Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen Roberta Pearson (bio) Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen by James Bennett. Routledge 2010. $140.00 hardback; $35.95 paper. 226 pages Bennett's Television Personalities undertakes the first comprehensive examination of those recurring and familiar faces that front lifestyle and light entertainment programming around the world—the medium's Jamie Olivers and Simon Cowells. Television personalities are not merely presenters but rather "those who develop a 'televisual image'" based on subsidiary forms of circulation as with film stars.1 But television personalities must be judged by standards appropriate to the small screen, not the large. While film stars, as Richard Dyer famously proclaimed, exhibit a tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary, television personalities must consistently display ordinariness, authenticity, and intimacy, entering the viewer's home without seeming to enact a prefabricated image. "Television personalities only ever play themselves, emphasizing the continuousness and authenticity of their ordinary persona," which distinguishes them from actors or stars who enact characters in fictional programming.2 Television personalities produce presentational performances of the self; television actors or stars produce representational performances of a character. Rescuing these personalities from academic neglect, Bennett posits them as deeply imbricated in television's systems of ideological, economic, and cultural meanings and argues for recognition of the skill, labor, and performance that go into the construction of their images. The book as a whole draws on wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research on both historical and contemporary television personalities; includes a range of well-chosen case studies; and applies theory lightly while making connections to larger debates, such as the construction of self in the postmodern world. Although the book devotes only one of eight chapters specifically to performance (in the sense of what these celebrities actually do on screen), the on- and off-screen [End Page 165] performance of authenticity and ordinariness is the fundamental component of the television personality's image. Readers interested in television personalities' on-screen performances—their presentational enactments of ordinariness and intimacy—will find fascinating Bennett's discussion of Cilla Black, long-term host of the British game show Blind Date (ITV, 1985-2003). Bennett shows how Black uses her voice, eyes, and body, together with her knowledge of television production, to keep contestants, studio audience, and home audience all engaged, playing off her image of being the ordinary girl from Liverpool. Bennett also provides a brief, if incisive, analysis of Jamie Oliver's performance in his early Naked Chef incarnation, remarking on the way in which the show's editing creates a kinetic style in keeping with Oliver's persona. Like any other screen performance, Oliver's results from a collaborative effort among all the program's producers, from costume designers to camera operators to directors. While it is important to recognize and value television personalities' skill and labor, it is equally important to recognize and value that of their largely invisible collaborators; otherwise, one runs the risk of buying into the myth of the self-made individual that the television personality system encourages. To be fair, however, an extensive production analysis of any one of Bennett's case studies would require another book. A key question lurks behind Bennett's discussion of Black's performance as typical of the on-screen construction of the television personality image: Can the analysis of this particular personality and this particular performance further our understanding of all television personalities? Bennett explicitly states, "It is not my intention here to provide a comprehensive typology of either performers or performance modes that are evident across the television personality system."3 Given the vastness of that system, Bennett's reluctance is understandable, and an illumination of even a part of that vast system is a valuable contribution to scholarship. As Bennett also says, there seems little point in comparing the performance of David Attenborough as natural historian with the deployment of Graham Norton's camp naughtiness as a chat-show host, given the generic differences between their programs.4 But the book never really comes to terms with these fascinating generic differences and, indeed, omits altogether figures like Attenborough and the other media dons who host the numerous science...