Interaction as a performance for a viewing or listening audience has had no shortage of attention. Broadcast talk as a field of critical inquiry is reaching maturity, with several recent books in print. The body of work on broadcast talk is now quite substantial. Most of it is on verbal interaction between participants in specific genres of programming, such as news interviews and sports commentary. In the 1980s, early work in the field attended to news, especially interviews with an interest in the design of talk for overhearing audiences; other prominent work in the field examined the dynamics of phone-in talk (these are both topics of subsequent Chapters: Chapters 7 and 8 respectively). Tolson (2006) provides a useful overview of generic developments in media talk on radio and television.

This chapter focuses on broadcast text as spectacle. It deals with issues of participatory structure, power and control in enactments of social relationships offered as spectacle. In it I focus on factual programming, on TV texts depicting TV presenters and non-media people, both professionals of various kinds and ‘Ordinary’ people. I have, of course, had to be highly selective, but the mediatised social identities and relationships that I address have relevance beyond the specific genres and programmes selected. Consumerist lifestyle television is the focus of the first two sections. In them, I look at TV presenters as tourists interacting with locals at holiday destinations, then at TV ‘experts’ and authority, the presenter-expert/novice relationship and sociability.