Posted: October 20th, 2022

Liveness

For a term below, please answer:

“Liveness”

a) The author who wrote about the term.

b) The meaning of the term, as it pertains to the topics covered in this course. (You should plan on writing at least a few sentences to adequately explain the definition of the term.)

c) A television example that exemplifies the term. (You only need to write about one example: a television show OR episode, OR character, OR plotline from a TV show, OR a block of shows, OR an entire network. You may give more than one example if you wish but only one is required. Please note that you must write about a television example, not a film example see below for a reminder about what counts as television.)

d) How the television example relates to, and illustrates, the term. (You should plan on writing 1 to 2 paragraphs6 to 12 sentences at leastto explain how your example relates to the term.)

Points will also be deducted for improper formatting proper formatting = listing out the different parts of each answer as a., b., c., d.

TWO NOTES :

1. What counts as television

Films or movies are approx. two hours in duration (unless they are shorts or documentaries) and they are made for THEATRICAL RELEASE not home or private consumption. When you go to the movies, you buy a ticket and go sit in a cinema with other people. I recognize that this distinction may fade over time (for example, some films are released on video-on-demand or on Netflix at the same time that they are released in movie theaters). But even in simultaneous release cases, the media text called a movie or film was MADE for theatrical release.

Television is made for private and/or home consumption. Television series or shows are narrative serial productions consisting of multiple episodes, typically either 1 hour or 30 minutes in duration.

Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon original series count as TV.

TV movies count as TV. If you’re not sure if a two-hour movie was made for TV or for theatrical release, check the title on IMDB.

Animated TV serials count as TV. This includes Japanese anime series.

Original online series or web series accessible on YouTube or other online platforms count as TV.

Webisodes (paratextual content made in conjunction with a TV series or original online series) also count as TV.

Short commercials (ads that air on broadcast or cable television, as well as ads on YouTube and Hulu and Amazon) count as TV.

Music videos (including Vevo videos on YouTube and elsewhere) count as TV.

I recognize that in the near future, every single type of audiovisual content may be available for private and/or domestic consumption at the same time as it gets released to theaters, so that even if the two-hour format persists (and even if cinemas endure), every text may be primarily produced for home release rather than for theatrical release. But for now, the media industries still make a distinction between film and television, and I maintain that distinction as well. You will get ZERO (0) POINTS for using film examples in a course about television and social media.

2. A hint: Write about the BIG PICTURE.

When you write parts b) and d) in the ID Questions, and when you compose your essay, be sure to write about the BIG PICTURE: what the term means, on a society-wide or industry-wide or culture-wide scale. For example: Does the concept/term mark a major SHIFT, from one thing to another If so, make sure to talk about that shift what changed in society or the industry or the culture. Some terms aren’t about big shifts, they’re about a certain society-wide anxiety or fear, or a specific movement, or an important trend, or a cultural trend/tendency, or how different concepts are linked, or a key industry framework. The key to success on the exams in this class is to summarize, clearly and explicitly, what you have learned from the lectures and readings about how these terms and concepts are significant in culture and society.

