ABSTRACT
Broadcast TV proposes itself a very different spectator from that of cinema. The viewer for TV is very far from being in a position of producing a totalising vision of the truth from an initial stance of curiosity. For broadcast TV, the regime of viewing is rather one of complicity with TV’s own look at the passing pageant of life. TV’s regime is not one of enigma and solution of enigma, but rather one of continuous variety, a perpetual introduction of novelty on the basis of repetition which never reaches a final conclusion. Broadcast TV’s viewer is therefore a bystander, but a bystander in very specific circumstances, those of the home.
