So instead of looking through the window at history we’re actually going to climb through that window to the other side and feel it. (Janice Feyen, Pioneer House)
The historical re-enactment reality series, of which Pioneer House (New Zealand 2001) is the first New Zealand example, constitutes an anomaly in reality programming because it signals a clear intention to identify itself with a historical past. As has been discussed elsewhere, reality television is definitively present-ist in its representation of time and space, as it privileges the affective impact of immediacy over the discursive intervention of historical context.[1] Pioneer House similarly prioritises the present tense, even as it takes New Zealand’s colonial past as its subject material. This contradiction is managed via a number of temporal strategies which pull the past into the present, rendering representations of lived experiences from a historical past as both contemporary and seemingly (a)live. As Pioneer House participant Janice Feyen aptly observes, reality television formats such as this, in which contemporary families adopt the living conditions of a past time, supply a “feeling” relation with the history they purport to offer – an alternative model of engagement which is definitively sensory and significantly unmediated. In this way, readers of history are re-positioned. Instead of looking from the outside in (“through the window”), or backwards at what has been, programme participants are invited to corporealise bodily experiences from the past century as they bring history to life.
This particular manifestation of history is possible because the historical material of programmes such as Pioneer House is, to cite Frances Bonner’s use of the term, “uneventful”.[2] The kind of history posited by this format is domestic, quotidian, intimate, ordinary and banal. As a project in social history, Pioneer House foregrounds the private and domestic texts of the previous century, telling tales gleaned from marginal notes in domestic manuals, personal diaries, grocer’s bills and children’s scrapbooks. As the marginalia of past times rather than the stuff of history books, the subject matter of Pioneer House constitutes a different relation to the present than that assumed by the great events of a public and national history. Like other reality-history shows of a similar type, the cyclical, repetitive and everyday nature of the domestic events which occur within the domain of the programme renders them timeless and familiar, meaning they slide easily into the present tense of production. In fact, this kind of history may be discussed as temporally present-ist, and thus pre-eminently suited to the medium of reality television.
The ambiguity of past and present generated within the reality-history format is further compounded by the status of these texts as products of their own time, that is, the turn of the second millennium. The recent wave of reality television series based on the re-enactment of domestic history began in the year 2000, and may be understood as an effort to over-determine social relationships with history in an era in which time itself seems in danger of running out. With this in mind, this paper seeks to illuminate the contradictory impulses at work in reality television re-enactments of history, and considers the extent to which manifestations of domestic intimacy may displace more conventional representations of the historical past.
A Medium for the Present
Since its inception, scholars have defined the medium of television according to the twin precepts of intimacy and immediacy. In terms of production, reception, flow and content, television privileges that which may be brought close: temporally, cognitively and affectively. This multi-valent principle of proximity has been discussed as the “present-ness” of television, the term “present” nicely incorporating both a temporal and social or spatial meaning. For Mary Ann Doane, the “temporal dimension of television [is] that of an insistent ‘present-ness’ – a ‘This-is-going-on’ rather than a ‘That-has-been’, a celebration of the instantaneous”.[3] As Doane suggests, the very structure of televised transmission, in which content lives and dies in the moment of its reception, forces everything on screen into the present tense. This “insistent ‘present-ness’” operates regardless of programme content. Thus, attempts to represent the historical past on television may be stymied by the pre-eminence of its present tense. More specifically, documentary theorist Bill Nichols reads television’s present-ist impulse in terms of a correlative loss of history, one which is produced by the particular aesthetic and discursive practices of reality programming. “Reality TV”, as Nichols states, “anneals the felt gap opened by historical consciousness between representation and referent”[4] , thereby generating an ineluctable present-tense or “the pervasive ‘now’ of tele-reality”.[5] Thus, critical contentions on the subject of television’s particular temporality seem to preclude the very possibility of televisual historicity.
