ABSTRACT

It is much easier to imagine tourism as a category of experience exceeding the formal sphere of television than it is to think of television without the idea of tourism. Travel, visit, movement, escape, displacement, abandonment are all terms that underscore the touristic imagination, but so too are they intimately tied to how television is now understood as a series of encounters between text and a ‘watching’ audience. Indeed, it is a limited definition of mass media that reduces its touring cultures to one of material flows of people moving from ‘screen to scene’, although this is how such a convergence has often been broached (See for instance Tooke and Baker 1996; Riley et al. 1998). According to writers such as Urry (2002) television is more than simply a non-touristic process anticipating, distinguishing and sustaining material places as sites for a tourist gaze. It is implicated in a series of different tourisms, as much defined by the apparently immobile viewer fixed in front of a depthless screen as it is by locations haunted by the ghosts of a text:

With TV … all sorts of places can be gazed upon, compared, contextualised and gazed upon again. … The typical tourist experience is anyway to see named scenes through a frame, such as the hotel window, the car windscreen or the window of the coach. But this can now be experienced in one’s living room, at the flick of a switch.