ABSTRACT
This section is treated first because it is these elements which, we would argue, provide the key to the organisation of the material in other sections. Two different elements are included under this heading. There are those items which have no basis ‘outside’ the programme and are exclusively generated by Nationwide itself. Nationwide has a wide range of self-generated items: sponsored competitions, audience-and presenter-participation events, special trips and tests which the Nationwide team undertake-the Nationwide horse, the Nationwide boat, Michael Barratt’s farewell train around the regions, etc., etc. There are also the many places in any one programme where the Nationwide team provide the inter-item and inter-region links, the frames and introductions which place and position all the other items within the structure of the programme. Both elements enable the programme to establish a substantial audienceidentification with the team itself; this is a basic mechanism of the programme, since the Nationwide team is not a team of self-effacing ‘objective reporters’ but are active Nationwide ‘personalities’ in their own right, and both embody and anchor the programme image. But it is also here that the critical contextualisations and evaluations are made-placing items, providing the links between items, signalling the appropriate treatments for items, giving items their ‘preferred reading’, towards which the audience is actively directed. This terrain of framing and contextualising is the exclusive preserve of the Nationwide team.
