'renovate' everything from their homes to their pets and children while lifestyle experts on TV now tell us what not to eat and what not to wear. Makeover television and makeover culture is now ubiquitous and yet, compared with reality TV shows like Big Brother and Survivor, there has been relatively little critical attention paid to this format. This exciting collection of essays written by leading media scholars from the UK, US and Australia aims to reveal the reasons for the huge popularity and influence of the makeover show. Written in a lively and accessible manner, the essays brought together here will help readers 'make sense' of makeover TV by offering a range of different approaches to understanding the emergence of this popular cultural phenomenon. Looking at a range of shows from The Biggest Loser to Trinny and Susannah Undress, essays include an analysis of how and why makeover TV shows have migrated across such a range of TV cultures, the social significance of the rise of home renovation shows, the different ways in which British versus American audiences identify with makeover shows, and the growing role of lifestyle TV in the context of neo-liberalism in educating us to be 'good' citizens.

This book was published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

Changing rooms, biggest losers and backyard blitzes: A history of makeover television in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia

Tania Lewis

Lifestyle programming – from daytime magazine formats to cooking, gardening and ‘DIY’ shows – has been a long-running feature of many television schedules around the world. More recently these more traditional forms of lifestyle television have been boosted by a growing number of ‘lifestyle makeover’ formats. The makeover represents a complex blend of television genres – combining conventions and concerns borrowed from lifestyle advice television and reality TV with a transformational ‘before and after’ narrative. Focusing primarily on ordinary people (although occasionally dealing with wayward celebrities), everything from homes (House Invaders) and pets (It's Me or the Dog) to parental skills (Supernanny) and bodies (How to Look Good Naked) are put under the spotlight and transformed – with the guidance of various life experts – under the gaze of the watching public.

This essay traces the development of this broad-ranging mode of programming. Locating the emergence of makeover television within the broader context of the rise of format television around the world, the essay notes the links between the lifestyle makeover show and the development of reality TV and other popular factual genres. It argues, however, that while the makeover show shares much in common with a broader turn on television towards ‘real life’ concerns, it is more than just a sub-genre of reality programming. In particular it emphasizes the genealogical links between the makeover show and the broader ‘genre’ of lifestyle advice programming on television, noting the way in which the contemporary makeover show merges the instructional concerns of lifestyle television with conventions and approaches drawn from various other genres, including talk shows and soap operas.

In tracing the generic development of the makeover format the essay frames its discussion in both transnational and national terms. Firstly, it places the rise of makeover television within the context of a broader international turn to ‘the real’ on television schedules before then discussing the rise of format television. It then goes on to examine the specific national contexts out of which the makeover format has emerged, focusing on its appearance first in the UK and then the US, followed by a brief discussion of Australia's engagement with the format. In a televisual era marked by the rise of globally successful formats such as Big Brother, Extreme Makeover and Supernanny it is increasingly difficult to talk about television cultures in purely national terms. However, the essay argues that, while the makeover format has become an international phenomenon and can be found on primetime television everywhere from Melbourne to Madrid, the historical development of the form as well as its contemporary reception has been and continues to be shaped by national cultural and televisual traditions.

From ‘true life’ to reality: Recent shifts in the televisual landscape

Television in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has become increasingly enmeshed in everyday concerns and social processes. The recent rise of lifestyle makeover shows on primetime television, for instance, can be read as one symptom of a broader set of shifts in televisual culture towards a growing focus on ‘the real’. As Frances Bonner points out (2003, 28), since the 1980s television has been increasingly concerned with the mundane and ‘the ordinary’, as reflected in its growing focus on domestic space and the lives of members of the public. Likewise, writing in the 1990s about the growing role of ‘true-life-story’ genres in the US, the UK and Europe, Ib Bondebjerg (1996) argues that this has occurred as part of a broader embrace of privatized modes of discourse, with the camera increasingly turning to focus on the intimacies of people's lives and relationships. The recent history of television can thus be summed up as being distinguished by a preoccupation with the ‘everyday terms of living’ (Corner 2004, 291).

