(Mis)appropriating the western game show: Pole Chudes [The Field of Miracles] and the double-edged myth of the Narod

Our discussion of audience reactions to My Fair Nanny brought to light a theme which has surfaced periodically throughout our book, and which will dominate the remaining chapters: the intersection within contemporary Russian television of global television forms, nation-building agendas and local meaning-making practices. If we add to this mix the function of a Soviet past both nostalgically recalled and disdainfully rejected, we have in place all the elements which, in their infinite permutations, account for the complexity of post-Soviet television culture. In Chapter 7, we explore one such permutation: the Russian domestication of a global game show format in which the regional audience dimension, rather than, as in My Fair Nanny, merely shaping the meanings that the show generates, is incorporated into the format itself as part of a nation-building gesture centred on a mythologised folk culture. As a consequence, the generic status of the programme, A Field of Miracles (Field chudes), based on the global Wheel of Fortune format, is, over a period of time itself transformed from within by the practices of its audiences. In this sense, it bears close comparison with the prison serial, The Zone, analysed in Chapter 5. It is worth noting that the progression from Chapter 6 (where we see

regional audiences shaping the meaning of national programming) to the present chapter (featuring the restructuring of a global format around the role of the regional audience) recapitulates the audience-text movement we pursue in the book as a whole, and within each chapter. Indeed, the fact that, at the end of the chapter, we consider the response of viewing audiences, regional and metropolitan, to The Field of Miracles, reconfirms the ‘to-and-fro’ form that the audience-text dialectic inevitably takes. It is in keeping with the dialectic that, when the mythologised narod

around which Field of Miracles is based encounters the ‘real folk’ constituting our focus groups, the nation-building strategy comes under pressure and fragments along both centre-periphery and class axes. For this reason, we suggest, the myth of a unified narod proves to be a distinctly double-edged sword in the hands of the nation-builders who wield it.