C94 Column
Where the Viewer is King
"Mum, Dad, Denise and Antony sit in front of the television in their living room, smoking, talking and bickering" is the unpromising description of Granada's made-for-the-BBC The Royle Family, now in its third season. It centres on small, seemingly trivial details of human interaction, dialogue and domestic squabbles. In common with other postmodern TV, it borrows and blends its genres - mainly along the soap and domestic sit-com axis, touching base with Mike Leigh's material and visual style. In the opening shots a stable, static camera frames their activities so that we enter their world through their TV screen in a mirror image of our own domestic setting. We're watching them watching us. While it shares its style with other TV fare, and even though we can trace Jim Royle's lineage back to Alf Garnett (albeit a gentler version)and not fail to note Jim and Barbara's cultural baggage from Brookside, nevertheless, it's the only programme on the television where people are shown actually watching television at all - and watching real, familiar, popular programmes so much of the time.
Throughout the episodes, the TV schedule is central to the family's everyday routine - structuring their domestic space and exchanges. In what Umberto Eco has called neo-television, the Royles express a strong sense of TV's history and an extravagant self-referentiality. They gamble on the outcomes of The Antiques Roadshow, they vie with the contestants in Who Wants to be a Millionaire? or practice their Ali G routines. While Nana favours daytime chat shows (timeshift viewing obligatory) Denise and Barbara collude to watch Changing Rooms despite Jim's running sarcasm about its purpose - watching paint dry. But while TV is central, even dominates, it's not a passive saturation. TV's presence in this house runs alongside all their other activities, embedded in everyday consumption - a new sweater, casual gossip or Antony's new girlfriend, glimpsed through our window on their world.
Since the 1960s there has been a growing body of critical writing about television - from Raymond Williams' understanding of TV as flow; through the regime of the glance; the cult of the personality to attract audiences; recent ethnographic studies of the process of watching TV with an emphasis on the meanings and pleasures that viewers generate in their interaction with TV. Much has also been written about how users tame new communications technologies through domestic adoption and point to the gender power relations in the take-up and use of technology in domestic contexts (in this household, Dad controls the zapper). One of the great strengths of The Royle Family is that it embodies and visualises these critical studies in the drama of the everyday - small details scrupulously observed and framed within larger social occasions - "our Antony's birthday," the build-up to Denise's wedding, Christmas and the birth of Baby David. We view their small crises, celebrations and poignant moments through our own TV screens - watching them watching us as the TV audience becomes central to the equation.
Stephanie McBride
