John Ellis,
Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty.
London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2000.
ISBN 1 86064 489 9 (paper).
193 pp.
UK£12.95
(Review copy supplied by I.B.Tauris)
Uploaded 1 November 2000
Television producer and academic John Ellis writes about television at the beginning of the new millenium. Ellis covers a lot of ground in eleven chapters, and all of it is interesting. The twentieth century was a century of witness, he argues, and watching television is a way of bearing witness to events. Television is not the only medium to do this, and chapter two is a discussion of television within the context of other media. But it is television’s domesticity that allows it co-presence with viewers and therefore “made witness into an everyday, intimate and commonplace act”. (36)
The turn of a new century encourages Ellis to offer a television history; he defines three eras in its development: scarcity, availability and plenty. He suggests that television performs different functions in each era. For example, in the era of scarcity, which for most broadcast systems is the era of one or two channels, television was crucial in the project of social integration. With few channels and few programmes, it could be assumed that the majority of the population would be watching the same thing at the same time, thus it “brought nation populations together”. (46)
In the era of availability, characterised by multiple channels and programs, television’s function is one of “working through”. Television broadcasts images from everywhere, and for us to experience these distant events in our homes means “We cannot say we did not know”. (15) Ellis captures the feeling of watching images of things and events we feel powerless, or too remote from, to control. He argues that television genres in the era of availability provide us with a process of working through the raw material, from the grabs of unanalysed images in news programs, to the acting out of individual tastes and preferences in magazine and lifestyle shows.
For Ellis, the crucial element to television is the role of scheduling. Television genres often resist closure, and “televisuality” is layered and multiplicitous, so television seems the “safe area in which uncertainty can be entertained”. (82) Scheduling, however, stabilises this uncertainty as it determines both the order of programs available, and, in reaction to audience research, the types of programs made. In the era of scarcity, scheduling provided stability by programming to the perceived rhythms of domestic life. In the era of availability, however, scheduling becomes competitive as broadcasters respond to the “narrativisation” of audience research, programming to identified differences in demographics. Consumers, meanwhile, suffer “choice fatigue”.
The era of plenty promises more of everything. Technologies promise new ways of watching, including individual program prediction and selection, and new uses for the television set, from email to shopping on-line. Some of Ellis’ predictions are available now, or are on their way, but these changes may not signal the end of terrestrial broadcasting. As viewers are asked to pay more for new services, Ellis suggests free-to-air broadcasting might have an important social role to play by providing stability through familiar scheduling, such as that during the era of scarcity. Television has the “ability to provide a voluntary point of social cohesion, of being-together while being-apart” (176), and in the era of plenty, terrestrial broadcasting might be that point of contact.
I think it’s tough to write about television. Television is so complex that to single out any one element, or moment, is to leave out so many other factors at play. But “television is always specific”(145), and to record its evolution is to discuss specific broadcasting instances and shifts. Ellis’ examples are specific to British television, including an extensive discussion of attempts by the BBC to “peel off” The Bill viewers from ITV (Independent Television), and a lengthy chapter on Channel 4. This specificity, or locality, does not detract from the project, and many of the programs mentioned are familiar to global viewers. Further, the shifts in the eras of scarcity and availability are to do with wider social changes not confined to Britain. Therefore Ellis’ work relates to other broadcasting systems.
Television will always change faster than we can write about it – programs disappear and schedules change rapidly and regularly. Ellis’ book, like most work on television, suffers a little from the complexity of the object of study. His specific examples seem to end in 1997, which seems a bit out of date now, but only because I want to know more about has happened since then.
Ellis tells us that his book took a long time to write, and it’s a small book of big ideas. There’s a lot of white space on some of the pages, and a lot of subheadings, and some chapters are better than others, but it’s compelling reading. At times, Seeing Things displays pre-millenium anxieties, hopes and fears, as if it had been written on 31 December 1999, before the clock ticked over and everything was okay. But this is an important book because of its place in the bigger, difficult project about writing about television. Ellis’ writing is thoughtful and thought provoking.
This isn’t a book about television and globalisation, although Ellis discusses imported programs and “Americanization”. Seeing Things doesn’t offer semiotic readings of programs, although a chapter is devoted to a discussion of the videographic, the televisual device that moulds the photographic image and layers it with more image, text and sound. Nor is it a book about audience studies, although the shifts in television eras are directly related to the increasing amount of information available about viewers. As such it’s not a text book, but a thoughtful discussion about how we are with television, and what we might be with it in the future, and I hope academics will add this to their lists of further reading. Ellis writes about how we have shaped television and how, through repetition and chance, structures and accidents, regulation and ratings, it has changed us, and with us. Definitely worth reading.
Margaret Nixon