ABSTRACT
This chapter is concernedwith the British daytime television programmeWantedDown
Under (BBC1, 2007-),which presents familieswith the possibility of trying on a new life
in Australia to test whether they would like to emigrate. Unlike the reality sub-genre of
property shows, this programme takes families through issues related to work, daily life
and homes, as well as the emotional trauma of leaving people behind, in order to assess
whether the family want to embark on a life overhaul. In this chapter we consider how
the feminised daytime address of the show encourages participants and audiences to
worry over contemporary conditions of family life inBritain during a periodof austerity.
Here the ‘good life’ is figured through a relatively imaginary Australia, as an escape from
financial pressure and an impossible work/life balance in which time is an increasingly
precious commodity. Drawing upon Lauren Berlant’s (2011) ideas around the cultural
work of ‘cruel optimism’, we consider the ways in which the programme sets up a
relationship to Australia which creates an impossible attachment to a more carefree life
throughwhich family time is delivered as leisure time.Heremigration is lifted out of the
racialised rhetorics which frame current debates in Europe, and is instead heralded as a
relatively free and easy life-choice which of course privileges, at the same time that it
normalises,whiteness.Women in the programme, and the feminised daytime audience,
are encouraged to worry over what such flight means – in terms of the emotional ties to
home, but also crucially in their role as ‘doing the right thing for the family’. InWanted
Down Under, this attachment to the good life is both lauded and problematised, high-
lighting its premise as a gendered structure of anxiety in the current cultural milieu.
