ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the background of confessional television and celebrity disclosure as a preface to the Langham/Stephenson exchange. Television's preoccupation with self-styled therapeutic analysis globally took hold in the 1980s with the advent of the American talk show. Popular hosts of the era, Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey and Sally Jessy Raphael capitalised on the feminist mantra "the personal is political" by providing a platform for collectives largely unheard in public forums. Although inviting trained analysts to participate as one-off specialists or regulars, celebrity hosts also played pseudo analyst to no celebrity and celebrity guests. The classic talk show can be seen as a short-lived mutation of the more intimate one-on-one interview/biography/confessional television popularised in the 1950s for instance, with Britain's Face to Face where even Jung was interviewed in his Zurich home. The competing energies of doubt, constructed reality, and authenticity that filter through our screens via this celebrity confession also colour the nonscreen therapeutic encounter.