Live television is still alive: on television as an
unfulfilled promise
Jerome Bourdon TEL A VIV UNIVERSITY
To begin with, let us pose the thesis that this article will uphold
throughout: television remains deeply influenced by the possibility of live
broadcasting, this despite the fact that, from a historical point of view, the
golden age of live broadcasting (the 1950s in the USA and Western
Europe) has long been over. If we can talk of a ‘language’ of television, or,
more modestly, of a semantic specificity of the medium, it lies in this
possibility, not always accomplished, but at least virtually present in many
programmes or sequences of television. This claim is both semiotic and
sociological: we will try to understand why a technical possibility,
translated into specific codes, remains a fundamental part of viewers’
expectations.
In television theories, the current academic trend is to reduce the
importance of live broadcasting (Corner, 1997), arguing that the evolution
towards ‘narrowcasting’ and ‘fragmented broadcasting’ calls for the end of
global analyses of television. I propose, however, that it is still relevant to
talk about ‘television’ as a unified medium. Granted, most of the examples
of programmes in the following article are taken from general audience and
national channels in various national contexts, be they public or private.
However, despite the already dated prophecies on the advent of ‘narrowcasting’
or ‘fragmented television’, let us note that general audience
channels still draw most of the audiences worldwide. I will, in addition,
make the claim that much of what happens on cable and satellite channels
is still related to ‘liveness’, as many themed channels emphasize their
ability to broadcast live alongside general audience channels which
continue doing so.
Media, Culture & Society 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi), Vol. 22: 531-556
[0163-4437(200009)22:5;531-556;014709]
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532 Media, Culture & Society 22(5)
Let us remind the reader of how the word ‘live’ (or its translations:
French ‘direct’, Italian ‘diretta’, German ‘direkt’) has been used, and is still
being used (or alluded to) in programme titles. This is a very widespread
feature of television, both old and modern, which can be confirmed by
different national histories (e.g. Baget Herms, 1993; Bourdon, 1990;
Briggs, 1979; Grasso, 1992). In the USA, from Saturday Night Live to
Primetime Live, the word ‘live’ has never disappeared from the names of
talk or variety shows. In France, En direct de (live from) was the name for
a series of programmes in the 1950s – ‘from’ actually referred to a variety
of hard-to-reach or strange locations (from an aircraft carrier, from a sinkhole,
etc.). Here, television wanted to exhibit its technical capacities. In the
1980s, on the second French channel, star-host and anchorwoman Christine
Ockrent fronted a show simply called Direct. In Israel, where the talk show
is a major primetime genre, the word ‘live’ proliferates. For three years, the
second (and leading) channel has been broadcasting, three times a week, a
programme called Live with Dan Shilon Interviewing. Finally, much of
what has been called in the 1980s ‘reality programming’ in the United
States, ‘televisione verita’ in Italy, and ‘reality-shows’ in France actually
consists of live programming: most shows conforming to this so-called
‘new’ genre use the live spectacle of ordinary viewers telling us about their
pains and problems, with the help of the ever-present host (Eurodience,
1990).
Beyond the historical fact that live broadcasting has declined between
the 1950s and the 1960s (simply because game-shows, not to mention
drama, moved from live broadcasting to film or tape), the use of live
broadcasting as an explicit and important resource has not disappeared
from television. Television reminds us that it links us live to something, to
a specific place (‘live from’), to a specific person (‘live with’). A fully
fledged history of live broadcasting would probably discover other interesting
examples of the use of live broadcasting, beyond the permanence of
the rhetoric of live broadcasting. A good example is Vianello’s (1986)
analysis of live television in the context of the ‘power politics’ of the
networks in the American television system. However, my point here is
that this history presents a fundamental, socio-semiotic unity.
‘Liveness’ in television theories
Many theories of television have – and continue to be – centred on
‘liveness’, first, as part of a professional ideology. In its early days, when
professionals started debating the specificity of television (notably in
comparison with the cinema), they related it to three characteristics, namely
screen size, domestic reception and, finally and most notably, ‘liveness’.
This last characterization of television has evoked lyrical texts. Live
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Bourdon, Live television 533
broadcasting has been exalted as a way to conquer time and distance, to
have vast groups of people commune in a new experience. Historical
research (see, for the United States, Vianello, 1986) reminds us of the place
of liveness in professional ideologies, most clearly among television
engineers and technicians but also among critics. At a talk presented by the
French director of programmes in 1955, television was presented, as was
typical of the time, as ‘the possibility at last given to mankind to defeat,
through the image, the limitations of time and space’ (Bourdon, 1986: 49).
Even though ‘liveness’ was a professional theory, with a strong emphasis
on ideological notions such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’, it was adapted by
academic theory in various countries. Books and treatises about the
aesthetics of live television were written during the 1950s and the 1960s.
However, these theories seem to have become unfashionable. Most
recently, a vigorous attack against theories of live broadcasting as central
to television has been launched by J.T. Caldwell (1995). Studying
American television, he diagnoses a mutation which he calls ‘televisuality’:
under the effects of competition, of the economic crisis which it has
caused, mass television (the major networks) has started stressing its
stylistic performances, the quality of its authors and ‘signatures’ and its
ability to process pictures through digital packaging. This televisual
