ABSTRACT
In this chapter we shall attempt to show that there is no single answer to this question. Indeed, we argue that television’s verisimilitude results from its exploitation of two different but simultaneously represented ways of constructing what we think of as reality. These two ‘approaches’ to reality on television derive ultimately from the two modes, oral and literate, that we described at the end of chapter 8. According to our analysis, literate modes generate the set of conventional devices known generally as realism, while oral modes generate a much less easily recognized or defined set of conventions which we shall introduce towards the end of this chapter.