Nevertheless, the success of the twenty-first century reality-history television series suggests an alternative historiography, one which happily deploys the present-ist impulses of the medium in the service of representations of the past. Although a present-ist temporality eliminates historical perspective in ways which seem regrettable for Nichols, the loss of history may here be reinterpreted as the advantage of intimacy and explored in relation to reality programming as both intentional and affective. The present-tense of reality television is critical to its feeling of realness because it underpins affects of immediacy and intimacy, making programme material seem both live (as a structure of broadcasting) and alive (as a structure of feeling). For formats which purport to offer viewers an experience of “living history”, the production of immediacy is thus, paradoxically, integral to the manifestation of the distant past.
The representation of both past and present takes on a particular urgency at certain epochal moments in history. In this light, Vivian Sobchack considers the relationship between flow and history in her article on New Year’s Eve television montage sequences. Sobchack analyses these programmes in terms of their special temporality, suggesting that they offer rare “sites for reflective meditation” in the sea of material which constitutes television’s present-ist flow and “its distracting insistence on the present moment of its ephemeral presence”.[6] Here, the turning year is an event which is both historical and of the present. Television’s effort to represent this calendrical event is thus figured as a self-conscious moment in television’s performance of history. As noted by Karen Lury, the BBC’s New Year’s Eve broadcast on the cusp of 1999/2000 was particularly charged in terms of its attempts to represent both past and present time.[7] This twenty-four hour television event, which included, at hourly intervals, satellite images of ‘other’ midnights around the world, exhibited an anxious desire to both fix and represent time itself. In this reading, television reaches its acme as a medium of the present, telescoping time and place into a spectacle of fragmented images of history-in-the-making.
As this brief overview suggests, when television theorists speak of history it is frequently history in the present tense, that is, history-in-the-making. Both “catastrophic” events, screened as breaking news (as discussed by Doane), and public spectacles, produced on television as media events (such as the New Year’s Eve countdown), are broadcast live and as they happen. The extent to which they constitute history depends on their indelible attachment to the historical continuum into which they erupt. That is, they make history as they occur because their occurrence is defined by its uniqueness in time and space. These events manifest a special relationship with historical time because they are, by definition, unrepeatable (consider the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers, the turn of the millennium). However, even as the production of these events as televised spectacle constitutes the historical continuum in which they may claim a stake, their attachment to this continuum forces them to recede into cultural memory. These events can be both live (emphatically present) and historical (attached to the past) because the moment at which the event co-incides with broadcast is so brief. As has been noted, “history comes to television, but only for the moment”.[8] Thus, as suggested above, the immediacy of televisual representation is critical to the manifestation of such events as history.
Reality/Television/History
Whether it arrives suddenly, as catastrophe, or ceremonially, as public spectacle, history, in the examples cited above, exists as a pro-filmic event. Television may amplify and multiply its existence, and even confirm its status as history, but it does not create (or seek to create) the event which it represents. However, as preposterous as it may seem, reality television series about history defy proscriptions as to televisual historicity by creating history anew.
As humankind prepared itself for the end of the second millennium, television’s capacity to represent the present was usefully harnessed to manifestations of history, in ways which assuaged contemporary anxieties as to the expiration of time itself. Collective neurosis about catastrophic computer failure (as the digital roll-over to year ‘zero’ was prophesised as the end of technological time) masked apparently less rational fears of a Nostradamusian apocalypse as the year 1999 drew to a close. In this environment, it is perhaps less surprising that television was called into service as a vehicle for the production and affirmation of history. For the BBC’s marathon broadcast on the last day of 1999 was not the only television event to commemorate history at the turn of the millennium in Britain. A historical re-enactment reality series entitled 1900 House(United Kingdom 2000), which required a modern day family to live according to the social mores and material conditions of the year 1900, was commissioned in commemoration of the turning century. Another television project, entitled Castaway (United Kingdom 2000), created a small community of volunteers on a remote Scottish island and documented their lives for an entire year, beginning on 31, December 1999. In their different ways, both 1900 House and Castaway attempted to produce history rather than simply mediate it. As television events specific to a time and place in history, these formats sought to make (television) history through their significant relationship with the historical present. By invoking the significance of the year at hand, both formats seemed to anchor themselves (as reality television never does) to a particular point in time. With their historical date writ large, these formats constructed themselves as television events with a use-by date, extended but nevertheless ‘one-off’ televisual experiences. Thus, like New Year’s Eve broadcasts, their relationship with the time of history was structured by their intention to manifest themselves as events in television history. In this sense, the effort to produce history in these texts may be read concurrently as the will to confirm human existence in the present.
