Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Television and Media Culture
Introduction
Chapter 4 looked at the legislators of garden history. It argued that most dominant
accounts, save for the new emerging social history of the private domestic garden,
fail to provide any contextual history or location for understanding ordinary peoples'
gardening practices and aesthetics
at the local level.
However, while written sources
are bestowed high measures of symbolic worth in our culture, they are not the only
texts which communicate values about the garden. This chapter turns its attention to
a more popular and contemporary institutional site where gardens became the subject
of intense focus in late 1990s: the media. It discusses how contemporary gardens,
gardeners and gardening 'experts' were represented in the national and local press,
magazine publishing and most especially on television.
While the 'lifestyle' media - particularly in relation to lifestyle television
programming - burgeoned in Britain in the mid-1990s, 'lifestyle' generally received
scant academic attention during that time (see Strange (1998) on television cookery
programmes). Since then lifestyle has a new emerging scholarship (Bonner 2003;
Brunsdon et al. 2001; Brunsdon 2003; Heller 2007; Hollows and Bell 2005, 2006;
Moseley 2000), though
garden
lifestyle media still remains under-explored. 'They
are too “ordinary”', remarks one of the few to have written about them, 'to be of
interest' (Gabb 1999, 256; see also Taylor 2002). Since my concern in this study is
to look at the intrigue of ordinariness, it would seem prudent to precisely focus on
this compartment of the media - renowned as it is for being mundane, trivial and
quintessentially ordinary (Bonner 2003; Silverstone 1994).
I argue that the continued popularity and growth of lifestyle television from the
mid to late 1990s was the result of a wider cultural shift: the rise of 'lifestyle' must
be understood as part of the transition from civic to consumer culture (Bauman
1987). At the local level, this shift was experienced through the fall of traditional,
communal 'ways of life' to the rise in the construction of consumer lifestyles
(Chaney 1996, 2001). For subjects who can no longer rely on the stability offered by
the traditional way of life, lifestyle projects can act as coping mechanisms in the face
of the changes delivered by modernity (Chaney 2001). The lifestyle media, I argue,
offered viewers the stabilising potential to help them cope; the formal construction
of lifestyle hooked into the ordinary rhythms, practices and sites of everyday life.
Using Bauman and Chaney, I argue that in the context of late-capitalism, the media
and culture industries had a vested interest in acting as a key site for the management
of the transition Chaney describes. Hence I examine the inter-locking, mutually
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