regime, which he terms ‘exhibitionist’, also corresponds to a technical and
industrial mutation. In this context, live television is seen as quite
secondary, and the ideology is rather one of television as an opaque
medium.
Despite the quality of his argument, Caldwell omits two major points.
First, stylistic exhibitionism has not erased genres which systematically use
live broadcasting as a resource. These genres stress ‘liveness’ through a
quite traditional series of indices, such as the direct address to the viewer,
or editing as a sign of continuity of the action. These indices will be
reviewed in detail later in this article. Second, refined stylistic treatment is
less a major mutation of television than a strategy of American networks at
a given point of their history and in given genres. World television, both
national and local stations, still resorts massively to live broadcasting in
traditional genres.
Furthermore, emphasizing the capacity to broadcast live can operate
together with stylistic refinement, as we have seen during the Barcelona
Olympics: the most refined digital effects are not incompatible with the fact
that this image, however reprocessed and manipulated, is a ‘live’ image.
And this is reinforced by the capacity of the image, at any time, to stop
being processed (slow motion, divided screen) and to fill the whole screen.
I suggest that these manipulations show the intervention of the televisual
enunciator (that is, the channel and its various delegates, hosts and
commentators) in the live event, rather than the disappearance of the live
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event itself into the televisual representation. Furthermore, all this processing
does not affect (or very rarely does so), the acoustic data so
fundamental in television yet perennially forgotten by theorists and
professionals alike: the voice. Television is always an audiovision (Chion,
1994).
The meanings of live broadcasting
Before going further into the argument, let us define what we mean by live
broadcasting. As we will see, we have moved from the original meaning to
a varied set of situations, containing both social and technical features,
where the word ‘live’ is used. There is, however, a common core to the
varied uses of the word ‘live’. In the first days of television, being live, that
is, the transmission of sounds and images of an event at the time when it is
occurring, was all that there was to television. Television has very quickly
made of this technical feat an institutional performance: the live transmission
is performed by an institution (public or private) which is in charge of
the apparatus of the transmission of events to viewers. At the same time,
live broadcasting was a public phenomenon (other people are viewing this
live event at the same time as I do). From this initial situation stems an
interesting ambiguity: is television about live broadcasting or about shared
viewing It is difficult to dissociate both elements. Think of the opposition
between live and recorded, of the meaning of recorded (programme prerecorded
by television, or video-cassettes viewed at home). I have tested, at
least in French and English, the possibility of uttering the following
sentence: ‘I don’t like video, I prefer live television’. Here the opposition is
between Hertzian mass diffusion by an institution (of live and recorded
programmes alike) and private consumption of cassettes.
One should not forget that there are other meanings to ‘live’. I will
mention three. When, within a variety show, a singer sings without lipsynching,
the host may stress the fact that this is ‘live music’ (again, the
opposition is with pre-recorded). One can also think of a live connection of
different locations within a programme (usually a live programme). Finally,
when television newscasts have started using amateur videos for specific
unexpected events, this has made possible another promise of ‘liveness’:
these images were shot live (that is to say, unprepared, which justifies their
non-professionalism). There is a common kernel to all these uses: in all
cases, there is a connection of people to people (people watching together)
and/or of people to a ‘natural’ (i.e. not pre-recorded in any of its
components) event, through technology.
These diversified meanings, which have been developing over time, have
a consequence. Live television is not an absolute. It is, rather, a question of
degree. There are moments of ‘maximum liveness’: we are watching at the
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same time as the event, at the same time as everyone else, and, what is
more, with an event taking place in different locations connected by
television, as is typically the case with major media events. Then, there is a
whole series of configurations where the sensation that the programme is
live might be as pronounced.
The notion of belief is central here. Unlike the technician in the studio
who perceives both the ongoing event and the representation on TV, most
viewers see only the representation and assume it to be a live event, that is,
a two-dimensional audiovisual representation of something which is actually
happening. Viewers reach this conclusion through a complicated
cognitive process. They get their clues (and their cues) not only from
television itself (the lighting, the editing, the word ‘live’ chromakeyed on
screen), but also from all the media paratext, to use the term coined by
Gerard Genette (1997) to refer to all the texts which surround a given
literary text, orienting and preparing the reading. We know that a
programme is live from television itself, from newspapers, the radio,
programme magazines. The spectator, then, ‘reads’ television in a context
more or less favourable to the belief in liveness.
The lies and truths of live broadcasting
The belief in liveness, then, varies according to the text, to the characteristics
of the viewer (education, generation, social milieu), to the situation of
the viewer (attention brought to ‘liveness’ or not) and, last but not least, to
the moment when one is viewing. Belief, as always, calls for a sequential
analysis. For example: a family watches a famous singer in a variety show.
The show has been pre-recorded by the channel. The singer himself has
recorded the performance before the show, in the same studio, and was not
present in the rest of the show. The director, however, was skilful enough