Although a heightened attachment to a notion of history, fuelled by the turn of the millennium, may have precipitated this programming trend, the evolution of the reality-history format is illustrative of the ineluctable pre-eminence of present-ism in the reality television genre. As its subsequent re-incarnations and international transfers show, the 1900 House format turns out to be quite free from the historical moment of Y2K. The popularity of the 1900 House series lead the same production company to produce 1940s House (United Kingdom 2001) a year later in 2001, creating an arbitrary sixty-ish years between time of production and historical referent. The shift from a single and specific year (1900), with its neat centennial relationship to the year 2000, to a decade (1940s), blurs the significance of a particular numerical relationship between the time of production and the historical setting in a way that illustrates a slide away from historical specificity. At the same time, production houses in New Zealand, Australia and America purchased the rights to this format, generating in New Zealand Pioneer House (broadcast in 2001 and set in 1900) and Colonial House (broadcast in 2003 and set in 1852), in America Frontier House (broadcast in 2002 and set in 1893) and Colonial House(broadcast in 2003 and set in 1628) and in Australia Outback House (broadcast in 2005 and set in 1861) and The Colony (broadcast in 2005 and set circa 1800). The simple erasure of the numerical signpost ‘1900’ gives this format a temporal freedom more suited to the principles of reality programming. The historical referent thus becomes a far less specific site, whether it is a decade (1940s), a broadly suggestive historical period (Colonial) or even a place (Frontier). Thus, the temporally specific 1900 House has been gracefully adapted to the present-ist mode through the erasure of its historical-temporal markers.
Curiously, however, the sequel productions which followed the original series in both the United Kingdom and New Zealand exhibited a will to reattach themselves to history. After the success of 1900 House and Pioneer House respectively, both production companies chose to attach the second series to a more politicized period of national and social history, deploying the additional stresses these factors placed on domestic circumstances as a new reason to watch.[9] Set in London during World War II, 1940s House uses bomb scares, rationing and women’s contribution to the war effort to refresh the formula established by the representation of past experiences of domestic life in 1900 House. Similarly, the relative security of suburban life in Victorian Auckland, as illustrated by Pioneer House, is exchanged for the rugged challenges of pioneer settlement in the second New Zealand production, Colonial House. In this series participants found themselves delivered to shore by sailing ship, carrying their worldly possessions several miles inland and living in canvas tents while they built a pioneer’s cabin out of available materials. In both cases, however, the great national histories of war and settlement form little more than a backdrop to the principal narratives of family, home and domestic labour. This is of interest here because it is indicative of the fluidity with which reality television forms attachments to a historical continuum, only to release itself from the constraints of chronological history by shifting the emphasis onto the kinds of past experiences which resist containment within any particular time frame. Drafted into service in this way, public history loses its bite. Subsequent productions in the United Kingdom, including The Edwardian Country House (United Kingdom 2002) and The Regency House Party (United Kingdom 2004), reverted to type, as they focused on intimate personal relationships, social issues around class and gender and the minutiae of domestic experience. The fluidity with which the various incarnations of the ‘house’ series attach and detach themselves to/from national histories is indicative of the freedom with which reality television treats existing historical narratives. As suggested, a focus on domestic life provides the series with a license to re-invent the past in television’s own image: intimate, immediate and banal.
