1 - ‘Desperately Seeking the Audience’: models of audience reception

Summary

Audiences are problematic.

(Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998: 1)

The Who's ‘Who are you?’ is the theme song for one of the most popular and widely viewed television programmes in the US and the UK: CSI. It functions as a provocative opening and a pun as one of the central themes of the programme is to find out ‘whodunit’. It also serves as a useful juxtaposition – the earthy, rock tones of The Who bellow out in contrast to the high-tech sophistication offered by the forensic investigating team. This question, ‘who are you?’, is also at the forefront of audience studies. Who are you the viewing public and what do you want to watch. This question has perplexed researchers, producers, writers and executives since the inception of television.

In the preface to her influential study of audiences, Ien Ang tells us ‘that despite television's apparently steady success in absorbing people's attention, television audiences remain extremely difficult to define, attract and keep. The institutions must forever “desperately seek the audience”’ (1991: ix). One of the central arguments in this book is that emotion is central to this seeking of the audience. Writers and producers understand the importance of moving their audiences and audiences value television programmes on the basis of their ability to move them. Ang's work aimed to disrupt a notion of the audience as unified and controllable and to reintroduce a sense of irony about this mass of people watching television (1991: ix-x).