to give, through editing, the feeling that the singer was actually present (we
are not aware that the ‘live audience’ has applauded the diffusion of a
recorded tape on a screen, not the actual singer). Last but not least, the
singer, at the time of recording his performance, was not singing, but lipsynching
to a pre-recorded playback. In this pseudo-live programme, three
layers of recording were added: the voice in studio, the performance of the
singer, and the show itself.
The viewers, ignorant of television production processes, might fail to
note most of these refinements. In our viewing family, the grandfather
might think that he was viewing, all along and in all of its components, a
live programme. Conversely, the younger brother, who has just completed
a training in video production, might be able to unveil the different levels
of recording (or only part of them) to the rest of the family, which we can
imagine surprised, or indignant, at this lack of honesty. Even worse, the
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same little brother might have played a trick on the family and broadcast
from his room a cassette of a show he had recorded a month before, when
the family was away on a vacation. In that latter case, there is no ‘liveness’
whatsoever, not technical, not institutional and not public, only a series of
lies, or organized deceptions.
The viewing family members’ beliefs also change according to time.
Like all beliefs, viewers’ beliefs in the ‘liveness’ of the transmission need
to be analysed sequentially. Such analyses have been done for fiction,
especially for film. When viewing a fiction film, one experiences the
‘momentary suspension of disbelief’. We believe – albeit not as a belief in
the real world – in the story we see unfolding in front of us. The same goes
for live broadcasting: the finest theorist, especially if he is a fan of the
singer (who was lip-synching to a playback in a recorded show), will prefer
to become engrossed in the belief that the singer is actually singing now, in
front of him, looking him in the eyes. The time of disbelief and of analysis
will come, but later.
Live broadcasting has other cognitive implications, not because it is live,
but because it is non-fictional. It is true that ‘live fiction’ has been a genre
of Western television (precisely the genre of what was thought of as the
golden age of live television), but it has disappeared from the screen, when
the means of recording fiction have been available. Economic factors might
have contributed here. Alongside the economic perspective, it seems that
from a phenomenological point of view the ‘added value’ of liveness has
not been as important to viewers as it was to critics and professionals. On
television, liveness gave a coefficient of reality to what was happening that
was of no value for fiction.
As in documentaries (even to a greater degree), in order to enjoy live
broadcasting, the viewers have to believe that the participants (the persons
on screen) are not acting. On the contrary, they are fulfilling an expectation
of authenticity. They are on a football field, as genuine football players.
They are not actors. They might lie or simulate (like we tend to think many
politicians do), but this is basically exceptional. And even politicians
remain lying politicians and not actors playing the part of politicians. The
actual participant might lie in what he is saying, not about what he is.
Otherwise, this would mean that the institution is lying (has allowed an
actor to pose as a politician). When the participants are television people,
lying becomes much more difficult, if possible at all, as participants and
institution identify with one another. The newscaster is an actual journalist
genuinely telling us what has actually happened (or trying to do so). Of
course, it is possible to play with these conventions, but only for a limited
period of time, as Orson Welles taught us with radio. This is done on April
Fool’s Day, when many newscasts choose to broadcast an absurd, invented
piece of news. Some special broadcasts have also used the pseudo-news
item – but the spoof is usually unveiled and explained after a few minutes
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Bourdon, Live television 537
or after a few hours (depending on its actual consequences). Every reader
can probably think of an appropriate example according to national
contexts. On French television, on 22 February 1984, star anchor Christine
Ockrent told us of a spectacular special set of governmental decisions,
including wage cuts and a dramatic increase of taxes. Our hearts started
racing, but suddenly, a digital effect chased her away, and she was replaced
by a more famous (and more reliable) star, Yves Montand, who reassured
us that this was a spoof, a ‘teaser’ used to introduce us to a special
magazine on the economic crisis. Two lies have been unveiled: it was false
news, and it has been recorded.
One might say that there is a contract between the persons on screen and
the viewers at home. The term contract has enjoyed an increasing fashion
after Philippe Lejeune (1989) introduced it into literary theory. It is true
that there is a contract (often even in the legal sense) between television as
institution and the persons on screen. But promises are made by the
television institution to its viewers. This goes way beyond the question of
live broadcasting, as a model of analysing the relation between television
and viewers. Undoubtedly, that the programme actually is and will be a
live programme, can be analysed as a promise. Again, think of the plain
words of the host at the beginning of the programme: not a contract, but a
series of promises: to meet the viewers, next week, at the same time, in the
same studio: ‘this is what this new show will be about . . . we will meet
again, next week … I will host these live debates for you’. Contract and
promise are interrelated, of course. The institution actually needs the
persons on screen to respect their contract to be themselves in order to
make sure its own commitment to viewers is fulfilled.
Within this configuration, live television, to a certain extent, likes
unexpected events to occur, as this is the best way to demonstrate that it
fulfils its commitments. The unexpected event demonstrates that not
everything has been planned, that television, even though it might influence
the event by its presence (and might even organize it), is not the sole writer