The reasons for this turn towards the ordinary are complex and multifaceted. Reflecting not only broader socio-cultural shifts, such as the growing intrusion of public and government concerns into the private lives of citizens, it also marks economic developments within the industry itself. In particular, the shift since the 1980s towards modes of relatively cheap, ‘unscripted’ television focused on ordinary people can be seen as an attempt to deal with an increasingly deregulated market and a fragmented audience, with free-to-air networks now competing with pay television for viewers’ attention, offering audiences an abundance of programming choices (Bonner 2003; Ellis 2000). Concomitant with these economic transitions there have been a range of shifts in the policy underpinnings and ‘culture’ of the industry around the world. While the nature of these developments has varied considerably in different national contexts, in general the television industry globally has been marked by a shift towards the adoption of more populist modes of address, a shift that for some reflects the ‘democratization of an old public service discourse’ (Bondebjerg 1996, 29) while for others suggests a growing and problematic convergence between public service and commercial concerns.

The transition over the past two to three decades to a more ‘democratized’ approach has been accompanied by some interesting innovations in the realm of genre. Just as news around the world has been marked by the growing prominence of ‘tabloid journalism’ (Hill 2005, 15) and ‘info-tainment’ values (Thussu 2007), the realm of entertainment television has increasingly embraced forms of ‘dramatized factual television’ (Bondebjerg 1996, 27), including the emergence of ‘docu-soaps’ such as the UK's Airport. In broad terms, then, there has been a growing hybridization of television genres, incorporating the fictional and the melodramatic into documentary and factual forms, and culminating in the more recent rise of purportedly ‘new’ formats such as ‘reality TV’. While I am arguing here that makeover television has a distinct cultural genealogy, tied to developments in advice media and lifestyle culture more broadly, as a television format it shares much in common with these other popular factual genres and in particular reality TV.¹

Rather than representing completely new genres, both reality formats such as Big Brother and personal makeover shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy can be seen to borrow from a range of older televisual genres that feature ordinary people and their everyday concerns. The UK, for instance, has a strong tradition of fly-on-the-wall social observational television featuring members of the public, while on US television soaps, talk shows and to some extent quiz shows focus on everyday life concerns and ordinary people. Reality and makeover formats can be seen to borrow extensively from these pre-existing forms of programming, blending together, for instance, the competitive game show element of quiz shows with the voyeurism, melodrama and confessional dimensions of talk shows and soaps. Today's reality shows, however, bring together these older generic elements in ways that speak to distinctly contemporary concerns. As Helen Wood and Beverley Skeggs note (2004, 205), contemporary lifestyle and reality shows are distinguished by a shared focus on ‘interrogations of selfhood under the pressures of particular conditions’. The reality formats that have come to dominate the last decade, then, are those that rely on increasingly contrived scenarios, from bringing together diverse people to live together in an artificial community under hothouse conditions, to encouraging people to undertake major personal lifestyle transformations under the intrusive gaze of the television camera.

The rise of format television

As noted, the reality turn on television – while linked to a range of socio-cultural issues – has also been driven partly by economic concerns. In particular, one of the reasons cited for the global success of reality and makeover television has been its ability to travel as a ‘format’ into a range of different television markets, as Albert Moran discusses in detail in his essay in this collection. The deregulation of the television industry around the world in the 1980s and 1990s and the emergence of a multi-channel environment has produced a situation where the pressure for product has encouraged local producers to create programmes that can potentially move across a range of markets (Moran 1998; Waisbord 2004). This situation has seen a relative challenge to US hegemony in global television traffic and trade as television formats increasingly emerge from the UK and Western Europe as well as from smaller players such as Australia and Mexico (Magder 2004; Moran and Keane 2006; Waisbord 2004).

As Waisbord comments (2004, 359), the rise and rise of format television has resulted in a situation whereby ‘[a]round the world, television is filled with national variations of programs designed by companies from numerous countries’. For instance, Endemol, a company that originated and continues to be based in Holland, first created the global reality TV phenomenon Big Brother for the Dutch market, going on to sell the format to numerous countries. Reality-lifestyle programmes offered up as format ‘shells’ such as the highly popular garden makeover show Ground Force, first aired in the UK, have been shown to have considerable transnational mobility and selling power, as they are amenable to being readily ‘indigenized’, even in the case of programmes emerging from non-English markets (such as the Dutch market), and are relatively risk free, having been previous tried out on an audience (Waisbord 2004).

