Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Game On
- 1 Genre and the Quiz Show
- 2 Quiz Show Histories
- 3 Quiz Show Theory: Approaching the Programme Text
- 4 Knowledge in the Quiz Show
- 5 The Quiz Show and ‘Ordinary’ People as Television Performers
- 6 ‘Asking the Audience’: Quiz Shows and Their viewers
- Conclusion: ‘Not the Final Answer…’
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Quiz Show and ‘Ordinary’ People as Television Performers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Game On
- 1 Genre and the Quiz Show
- 2 Quiz Show Histories
- 3 Quiz Show Theory: Approaching the Programme Text
- 4 Knowledge in the Quiz Show
- 5 The Quiz Show and ‘Ordinary’ People as Television Performers
- 6 ‘Asking the Audience’: Quiz Shows and Their viewers
- Conclusion: ‘Not the Final Answer…’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Ordinariness is not much in demand [on television] any more. Even reality TV shows claiming to explore the lives of the unfamous turn their subjects into stars, [producing] … fodder for heat magazine. The genuinely ordinary – the sort of people who might wear skirts with elasticated waists, eat fish fingers for tea and worry vaguely about fungal infections on their feet … are beneath general notice.
(Bell 2004: 15)Geraldine Bell's description of ‘ordinary’ people in The Guardian indicates how responses to ‘ordinary’ people on television are often couched within discourses of (class) taste. The references to ‘elasticated waists’ (read unfashionable, cheap clothes) and ‘fish fingers for tea’ (read unfashionable, cheap food) are far from neutral. But Bell is also pointing to what she sees as the disappearance of the ‘ordinary’ on television. Reality TV has developed an appetite for the type of ‘ordinary’ people that can guarantee something close to a semi-professional performance. As press critic Ian Parker puts it, ‘the real person who cannot rustle up a heightened TV persona is asked to step aside’ (cited in Piper 2004: 282). But the fact that television's portrayal of ‘ordinariness’ may differ across genres, or that it appears to be changing over time, usefully foregrounds its status as a cultural construction – something which is brought into being by television. It is this process of constructing the ‘ordinary’ which is the focus of this chapter.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Quiz Show , pp. 118 - 139Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008