ABSTRACT
Lifestyle has been the boom program type of the 1990s, yet prior to the arrival of the category of lifestyle programming in the late 1980s, related programs were hidden in a category called ‘information’, usually agglomerated with ‘religious’ and ‘arts’ into what was still the smallest program category identified. The list of sites where style or taste was able to be evident overlaps substantially with the concerns of lifestyle television, but the assertion of individuality in this statement needs more attention. Everyone has a lifestyle which acts in part to assert who that person is and where he or she fits in society, and in a consumer culture this is evinced by the purchase and display of goods and services. Television has an important role to play in this, through being a site where the options and the consequences of their adoption are displayed and their consumption advocated.
