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operations following the 1986 deregulation of the French television market. Since the buyers declined to comment, it might be fair to let the selling agent have the last word: “Viewers have been bluffed by vandals . . . . They were not passionate enough” (Cousin 1992). It’s inescapable. Every channel needs to create a regular and loyal audience without spending too much on doing so. There aren’t a thousand different solutions. I’ll bet you that in ten years every channel will run one or two soaps. The question is: will they be French or bought in from other countries? (Cousin, quoted by Pélégrin 1989: 37) Conclusions The major conclusion will already be clear, namely that importing countries’ cultural and televisual norms, especially the contours of their “soapscapes,” constitute the crucial determinant of the success or otherwise of an imported soap. Massive success is predicated, as for Neighbours in Britain, upon the recognizability/acceptability of the textual features described above; upon such favorable – and sometimes fortuitous – cultural and institutional features as Kylie Minogue’s singing career and the expansion of British tabloids; and upon the acceptability of difference across such axes as weather, accent, and home-ownership. Culturally and televisually, Britain is far closer to Australia than are the other two territories. In the USA and France, given the time taken to build a soap audience, Neighbours barely achieved the threshold of visibility which would have enabled its potentially attractive textual features to come into play with viewers. In both countries, executive decisions to cut the program arose from the challenging, deregulationary ethos of the late 1980s. A second conclusion concerns the conceptualization of audiences. In writing of audiences as defined by various nation states I have, of necessity, homogenized hugely diverse audience responses. As I have argued elsewhere, to hypostatize the national is to deny both the subnational and the supranational (Crofts 1993). What is entailed in this essay, on this topic, is the necessity to work at a certain level of abstraction. There is no contradiction between such work and that of Marie Gillespie in this collection (Chapter 18). Methodologically, journalistic commentary and interviews with buyers and sellers are as appropriate to the former as are surveys of, participant and non-participant observation of, and interviews with viewers to Gillespie’s ethnographic research into the social use-value of Neighbours for Punjabi youth in the outer London suburb of Southall. Macro- and micro-levels of research are both valuable and complementary.
DOI link for operations following the 1986 deregulation of the French television market. Since the buyers declined to comment, it might be fair to let the selling agent have the last word: “Viewers have been bluffed by vandals . . . . They were not passionate enough” (Cousin 1992). It’s inescapable. Every channel needs to create a regular and loyal audience without spending too much on doing so. There aren’t a thousand different solutions. I’ll bet you that in ten years every channel will run one or two soaps. The question is: will they be French or bought in from other countries? (Cousin, quoted by Pélégrin 1989: 37) Conclusions The major conclusion will already be clear, namely that importing countries’ cultural and televisual norms, especially the contours of their “soapscapes,” constitute the crucial determinant of the success or otherwise of an imported soap. Massive success is predicated, as for Neighbours in Britain, upon the recognizability/acceptability of the textual features described above; upon such favorable – and sometimes fortuitous – cultural and institutional features as Kylie Minogue’s singing career and the expansion of British tabloids; and upon the acceptability of difference across such axes as weather, accent, and home-ownership. Culturally and televisually, Britain is far closer to Australia than are the other two territories. In the USA and France, given the time taken to build a soap audience, Neighbours barely achieved the threshold of visibility which would have enabled its potentially attractive textual features to come into play with viewers. In both countries, executive decisions to cut the program arose from the challenging, deregulationary ethos of the late 1980s. A second conclusion concerns the conceptualization of audiences. In writing of audiences as defined by various nation states I have, of necessity, homogenized hugely diverse audience responses. As I have argued elsewhere, to hypostatize the national is to deny both the subnational and the supranational (Crofts 1993). What is entailed in this essay, on this topic, is the necessity to work at a certain level of abstraction. There is no contradiction between such work and that of Marie Gillespie in this collection (Chapter 18). Methodologically, journalistic commentary and interviews with buyers and sellers are as appropriate to the former as are surveys of, participant and non-participant observation of, and interviews with viewers to Gillespie’s ethnographic research into the social use-value of Neighbours for Punjabi youth in the outer London suburb of Southall. Macro- and micro-levels of research are both valuable and complementary.
operations following the 1986 deregulation of the French television market. Since the buyers declined to comment, it might be fair to let the selling agent have the last word: “Viewers have been bluffed by vandals . . . . They were not passionate enough” (Cousin 1992). It’s inescapable. Every channel needs to create a regular and loyal audience without spending too much on doing so. There aren’t a thousand different solutions. I’ll bet you that in ten years every channel will run one or two soaps. The question is: will they be French or bought in from other countries? (Cousin, quoted by Pélégrin 1989: 37) Conclusions The major conclusion will already be clear, namely that importing countries’ cultural and televisual norms, especially the contours of their “soapscapes,” constitute the crucial determinant of the success or otherwise of an imported soap. Massive success is predicated, as for Neighbours in Britain, upon the recognizability/acceptability of the textual features described above; upon such favorable – and sometimes fortuitous – cultural and institutional features as Kylie Minogue’s singing career and the expansion of British tabloids; and upon the acceptability of difference across such axes as weather, accent, and home-ownership. Culturally and televisually, Britain is far closer to Australia than are the other two territories. In the USA and France, given the time taken to build a soap audience, Neighbours barely achieved the threshold of visibility which would have enabled its potentially attractive textual features to come into play with viewers. In both countries, executive decisions to cut the program arose from the challenging, deregulationary ethos of the late 1980s. A second conclusion concerns the conceptualization of audiences. In writing of audiences as defined by various nation states I have, of necessity, homogenized hugely diverse audience responses. As I have argued elsewhere, to hypostatize the national is to deny both the subnational and the supranational (Crofts 1993). What is entailed in this essay, on this topic, is the necessity to work at a certain level of abstraction. There is no contradiction between such work and that of Marie Gillespie in this collection (Chapter 18). Methodologically, journalistic commentary and interviews with buyers and sellers are as appropriate to the former as are surveys of, participant and non-participant observation of, and interviews with viewers to Gillespie’s ethnographic research into the social use-value of Neighbours for Punjabi youth in the outer London suburb of Southall. Macro- and micro-levels of research are both valuable and complementary.
ABSTRACT
STEPHEN CROFTS