At the same time, television formats represent sites marked by complex negotiations between globalizing forces and domestic concerns and contexts (Moran 1998). Makeover television programmes – whether sold as format shells to be localized for a domestic market or shown in their original form – do not necessarily succeed in all television markets. In part this is due to the fact that even as apparently culturally neutral format shells, television formats are shaped by and speak to certain types of cultural values and concerns. In the case of lifestyle television this is especially so. As Bonner argues (2005), the content of lifestyle television has traditionally been inward looking, reflecting everyday concerns and national beliefs and values. The makeover show on the one hand can thus be seen as a product of an increasingly globalized, format-driven television industry, drawing upon a range of transnational generic, cultural and industry influences. At the same time, the development of the lifestyle makeover format has very much reflected its ties to the ‘national ordinary’ while also being shaped by different nationally inflected industry histories and modes of reception or ‘television makeover cultures’, as Mischa Kavka (2006) has termed them. In this next section, then, I want to discuss the development of the makeover format in relation to some of these different ‘makeover cultures’, focusing in particular on the rise of lifestyle and makeover television in the UK and US as well as in Australia.

The ‘makeover takeover’ on British television

While the makeover format is often popularly associated with US television culture, industry commentators and numerous television scholars point to the UK in the 1990s as a defining moment in the emergence of the format as a major primetime player. In a frequently quoted article in the film magazine Sight and Sound, Andy Medhurst (1999, 103) at the end of the 1990s pronounced the decade in the UK as ‘the era of lifestyle TV while Rachel Moseley (2000) describes British television as undergoing a ‘makeover takeover’.

British scholars have offered a number of reasons for the rise and popularity of the makeover format in Britain. Moseley suggests, for instance, that it marked an important shift in the gendering of the mode of address of television. Arguing that the format is ‘the most visible marker’ of a broader mainstreaming of feminine makeover culture, she contends that the broad-based popularity of makeover television reflects the fact that men are now engaging with a range of once feminine-coded activities associated with ‘the personal, the private, the everyday’ (in Brunsdon et al. 2001, 32).

While previously found primarily on daytime television where it often featured as segments on magazine shows aimed at women, the 1990s saw the makeover expand into a full-length format and move into primetime schedules. However, where daytime television makeovers often focused on issues of personal style and fashion, the first successful makeover formats were shows oriented towards investing in and improving the home rather than the self. One of the first breakthrough makeover shows on primetime UK television was the home renovation game show format Changing Rooms (broadcast on the BBC in 1996 and later sold into a number of international markets).² While this format seems at somewhat of a remove from daytime television's feminine style makeover, Moseley's argument positions it as a kind of cross-over format addressing both female and male viewers by blending ‘soft’ feminine interior design with the ‘harder’ focus associated with DIY programmes as well as with a fast-paced MTV aesthetic.

While acknowledging the importance of a gender-based analysis, Gareth Palmer (2004) has argued that the rise of lifestyle programming in the UK speaks centrally to shifts in British class culture and in particular the recent growth of an aspirational, petit bourgeoisie. Palmer reads the tips provided by the new echelon of experts that emerged on both home shows and fashion makeover formats like What Not to Wear (BBC 2001) as offering strongly class-inflected modes of guidance around questions of style, taste and social distinction – a focus that has remained a prominent feature of makeover programming in the UK. While many of the ordinary people featured on...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction: Revealing the Makeover Show
• 1. Changing rooms, biggest losers and backyard blitzes: A history of makeover television in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia
• 2. Makeover on the move: Global television and programme formats
• 3. Makeover television, governmentality and the good citizen
• 4. Economy and reflexivity in makeover television
• 5. Insecure: Narratives and economies of the branded self in transformation television
• 6. Property and home-makeover television: Risk, thrift and taste
• 7. Media-bodies and screen-births: Cosmetic surgery reality television
• 8. Out for life: Makeover television and the transformation of fitness on Bravo's Work Out
• 9. Little Angels: The mediation of parenting
• 10. Fixing relationships in 2-4-1 transformations
• 11. The labour of transformation and circuits of value ‘around’ reality television
• 12. Epidemics of will, failures of self-esteem: Responding to fat bodies in The Biggest Loser and What Not to Wear
• 13. Afterword: The new world makeover
• Index