The Quality of Intimacy: Revelation and Disguise in the Dramatic Monologue

Abstract

One of the taken for granted and everyday characteristics of broadcast television is the quality of intimacy. The mediation of the proximity that passes for intimacy at a distance is usually associated with non-fiction rather than television drama (Creeber 2002). The recurring familiarity of the personalities that populate genres such as talk shows, lifestyle programmes, news and weather forecasts offer an ongoing relationship of immediacy and familiarity to the viewer through direct address. Intimacy tends to be used to describe television in general rather than to evaluate the particularities of the intimacies that different forms offer to viewers (Horton and Wohl 1956; Ellis 1992: 132). Critical judgements on aesthetic qualities historically demand distance rather than engagement with an attribute such as intimacy (Brunsdon 1992). Non-fiction and first person television has increasingly focused on revealing, exhibiting and manipulating relationships located in the personal and professional sphere (Dovey 2000). This has generated a debate about the cultural value of such television. In fictional television drama, a less conspicuous intimacy has emerged with the dramatic monologue. This borrows and transports the familiarity of direct address from non-fiction into a fictional and dramatic situation that replaces the conversational greetings of the personality with a monologue narrated in the first person and conveyed through the performance of a single character. The progeny of the monologue takes a literary form and its emergence on television is primarily associated with Alan Bennett and Talking Heads (BBC 1988, 1998). The recent and less conspicuously authored monologues of Marion and Geoff (BBC 2000) and Up in Town (BBC 2002) continue to develop the television monologue. The monologue typically offers a situational intimacy of disclosure that differs from the cumulative intimacy offered by the personalities of non-fiction. Situational intimacy typically occurs through isolated individuals who