ABSTRACT
In 1997 Finlay and Johnson published an analysis of Saint and Greavsie, a football discussion programme broadcast on the ITV network at Saturday lunchtimes during football seasons in the early 1990s. These scholars claimed that the role of television programmes based on football talk was to establish a discourse space ‘in which men can interact without women and begin to perform masculinity’ (Finlay and Johnson 1997:140-41). Elsewhere (Kennedy 2000) I have argued that it is possible to identify markers of masculine style in televised football that constitute an address to a specific type of viewer-a ‘masculine address’ that excludes those viewers who do not identify with it. The evidence of such an address may explain the traditional lack of popularity of football with female viewers. Contemporary football discussion programmes, however, are no longer exclusively presented by men. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, can we find evidence to support the view that football discussion programmes still exclude women from their address? Does the presence of women on television football shows change the address to the viewers?
