Helen Wood

This contribution is the introduction to the Cultural Commons special issue on ‘Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique’, edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood. Through the lens of ‘energy’, this special issue explores audience research as a field, practice and critique that both demands and harnesses energy. Between tensions, currents and changes, in light of both rapid development and enduring understandings, we – as audience researchers – are constantly challenged to bring new energies to our research, while at the same time being energised by these challenges. In this introduction – as well as across the different contributions – we draw on energy as a term that implies reciprocity and collectivity. Rather than thinking about a ‘return to’, or ‘return of’, audience research, this special issue both reflects on developments in the field of audience research and speculates about the future.

This article traces the evolution of the rule changes to Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code in 2021, in response to a number of high-profile crises in reality TV in 2019, to regulate for better duty of care for participants. By analysing the rhetorical framework around Ofcom complaints, conducting a discourse analysis of Ofcom’s consultation on duty of care and interviews with senior broadcasting executives, it demonstrates how the statutory framework evolves through compliance negotiations around ‘audience expectations’ and ‘freedom of expression’. Analysing the ‘silence and noise’ of the Parliamentary Inquiry and Ofcom’s consultation, shows whose voices were most prominent (broadcasters and production companies) and whose were marginalised from the debate (participants and production crew). The framing of the policy is analysed through the lens of the relationship between the broadcasters and Ofcom in a modern regulatory system that relies on governance mechanisms and models of ‘risk management’. This begins to raise questions about the regulation of care where compliance becomes about protecting the broadcaster from negligence, rather than the participant from harm, calling for a broader approach to an ethics of care which accounts for the interdependencies between all parties involved in reality television production.

Since its publication in 1997, Formations of Class and Gender has become a touchstone for research in sociology and feminist media and cultural studies due to the precise, evocative and generative way it pinpoints and theorises class and gender. Skeggs’ careful ethnographic work – listening to 83 women training to be carers in the north of England over 12 years – provides tangible evidence of classed ‘feelings’ at the intersection of culture and economy and uses a multifaceted cultural studies approach to understand how this relates to their socially and historically specific context, or conjuncture. Formations gave many people a language with which to extend their analysis of the cultural violence enacted through the terms of ‘respectability’, alongside the undervalued nature of classed and gendered labours of care. These insights have had remarkable analytical reach for sociology and media and cultural studies, helping us understand how inequalities are both formed and felt. This article analyses the book’s contribution in three parts. The first opens by highlighting key features of the text and sharing our reflections on the book when re-reading it in the present. The second part charts the impact and contributions of the text in and around feminist media and cultural studies. The third part discusses the book’s continued relevance for understanding the current conjunctural moment of widening social inequality and a crisis in care, when sexism, racism and class divides adopt new incarnations, and suggests how its lessons might be repurposed today.

This chapter considers the classed dimensions of victim credibility as they are depicted in the real crime TV drama series Three Girls (BBC, 2017) and Unbelieveable (Netflix, 2019). While both series come from different television stables and the real crimes they interrogate are different, they both share an important thread in that the victims were initially not believed because of their association with “risky” and chaotic lifestyles. Following work that draws attention to the intersectional dynamics of sexual assault, this chapter traces the way in which the series approach the issue of victim credibility. Both series detail how the victims were not believed, how forms of testimony are classed and show how judgement by representatives of the state visits another trauma upon the raped victim. The chapter goes on to discuss what we might mean by the “inherent” characteristics of “unbelieveability” and shows how the series generate victim hierarchies around appropriate victimhood. However, in the narrative affordances oftelevisual resolution, both series ultimately reproduce versions of the Pygmalion narrative that attach recovery from trauma to individualised images of social mobility that ultimately mark the working-class victim as embodying the crime. The chapter argues that this prevailing narrative needs undoing so that we can pay adequate attention to the material socio-economic contexts of rape and appropriately amplify the classed voice.

This article draws on the work of Raymond Williams to argue that under covid-19 the dominant ‘ways of seeing’ the countryside and the city in Britain are working to obscure the structural violence of capitalism. Cultural narratives of ‘exodus’ from the city abound in British media, fuelling a material ‘race for space’ as the middle class rush to buy up rural properties. The ‘cottagecore’ social media aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatized solutions to the crisis through nostalgic imagery of pastoral escape. At the same time, nineteenth-century discourses of dark, diseased cities have been rearticulated, providing ideological support for racist migration policies. Exploited migrant workers in Leicester are framed as ‘modern slaves’ in the city’s ‘dark factories’; their bodies are transcoded as ‘dirt’ which must be ‘rooted out’ of the nation. We argue that these binary narratives and aesthetics of a bountiful, white countryside and an infested, racialized city lead to an ‘unseeing’ of the deep structural causes of inequality. We develop Williams’s analysis to show how these cultural imaginaries also sustain the gendered and racialized division of labour under capitalism, arguing that the country-city distinction, and the material injustices it obscures, ought to become a central focus for cultural studies.

This article analyses (broadly lower middle-class) women’s responses to the arrival of commercial television in the UK in the 1950s, and seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of British women’s relationship to television, consumer capitalism, and modernity in the mid-twentieth century. While women are dominantly figured as especially prone to being seduced by commercial culture at this time, our analysis of material from the Mass Observation archives shows that women in this context were more likely than men to be resistant and hostile to the idea of “sponsored programming”. We also show how women’s responses reflected and reproduced elitist discourses about “Americanization” as well as the susceptibility of the working classes to the vagaries of commercial culture. We therefore call for a more nuanced and transnational conceptualisation of the historically shifting relationship between women and television.

This article focuses on the BBC1 three-part drama Three Girls, broadcast in July 2017, which dramatised the Rochdale child sex-grooming gang scandal of 2011 and won five BAFTAs in 2018. While many of the dominant press narratives focused on the ethnicity of the perpetrators, few accounts of the scandal spoke to the need for a sustained public discussion of the class location of the victims. This article considers how the process of recognising the social problem of sex-grooming is set up for the audience through a particular mode of address. In many ways the drama rendered visible the structural conditions that provided the context for this abuse by drawing on the expanded repertoires of television social realism: the representation of the town as abuser; the championing of heroic working-class women; and the power of working-class vernacular. However, ultimately, the narrative marginalises the type of girl most likely to be the victim of this form of sexual abuse. By focusing on the recognisable journey of the girl ‘who can be saved’ this renders the impoverished girl as already constitutive of the social problem. The analysis draws attention to the difficulties of recognising alternative classed subjectivities on television because of the way that boundary-markers are placed between the working class and the poor and suggests that the consequence of these representations is to reify ideas about the victims of poverty and exploitation.