of the screenplay. Accidents and scandals, always a delight for the media,
are even better when we see them happening live. If the accident or
scandal is big enough, it triggers the viewers into calling their friends and
telling them: ‘switch on this channel, something is happening’.
This also explains why, when national histories of live broadcasting are
written, they often include a chronicle of famous accidents, scandals,
insults, fights, which are rebroadcast in specials, thus gaining a special
status in viewers’ memory. These accidents guarantee that television is
still, at least at times, as live as it can get. For television triumphs in a
social world which is shaken, but never overly so. A few demonstrations, a
revolt, are good for television, not a revolution – that is only tolerable in
the neighbouring country.
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Furthermore, it is impossible for live cameras to be simply there, facing
a non-interpretable event. Paradoxically, a ‘completely live’ image cannot
exist alongside live broadcasting, for there is no institution to interpret such
an event. As has been noted, live broadcasting always presupposes a
minimum amount of screen writing to retain the viewer’s interest. If not,
television is not live, but simply absurd, as happened to French television
during the Romanian revolution in 1989, when comments such as the
following could be heard: ‘I have to interrupt you now. We are now
receiving pictures that are being shot live. They are shot at this very
minute. These are raw pictures, just as we are receiving them’ (on screen,
the viewer could actually see dark streets with people running) (Jost and
Leblanc, 1994: 29). When the event-beyond-comment occurs, television
caricatures itself, like the famous Italian animator who, when suddenly
confronted with any unexpected problem or incident, uttered the ritual
phrase: ‘That is the beauty of live television’ (Grasso, 1992: 198).
Four types of television: fully live, continuity, edited, fiction
At this point, let us propose a division of television texts not so much into
genres, in the traditional sense, as in terms of types, where live television is
more or less achieved. Two qualifications: these types do not necessarily
correspond to complete programmes; they might concern sequences within
programmes. And again: live really is not only about the technical
performance, but also about the spectatorial belief – these, as we have seen,
do not completely overlap.
This distinction, incidentally, is present in the technical vocabulary of
many television stations. French television once classified its programmes
as ‘vrai direct’ (truly live), versus ‘direct differe’ (recorded-live television),
or ‘faux direct’ (falsely live). At the level of spectatorial beliefs, we will
oppose ‘fully live’, where the spectator has the full sense of experiencing a
life event, and ‘continuity television’, where the spectator only partly has
this feeling. Oilr third type is ‘edited television’. All television is edited
(directors of live programmes actually talk of ‘live editing’ – ‘montage en
direct’). However, in this article, I will use the expression only for
programmes that are edited after shooting (in the editing room) and are not
fictional, which have been shot ‘in real life’. Our fourth type is fiction,
played by actors, and edited – as far from live broadcasting as one can
think, since it presupposes a high degree of previous elaboration. Some
fictional genres actually retain proximity with liveness, but more on that
later. Of course, live television is also elaborated, and we are aware of that.
But that elaboration is supposed to serve an ongoing event, to give us a
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chance to see not so much the work of television as such but the workings
of the world (albeit the television studio) in its most interesting aspects.
Fully live versus continuity
Fully live television is best exemplified by major media events when
television cannot possibly not be live: these major media events have been
theorized by Dayan and Katz (1992) who have described them as
‘windows’ or ‘holes’ in the usual routine programming. At these moments,
television seems to be completely at the service of the event, even if it
might have contributed to its organization. In such cases, the paratext
(Genette, 1997) also works at full capacity. It is not only from the screen
where the Pope is walking (Poland, 1979), where Sadat arrives in
Jerusalem (Israel, 1977) that you can be sure the event is a live event. It is
also because, weeks before, you have been told the event is about to occur.
The world around you can be visibly affected by the passion surrounding
the event. The city is deserted, everybody is watching, you have been told
by the radio not to drive around the airport or the stadium where the event
is taking place.
In our daily life as viewers, we experience less the regime of ‘fully live’
than that of ‘continuity’. We are in a televised world where a lot looks (and
sounds) live but is not necessarily so. We infer liveness from the text and
also from assumptions about specific genres (news is more likely to be live
than variety shows, major weekly prime-time variety shows are more likely
to be live than daily daytime game shows). Of course, the word ‘live’
might be chromakeyed on the screen (as during the news, in many cases, or
in the titles of programmes). However, some programmes are live without
claiming their liveness in such a way. Moreover, if television claims to be
live, it never claims not to be live (or on very specific occasions, as will be
analysed later). Thus, a rich, ambiguous land is created for the viewers’
inferential work.
Suppose,. however, the viewer has just subscribed to cable and turns on
their set to discover a new channel. Is it live The answer might come from
textual indices: a host looks at us straight in the eyes, in the flat lighting of
the video, and starts stammering, then apologizes. We tend to think,
routinely, that we are seeing a live programme. Our knowledge of
programming might also help. If you turn on your television at 8 pm in
France, at 9 pm in Spain, this is the hour of the newscast. If you turn on
your set at 10 pm in the same countries (too late for the main news, too
early for the late night news), you are left with two alternatives: a
newsflash, which indicates a major event has occurred, or a documentary or
a report on the news, which uses live television as archive footage. If this
