Audiencing Jamie Oliver: Embarrassment, voyeurism and reflexive positioning

Abstract

This paper explores audience engagements with popular television food media via a focus on UK based celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. One series, Jamie’s Ministry of Food (JMOF) is argued to form a common resource around which different audience positions are constructed and performed. This paper draws on focus group and interview data from two stereotypically contrasting UK towns, Rotherham and Tunbridge Wells. The paper identifies three key tropes: embarrassment, voyeurism and reflexive positioning. In Rotherham I show how the formation of embarrassment is premised upon an imagined social relationship between distant audiences, JMOF and an anxiously anticipating subject. In Tunbridge Wells I explore the recursive relationship between Voyeuristic class disgust and subsequent reflexive positioning. I argue that reflexive positioning works through exchanges of public self critique and public media critique in order to attain and maintain a position within a social group. Voyeuristic and reflexive audience positions are argued to be complementary to one another, forming two parts of a wider flexible relationship to media and the social, possessed by those in particular geographical, as well as subject, positions. The ostensible aims of JMOF are the improvement of health and culinary skill and yet these are complicated and interrogated in audience accounts. Matters of a moral nature, including discussions of social class, poverty, disgust, pleasure, and the ethics of spectatorship take prominence.