Pioneer House: Writing History in the Dirt
Although, as a television project inspired by the turn of the millennium, Pioneer House makes much of the one hundred year timeframe separating the Victorian household from its re-enactment in the twenty-first century, the space between the two remains, in practice, significantly vague. This is because the history expressed by television’s reality-histories is not only created anew but created as, for and through the medium of television. Thus, despite the fact that the domestic spaces represented by these programmes, and the activities which are undertaken within them, are attached (aesthetically, discursively, numerically) to a nominated period in the historical past, they are wilfully present-ist in their realisation, and positively quotidian in their delivery.
As suggested above, this is possible because the historical material of programmes such as Pioneer House is emphatically personal rather than public or political. As a project in social history, Pioneer House presents the year 1900 as a catalogue of domestic trivia, intimate experiences and ordinary, everyday activities. One of the recurrent subjects of interest in the historical-reality series is the menial labour of household management. In Pioneer House, episodes focus in detail on the family’s efforts at cooking, cleaning, dusting, sweeping, gardening and laundering in which the materials of domestic life are disciplined into appropriate forms. This focus on housework allows the production of history to occur through the interaction of contemporary bodies with historically located objects, in ways which redeploy historic practices in the present tense.
The relationship between animate bodies and inanimate objects is critical to the model of historical authenticity at work in the series. In the first episode of Pioneer House, the show’s resident expert, social historian Dr. Caroline Daley, introduces the series with the following commentary:
It’s not unusual to recreate rooms from the past – museums do it all the time – creating displays where people can see what it was like to live in that past – but what we’re doing here is unique. We’re recreating a home from 1900 – a sort of time machine for the family to go and live in.
When Daley calls the place a “home”, she inflects the pioneer house with warmth, vitality and contemporary, common experience, rendering the time of history intimately proximate to the present. When she distinguishes the house from a museum, she identifies the different processes by which it may offer a connection with the past. In a museum, one may only “see”; the promise of Pioneer House is that one may also “feel”. The practical use of the pioneer house as a dwelling transforms the retro-fabricated Victorian villa from a site of exhibition to a site of occupation, reconfiguring display as experience. As has been observed elsewhere, television’s manifestation of history as an interactive site of exploration is contiguous with current trends in museum design. And yet, as noted by Taddeo and Dvorak, the “total immersion” experience offered up by historical reality series sustains the possibility of historical embodiment over the course of its extended duration, in ways which render history both painful and messy.[10] In this way, the historic building and its contemporary occupants produce history through their engagement with one another, a symbiosis which characterizes the interpenetration of past and present throughout the format.
As the transfer from museum site to “home” suggests, the pioneer house itself, and the antique objects placed within it, are transported into a new set of social relations when they are worn, handled and used by the Feyen family. These buildings and household objects incorporate people into history when they ‘call out’ to be used in certain ways. However, in between the family (certified as being from the present) and the house and its contents (which are certified as being from the past), is the rubbish which they generate together. This domestic dirt and waste is critical to the representation of ‘living’ history in Pioneer House because it offers up material evidence of the family’s actualised experience of the past. Unlike the antique articles inside the house, which came into being in the late nineteenth century, have been well-preserved and are here redeployed as if new, the dirt in the house is generated as new, in that instant and from contemporary materials. The bread crumbs which fall from the table, the coal dust which falls from the coal range and the threads which fall from Janice’s sewing machine manifest dirt in the style of the previous century, but they come into being in the present. The antique items (the table, the oven and the sewing machine) cease to function as articles in a museum display when they are used by humans in ways which generate mess. It is precisely this level of detail – the dirt which is manifested in the present-tense – which animates the history represented by Pioneer House into ‘living’ form. Thus, history comes into being in these reality programmes at the very point it dissolves into instances of dirt and dust.
