Agriculture Reference
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Yet despite these caveats, the increased presence of the representation of
ordinariness was an important milestone for the lifestyle viewer. This chapter has
also raised a number of positive ideas about the lifestyle media and the emancipatory
potential it offered the ordinary viewer. For example, it has also been suggested that
viewers retained their status as '
citizen-
consumers' (Brunsdon et al 2001) and in
this sense the lifestyle media retained a civic, educational address. Lifestyling, as
Chaney (2001) suggests, contains stabilising strands which enable people to cope
with modernity. And ordinariness, as Felski (2000) asserts, has the potential to enable
people to envisage and execute innovative responses to rapid social change.
Postscript: Where is the Garden Now?
'The death of TV make-overs: what next?' (MINTEL, Gardening Review, 2007)
Television genres and their hybrid off-shoots are continually evolving. At the
time of writing, it is property shows that seem to be the most fashionable lifestyle
component in today's daytime and terrestrial primetime schedules.
8
If lifestyle is
about 'constructing projects of the self' (Bell and Hollows 2006, 4), then property
accrual would seem to be one way in which value becomes attached to the middle-
class self in the contemporary. Since the late 1990s, much has changed across
the televisual landscape. An encapsulation of those changes is beyond what I can
provide here, but some of the shifts in television production have signalled an end
to the lifestyle makeover as it was. Some of its conventions - of transformation
through expertise for example - have merged with reality formats to produce generic
shifts in lifestyle television: hobbyist forms of television have given way to an over
whelming preoccupation with the self (Palmer 2004; Wood and Skeggs 2004); the
out-link to retail consumption that lifestyle make-over programmes once showcased
has become a faded convention; and there has been an extension of the use of affect
and emotion that characterised the 1990s 'surprise' makeover programmes (Aslama
and Pantti 2006; Gorton 2008).
9
In this way, television genres come and go and gardening lifestyle makeover
programmes belong to a specific moment in television history. For, as I browse the
early January terrestrial and main digital schedules - and it may have something to
with the season - I can see the weight of MINTEL's (2007) assertion about the death
of the make-over: garden lifestyle programmes have disappeared. It is not that the
garden is entirely moribund on television or in the lifestyle media more generally.
8 For example, across January's 2008 primetime terrestrial schedule, Channel 4 is
showing an hour long property show between 8-9 pm from Tuesday through to Friday. That
includes:
Property Ladder
,
Relocation, Relocation
,
A Million Pound Place in the Sun
, and
A
Place in the Sun: Home or Away.
9 These shifts can be seen if one compares the changes in programme content from
What Not To Wear
(BBC1, 2002-) to
Trinny and Susannah Undress
(ITV, 2006-)
.
In the latter,
there is a deeper involvement in the relationship between the look, self-image and personal
relationships of the makeover subjects and as a result, far more emphasis on emotions and
psychological exploration.
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