latter inference is the right one, then the familiar face of the host will soon
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be replaced by another familiar face, or covered by a voice-over, which
will tell you how to interpret these images.
Sequence-guarantors of live continuity: the direct address (the
look to the camera)
Using the example of news, I have been driven to treat ‘live broadcasting’
and the ‘look to the camera’ of the newscaster as nearly equivalent. Before
referring to programmes as whole, we should try to consider the basic
segments, or sequences of television, inasmuch as they help us to identify
one of our four types: liveness, continuity, editing, fiction. Let us talk,
following many authors, of the ‘direct address’, to define the sequence
where a person looks straight at the camera (as if at the viewers) and
addresses the viewers, using the appropriate deixis. The most evident part
of this deixis is of course the personal pronouns ‘I’ (the host) and ‘you’
(the viewers at home). One should add that the word ‘live’ might be used
here (‘we are coming to you live’), and interpreted as a specifically
televisual deictic: it refers not only to the moment when the speaker is
talking (even if the sequence was recorded), but to that moment inasmuch
as it is the same moment for the speaker and for the addressees (the
viewers at home). ‘I am talking to you live’ is the televisual version of ‘I
am talking to you now’.
Even though Umberto Eco has written that it is one of the characteristics
of the ‘neo-television’ of the 1980s, which he claims stresses contact with
the viewers (Eco, 1990), the ‘direct address’ has been important from the
first days of television. We should carefully distinguish two phenomena:
the systematic exploitation of television stardom (which characterized
competitive commercial television systems), and the presence of a group of
familiar mediators, of television figures, which is a common feature of
television. From the early experiences of live television, programmers have
‘naturally’ resorted to television mediators, who looked and talked at the
camera.
Where do we find the ‘direct address’, the look to the camera of the ‘I
and you together’ In a very systematic manner, in the opening and closing
sequences of continuity television programmes, when the host greets us,
enumerates the list of his guests, and gives us an appointment for next
week (or for many weeks to come). There are variations according to
genres, but the basic pattern is present in newscasts (be it reduced to a
simple ‘good day’ and ‘good bye’), in talk shows, in game shows, in
variety shows, or in political debates.
The look to the camera is present in another type of sequence, one which
I call ‘addressed actuality’. The mediator still addresses us, but tells a story
in the third person, of what has happened. He uses deictics like ‘yesterday’
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and ‘today’, but the viewers are no longer referred to in the discourse.
There is still some sense of live television, but less than in the direct
address. In another case, the mediator looks at us, but eliminates references
to the deixis of the present. He tells us a story of the past. This sequence I
call the ‘addressed history’. The story might be told in the present tense,
but the tense is used always with the value of a preterite: it describes the
succession of events in the past, without any relation to the time when the
story is told. Such was the regime of shows where a narrator (usually a
famous mediator) would tell stories of the past (James Mason in English,
Alain Decaux in French). This type of show seems no longer to be popular
on television. Was it a live programme Again, at the textual level, there
are some indications to the contrary. Verbally, we are detached from the
time of the actual telling of the story. Visually, there might be some
carefully edited sequences to illustrate the narrator’s story. At the level of
production, in the case of the French programme, we know that it was
initially broadcast live, then later moved to tape.
Continuity television: the part of the voice
As we can see, our television types are not necessarily related to entire
shows. In effect, the types of television are realized more or less in specific
sequences of unequal duration. We want to try to break the flow of
television into constitutive sequences (bearing in mind we cannot completely
escape the notion of flow, to which we will return later). Of course,
these sequences are related to one another by specific traits, which we
might call ‘suprasequential’ (to paraphrase the ‘suprasegmental’ used in
linguistics). As the reader might have noticed, we consider the voice and
its relation to images as a key criterion for classifying basic sequences of
television. The voice, and sound in general, are continuously neglected in
many analyses of television and film, with notable exceptions (Scannell,
1991; Chion, 1994). Chion, one of the most interesting analysts of sound in
film, goes as far as to claim that television is nothing but ‘illustrated radio’.
This is extreme. I will follow him when he affirms that television, although
a visual medium, is a ‘vococentric’ medium, a medium where the voice
orients the viewers decisively in certain directions of interpretation. The
voice governs television. But then, there are different kinds of voice.
Again, we have to distinguish between technology and belief. We
analyse television from an ideal viewer’s point of view. Let us consider
three situations. First, the viewer perceives the voice as ‘voice-over’. It has
been added to the film at the time of editing. The voiee is slow, which
often creates the effect of a text being read. In that case, I will speak, after
Michel Chion (1994), of ‘acousmatic voice’. The acousmatic voice, which
has no physical identity, can be opposed to the voices which belong to the
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542 Media, Culture & Society 22(5)
films, which are all visualized, or, at least, visualizable. They do not
generate the effect of a text read, of a prepared story, but of more
spontaneous (or less formal) interventions. As opposed to the acousmatic
voice, visual and visualizable voices belong together. One can always
switch from a visualizable voice to a visualized voice, and conversely (a
journalist commenting on his film is now on camera and addresses us). But
