ABSTRACT
Class themes haunt many of the debates about ‘reality’ television programming. In shows where media professionals are replaced with ‘social actors’ (Nichols 1991) discourses of class operate at a number of levels. First, ‘reality’ television is regularly spoken of as ‘trash’ television, locating participants and viewers at the bottom of a hierarchy of taste classification.1
Second, ‘reality’ television is seen to represent a crisis in civic public culture because public and private spheres have been inverted and the ‘ordinary’ has been made central. As Roger Bromley (2000) notes, ‘ordinary’ is one of the many euphemisms to emerge, after thirty years of political rhetoric and academic theory claiming the demise of class, as a substitute for the term ‘working-class’. Locating drama at the site of the ‘ordinary’ also suggests a greater purchase on the ‘authentic’ – a route informed by socialrealist critique in documentary and film – which is often problematically associated with the working class. Third, there is overrepresentation of the working class on ‘reality’ television, precisely because of their cultural and economic situation: Mimi White (2006) in her analysis of the American ‘reality’ programme Cheaters, a programme set up to catch partners in acts of infidelity, admits that the $500 payment skews the class profile decisively, so much so that ‘There is clearly a level of class exploitation at work’ (p. 229). This simple fact is often minimised by an optimistic rendering of the democratising potential of ‘reality’ television, which underplays why the working classes make such good entertainment in the first place (paid or unpaid). Fourth, and connectedly, class raises its head because the access offered to television in the search for participants reinvents the mythologies of social mobility promoted by neoliberal political culture (Biressi and Nunn 2005), despite the fact that the gap between rich and poor widens, and social mobility rates remain stagnant (Aldridge 2004). Finally, many of the programmes are structured through class relations where the working class are exposed as inadequate and in need of training in middle or upper-class culture (a mutation of the Pygmalion narrative, e.g. Ladette to Lady, or differentiated within the working class by the traditional trope of rough versus respectable, e.g. Holiday Showdown, Wife Swap). And yet, notwithstanding the entry of ‘reality’ television into
the heart of these glaring class-based realities, discourses and sensibilities, it has been possible for some authors in television and media studies to write about ‘reality’ television without an adequate theory of class relations.