Here, television displays history as a patchwork of rubbish, presenting butter papers, soap shavings, coal dust and vegetable scraps as the recurrent signs of past times. In one episode, Janice Feyen is shown scattering damp, used tea-leaves onto the kitchen floor, prior to sweeping up, in accordance with a tip she has learnt from a Victorian domestic manual. When she completes the task, the commentary notes the efficacy of this technique and the camera moves in for a close-up on the dustpan showing the clumped wet leaves and balls of dust. The contents of the dustpan are shown here as the material evidence of Janice’s productive embodiment of a historic practice. Thus, material dirt generated within the pioneer house authenticates history, as it furnishes a proof of the real.
But household rubbish is not the only kind of domestic dirt produced by the friction between contemporary bodies and historically-authenticated sites and objects. The occupation of the pioneer house also generates instances of bodily waste, and it is this kind of dirt which offers the most intimate, and thus most potent, manifestation of the historical real in programmes such as Pioneer House. Menstrual blood in calico pads, working-man’s sweat in woollen long-johns and tears of frustration in the handmaid’s apron are critical moments in the history-reality narrative because, like the tea leaves in the dust pan, they constitute instances in which the historical re-enactment of domestic life produces history anew, offering up dirt or bodily waste as material evidence of both history and reality. The sensitive bodies of the house’s contemporary occupants testify to the feel of scratchy underwear, the smell of unwashed wool, the discomfort involved in the use of an outdoor dunny. The pre-eminence of sensory experience is illustrated by the ‘tripe episode’, in which the Feyen family are obliged to partake in a typical Victorian meal. This story line is narrativised as a series of physiological activities and reactions – showing the family cleaning, cooking, serving, tasting, regurgitating and finally burying the old-fashioned meal in the garden. In this way, the explication of history takes place as a bodily and contemporary experience rather than a cognitive reading. As Stephen Heath has written, “television actualizes rather than intelligibilizes time”.[11] In Pioneer House, knowledge of history occurs via the ‘actuality’ of sensation, a proof of the real which is made present, bodily and temporally. In this way, the production of domestic dirt in these programmes refutes Robert Thompson’s contention, in regard to reality-history formats, that “You can’t replicate the past. You can [only] replicate the surfaces of the past – what things looked like and what materials they were made of”.[12] As boiled tripe passes through the bodies of the programme’s participants, Pioneer House reaches far deeper into an imagined and embodied history than that supplied by a surface image of a plate of offal. In these moments, the production of bodily waste pulls the past into the present tense. This is because bodily emissions are generated, absorbed and ultimately resolved in ways which have been certified (by the programme’s resident historian) as contiguous with past practices. Their realisation, however, via the twenty-first century bodies of the family concerned, is resolutely, and unapologetically, of the present.
Although many aspects of the domestic experience of Pioneer House are markedly different from contemporary practices, they cannot be properly attached to the summer of 1900 – the historical moment they purport to represent – but only to a generalized sense of some time ago. As these domestic practices were repeated daily or weekly for many years or perhaps decades by many different domestic workers, they can never be attached to a specific place, time or person. Even within the narrow range of the programme’s production, individual instances of house work, such as Janice’s action of sweeping up with damp tea leaves, are made to stand in for daily repetitions of a task, which are invisible but presumed to occur. Thus, even as information about the domestic management of household dirt, or the management of personal waste, supplies an important aspect of the programme’s effort to represent a historical past, this information fails to assert any particular place in the historical continuum of the nineteenth century. In this way, the dirt generated by domestic activities during the course of the Pioneer House re-enactment continuously resolves the past as a process of replication via its manifestations in the present. Because the production of domestic dirt by human beings occurs constantly and repetitively through time, the representation of such domestic details resists attachment to a particular moment in the historical past, or indeed, the historical present. In this way, the dust and dirt of Pioneer House is indicative of the extent to which the format manages the representation of history by subsuming history into the immediacy and intimacy of domesticity.