the acousmatic voice has to remain off screen, at least for the duration of
the documentary concerned.
I have tried to avoid using technical terms (like voice-over, voice-off
camera), because my point of view is not technical. Let us come back to
the example of synchronized play-back. When the singer was singing his
song ‘live’, for most viewers it was a visual voice. Some knew it was
sound over simulated synchronization (we might call it ‘pseudo-visualized
voice’). Another case: in a documentary, relevant sounds are added to
pictures of a crowd. Again, we can speak of ‘pseudo-visualized sounds’: in
most cases, the viewers will actually perceive such sounds as recorded at
the time the film was shot, as belonging to the pro-filmic, to the ‘worldbeing-televised’.
While, in the case of acousmatic sounds, the sound’s
. source belongs to the television institution, operating ‘from above’ on the
world-being-televised.
Let us return to continuity television. As far as sound is concerned,
continuity television precludes acousmatism: all sounds are either visualized
or visualizable. In the studios of game shows, variety shows and .talk
shows, this is obviously the case of the voices of guests and mediators –
journalists and hosts – belonging to the institution. However, some people
might be very far from the set, while their voices will still be visualizable.
In some shows, people are requested to phone from home. Their voices are
visualizable (even though sometimes the screen, as a technological synecdoche
for the individual speaking, presents a close-up of the phone),
even though we might never see them. We know who they are, they have a
social identity. They are people interacting in front of us, in the worldbeing-televised.
A more subtle case is the one of sound-only news reports.
The newscaster tells us we are about to hear a report by a certain
correspondent; then we hear the correspondent’s voice, usually with a
photograph of her/his face, over the background of a map of the country
where the events reported are taking place, and from where the correspondent
is calling (or has called). Sometimes the voice is recorded, sometimes
it is live (and the word ‘live’ might be chromakeyed). If it is recorded, the
newscaster is actually listening ‘with us’ to a tape, not to a human being.
My contention here is that, phenomenologically, the whole apparatus of
television is working to create the illusion of a voice that is both visualized
and live.
The case of music is partly similar. Music is an interesting case. Music,
as Nattiez (1975) has written, has something fictional to it. Temporally
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Bourdon, Live television 543
oriented, charged with emotion, it is accepted (even as acousmatic music)
by viewers of fiction. In continuity television, there is very little music. The
bulk is visualized music in variety shows, or in some talk shows. There is
very little music which is not visualized, and only visualizable. A good
example is provided by the game show ‘Countdown’ (originally a French
format called ‘Des Chiffres et des Lettres’). When the candidates are
searching for the solution of the problem, there is a light, musak-type
background music. This is visualized music in the sense that it is played in
the studio, live to the candidates and to us together. It is unobstrusive, for
the same reason that there is very little non-visualized music in continuity
television. Music would take on a life of its own, be perceived as
acousmatic, and definitely ruin the impression/illusion of liveness.
Continuity programmes cannot easily be divided into sequences on the
basis of the work done by the apparatus of television, precisely because it
aims at transparency. Editing, in particular, is supposed to be fluid, and
switches between cameras should not create the impression of abrupt,
unexplained switches between places and periods, as in a documentary or a
fiction film. The voice, again, and, more precisely, the verbal, is the main
criterion to analyse the flow of continuity television. Continuity television
should be analysed with tools derived from conversational analysis, as
initiated by Sacks et al. (1974). Television talk has its own rules of turntaking.
The analysis should start with a major distinction, between routing
turns (questions, requests, Assessments) and routed turns. The first belong,
most of the time, to mediators: they have the privilege of routing and of
addressing the viewers. Routed turns belong to guests, who are requested to
respond to routing in an appropriate manner. A mediator talking can move
from different types of turns, starting with a direct address to a viewer, and
moving to a series of routing turns.
The voice in fully live or continuity television is visualizable, even if we
do not see the speaker for a long period of time. The best example is the
voice of the sports commentator, in the sequence we will call ‘involved
commentary’. This sequence has specific phonetic features, besides its
specific vocabulary. On radio, even in a language you do not know, you
might identify the commentary of live sports, by its rhythm and prosody. If
you know the language, the use of tenses, the variety of the deixis
(personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place) are striking. Of course, the
voice of a live commentary can be recorded and broadcast later with the
pictures to create the illusion of live television. This is especially the case
for sports events which take place with a time lag. In France, some events
of the Atlanta Olympics were broadcast in such a way, even though
viewers were told before the broadcast that the events were not actually
live. Less honestly, the French first channel TFl broadcast a football match
a few hours after the event, with the live commentary recorded, trying to
beat the channel which had exclusive live broadcasting rights by acting as
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544 Media, Culture & Society 22(5)
if nothing had happened. Another kind of involved commentary, less
passionate than sports, can be heard during any sort of live event, from a
major media event to more ritual live events, like the annual Bastille Day
parade in France.
Be it for media events or for sports events, viewers can hear a voice
without actually seeing the face of the speaker for long stretches of time.
Why then claim that such a voice is visualizable The commentator has a
