Abstract
Using the example of ‘Machines for Living’ (8 April 1958) from the BBC’s ‘Your Life in Their Hands’ series, I explore doctors’ and patients’ performances on live medical television. The point is to examine how the grammar and technology of live television provided affordances and constraints to the representation of medicine, here the high-tech medicine of dialysis and heart-lung bypass at Leeds General Infirmary. I use several theoretical lenses to focus attention on the participants’ performances, including work by Erving Goffman, Richard Schechner, Espen Ytreberg, Judith Butler, and Paddy Scannell. Although the analysis is tightly focussed on a single programme, it is intended to be generally applicable to the analysis of medical, and indeed non-fiction television of all kinds.
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