Conclusion
For reality television, an authentic representation of New Zealand’s past is one which is not political, but intimate and immediate. Accordingly, Pioneer House boldly reconfigures the past as a series of private, bodily and domestic experiences which may be freely relocated within the buildings and bodies of a contemporary community and family. In this way, the spatial and temporal proximity of the past achieved by Pioneer House is a testament to the processes by which reality programming seeks to register realness via the body, the home, and the present moment. Thus, despite its apparently anomalous relationship with historical time, Pioneer House epitomizes the affective strategies of reality television as a genre, as the representation of past experience feels real because it is (perhaps surprisingly) bodily, ordinary, local and immediate.
Importantly, Pioneer House makes history present by re-enacting it inside a contemporary space – making it domestic, quotidian and ordinary – and within contemporary bodies – making it visceral, vivid and occasionally vulgar. In other words, it makes history palpably and purposefully the stuff of reality television. This is possible because reality television does not seek to represent the kind of history which has a unique existence in time and place, which comes to television and stays so briefly. Rather, reality television makes history in its own image, producing a kind of history which manifests itself as everyday, intimate and banal. In this way, the temporal strategies through which reality programming maintains immediacy are easily accommodated by this kind of quotidian history.
While critics of reality programming in general focus their censure on the various bodily excesses committed by reality television shows, the visceral evidence of bodily experience in a historical format such as Pioneer House is doubly provoking, as it appears to corrupt the proper, epistemological function of exhibitions about history. As observed by Misha Kavka, reality programming is contentious because it contravenes the “educational or consciousness-raising impetus which defines documentary” through its adherence to a series of isolated presents and the elimination of socio-historical context [13] ). As Pioneer House attempts to ‘do history’ as reality television, it might be read benignly as an educational programme which utilises the populist strategies of reality programming to deliver its history lesson. More radically, however, Pioneer House seems to offer an alternative mode of learning, one which generates dirt and disgust, one which is grounded in visceral responses and bodily functions, one which seeks to feel rather than to know. It is this aspect of the format which challenges the pre-eminence of conventional documentary strategies of knowledge-sharing. Like all good reality television formats, Pioneer House seeks to bring things closer and to privilege the experiences of the everyday. What makes the programme contentious is that it takes as its subject the material hitherto characterised by distance, objectivity and particular forms of authority. Pioneer House makes history visceral and, more radical still, makes the past present.
Endnotes
[1] Misha Kavka and Amy West, “Temporalities of the real: conceptualising time in reality tv”, in Understanding Reality Television, eds. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (London: Routledge, 2004), 136-53.
[2] Frances Bonner, Ordinary Television: Analyzing Popular TV, (London: Sage, 2003), 43.
[3] Mary Ann Doane, “Information, crisis, catastrophe”, in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellancamp (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 222.
[4] Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana UP, 1994), 51.
[5] Nichols, 54.
[6] Vivian Sobchack, “‘Happy new year and auld lang syne’: on televisual montage and historical consciousness” in Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real, ed. James Freidman, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002), 92.
[7] Karen Lury, Interpreting Television ( London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), 138-141.
[8] Kavka and West, 143.
[9] It seems that a similar point could be made about Australia’s The Colony, or America’s Colonial House. See, for instance, Michelle Arrow, “‘That history should not have ever been how it was’: The Colony, Outback House, and Australian history”. Film and History 37, no. 1 (2007): 54-66.
[10] Julie Ann Taddeo and Ken Dvorak, “The PBS historical house series: where historical reality succumbs to reel reality”. Film and History 37, no. 1 (2007): 18.
[11] Stephen Heath, “Representing television”, in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellancamp (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 279.
[12] Thompson quoted in Taddeo and Dvorak, 27.
[13] Misha Kavka, “Reality estate: locating New Zealand reality television”, in Television in New Zealand: Programming the Nation, eds. Roger Horrocks and Nick Perry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 225.
Created on: Sunday, 29 March 2009