Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 84

actively express their identity and differentiate themselves from others. As Chaney
argues, lifestyles are also sensibilities which become imbued with ethical, moral
and aesthetic significance. Even the most quotidian practices and mundane objects
accrete aestheticisation in the contemporary social climate whereby tastes and
aesthetic choices have become responsibilities by which one is judged by others.
More importantly, for individuals and groups who are relatively destabilised by
the lack of permanence offered by more traditional ways of life, the practice of
lifestyle construction can serve an important function as a means of coping with
social change. For Chaney, lifestyles are reactive modes of behaviour or, 'functional
responses to modernity' (Chaney 1996, 11). Changes in employment; conceptions
of the family and gender relations; the development of mass society; increased
secularisation; and new urban landscapes in the form of suburbia, have meant that
lifestyles, 'offer a set of expectations which act as a form of ordered control' in the
face of uncertainties wrought by modernity (Chaney 1996, 11). Seen in this way
lifestyles serve an invaluable role for people in post-industrial societies: they act as
resources of stability or coping mechanisms which help people to manage their own
relationship to social change.
Lifestyles potentially act as stabilising mechanisms because they hook into the
rhythms and practices of everyday life; the act of lifestyling can potentially provide
ordinary comforts formed out of the habits of dailiness. Indeed Felski (2000), as
I established in chapter 2, argues that dimensions of ordinariness are stabilising
cognitive mechanisms which help people cope with rapid social change. Similarly,
the formal construction of lifestyle television fastens onto a sense of the ordinary
through its evocation of facets of everyday life, aspects identified by Felski as
repetition, home and habit (Felski, 2000). The ordinariness evoked here relates not
to the strand of thought which equates an authentic version of ordinary everyday
life with the lives of women or working-class people (see for example, Featherstone
1995). The ordinariness of terrestrial television presenters and subjects in the late
1990s, as I argue later, was at least a lower middle-class version of ordinariness.
Rather, it is possible, as Felski suggests, to consider ordinariness in a different light:
the taken-for-granted continuum of the activities of daily life characterise most
peoples' lives. 'Everyday life', Felski argues, 'is not simply interchangeable with the
popular: it is not the exclusive property of a particular class or grouping, Bismarck
had an everyday life and so does Madonna' (Felski 2000, 16). The '“ordinari-
ization”' of lifestyle media describes how lifestyle programmes fasten into the sense
that we are all, in so far as we connect to the backdrop of everyday life, ordinary; we
are all somehow anchored to routine, to a place called home and to the mundanity
of daily habit. The enactment of lifestyle ideas are rooted to the humdrum rhythms
and practices of the quotidian. The garden, an inextricable part of our conception
of home, is one of the key sites where the habitual and mundane, yet familiar, safe
and private practices of daily life are located. Strategies of '”ordinari-ization”' work
to make viewers connect the familiar, safe spaces of home with accessible and
achievable lifestyle ideas.