Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 85

The Popularity of Lifestyle Programming
Lifestyle and consumption have accrued increasing prominence for people in
contemporary society (Bauman 1987; Chaney 1996, 2001). The credence of
this argument was clearly illustrated by the eminence and popularity of lifestyle
programming in the popular media in the late 1990s. By the start of the twenty first
century there had been a noticeable shift in primetime British terrestrial scheduling.
By the year 2000, between 8.00 and 9.00, 'factual entertainment' - an umbrella term
which includes lifestyle programming - had virtually replaced the popular staples of
situation comedy and high status genres such as documentaries and current affairs
programmes (Brunsdon et al. 2001; Moseley 2000). Mainstay popular genres of the
1980s were being transferred to other less prestigious compartments of the terrestrial
schedule in order to make way for 'the dominance of lifestyle':
In the 1980s, variety shows, quizzes and sit-coms were a regular feature of the primetime
8-9 schedules. In 1999 they had all but disappeared. Sit-coms had moved to a later slot in
the weekday schedules, variety was almost exclusively transmitted on weekend evenings
and quizzes had either been incorporated into the later 'comedy' slots or relegated to the
daytime schedules (Brunsdon et al. 2001, 43).
These architectural schedule changes barometered the historical rise of the popularity
of lifestyle, for as Ellis argues, 'any schedule contains the distillation of the past
history of a channel, of national broadcasting as a whole, and of the particular habits
of national life' (Ellis 2000, 26).
These changes were the result of an elaborate interplay of factors which
impacted on the British media industries. For example, the growth of cable and
satellite broadcasting and the call in the 1992 Broadcasting Act that 25 per cent of
programmes be produced by independents heightened the pressure for programme-
makers to provide cheaper programming (Brunsdon et al. 2001, 31). This was a
demand met by the economies of lifestyle genres which require no theatrical regalia
or high budget stars and sets. In addition, the increase of factual entertainment from
8.00-9.00pm was a reaction to the ratings crisis endured by the BBC in the early
1990s, which spurned a will to engage more aggressively in a scheduling battle
over ratings (Brunsdon et al. 2001, 40; Ellis 2000). 2 But perhaps more pertinently,
primetime was re-configured because the media industries recognised the need to
address wider cultural shifts - programmes in the late 1990s addressed audiences as
consumers rather than citizens. The authoritarian, paternalistic voice of 'old public
service discourse' was virtually dismantled in the most popular enclave of primetime
television (Bondebjerg 1996, 29). In its place, as Bondebjerg argues, was a more
democratised, 'new mixed public sphere where common knowledge and everyday
experience play a much larger role' (Bondebjerg 1996, 29). As Brunsdon observed,
2 Ellis (2000) offers examples of how the BBC waged several battles during the mid-
1990s with the popularity of ITV's 'early evening strengths' by successfully pitching factual
entertainment programmes 999 Lifesavers and Animal Hospital against the ITV 'banker'
police series The Bill. ' Factually-based entertainments performed better,' he argues, 'than did
the sitcoms which BBC1 had initially pitched against The Bill ' (Ellis, 2000, 31).