name, which is given in the credits, he has a face in many other programmes,
especially in sports magazines, or in the coverage of television by the press.
Most viewers know this face and can actually visualize a familiar personality
when they hear the commentary. During the match or the event itself, it is not
unusual to see, during the intermission, commentators with their headphones
on their heads. This is not only a question of identifying the mediators. For
the institution, the sequence where we see the commentators of the event is
a way of guaranteeing the spectator that the commentators are actually
commentating on the event, that they are part of the event, and not, like us,
in front of their screen. No matter what the quality of the commentary, the
commentator has to be a live witness. When, as for the Barcelona
Olympics, it was reported that some journalists had been commenting from
their hotel rooms, this was perceived as a professional failure and a breach
of confidence.
Edited (and non-fictional) television: documentaries and news
reports
In this article I have opposed continuity television to edited television: that
is, to the programmes in which the after-the-event editing (not live editing)
can be perceived and is perceived by all viewers. The editing is perceived
at several levels. Visually, the shots connect unrelated times. Acousmatic
music is also typical of edited television (fiction and non-fiction alike).
Acousmatic voice, however, is a very specific case: it is the privilege of
edited, non-fictional television. Edited non-fictional television is only
represented by a small number of genres: documentaries, news reports,
credits, advertising, music videos, propaganda (especially, in democracies,
election programmes). Let us start with documentaries and news reports.
They share many features, except for their relations with news and their
length (the news report is brief, and has become shorter since its birth,
while the documentary can be long). Furthermore, the documentary offers a
good example of the evolution towards what is sometimes called ‘thematic
television’, i.e. genres as channels.
News reports, but also documentaries (despite their ancestry in the
cinema newsreels and cinema documentaries) are affected by their being
television genres. A news report is, as Vianello (1986) has observed,
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Bourdon, Live television 545
something of a paradox: it is central to a genre which puts high value on
being broadcast live, the news. Yet, most news reports are made of edited
visual material – they are, at least visually, not live. The case of the voice
in news reports is complex. The reporter’s commentary is mostly live, but
sometimes recorded. Sometimes, a short report is delivered live by the
anchor (this practice has become extremely frequent in the short news
flashes of non-stop news channels). Within the news report, American
television was the first to introduce ‘the stake out’: the reporter addresses
his commentary to the camera, from the place of the ‘action’, opposite the
Presidential Palace or the Court where the trial is taking place (Hartley,
1982). The voice is visualized. The ‘stake out’, following the professional
term, actually is the sequence I have already called addressed actuality.
There is a question of who the reporter is talking to: the gaze is somewhat
ambiguous, while the verbal indications (especially the use of the name of
the anchor to signal the end of the ‘stake out’) seems to indicate he is
talking to the anchor. Finally, we have the case, which we have already
discussed, where news reports are often reduced to a voice added to the
photograph of the correspondent.
With news programmes in general, especially before American professional
practices started being imported, the ‘voice-on news’ has long
been dominant. Let us refer to ‘voice-on news’ as the story delivered by a
reporter off camera. The voice is visualizable: the name of the reporter is
given in the credits, and many viewers have actually seen him on the
screen. The story is edited, therefore the images are not live, but the voice
can be live (it always was in the early days of the newscast). In short, a
report within the news borrows some of the conventions of liveness, even
though most of the time at least part of it is not live.
More surprisingly, the documentary, a genre born as an elaborated
discourse on the world, not linked to news (Jacobs, 1971), has been
submitted to the pressure of liveness when becoming a television genre, as
has already been noted. Corner (1996: 2) writes that the documentary,
having started as a ‘cinematic essay’, now mostly has the form of an
‘expanded reportage’. The most obvious sign of this is the frequent
occurrence of direct address. Many television documentaries, especially
documentary series, include a mediator who addresses the viewers at
regular intervals. Of course, these ‘direct addresses’ are usually not
recordeq in the studio. They might be shot ‘on location’ in places
connected to the theme of the documentary. The viewer probably never
assumes them to be live. And yet, the ‘here and now’ of the mediator’s
living gaze is here, an indelible indicator of ‘presentness’.
The direct address is also quite frequently used before the documentary.
A personality, usually a celebrity of some kind, is there to ‘launch’ it (as if
it did not have enough energy of its own). In 1998, the long and very
successful (and controversial) documentary series Tkouma, produced by
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546 Media, Culture & Society 22(5)
Israeli television on the occasion of the country’s 50th anniversary, was
launched in such a way by famous public personalities. Again, the
documentary might be about the past, but the ‘launching sequences’ show
us a mediator using the present tense for proposing that we see something,
tonight (to sit with him in the studio, maybe, and to watch together –
therefore perhaps transforming all living rooms into one huge communal
television studio).
Documentary, like news reports, can be easily divided into specific
sequences. In documentaries, apart from the ‘direct address’, we find basically
three different types of sequences: ‘scenes’, ‘interview excerpts’ and ‘acousmatic
commentaries’ (or documentary voice-overs). Formally speaking, a
scene is identical to a sequence from a fiction film: the characters ‘play their
own role’, do not seem to pay attention to the camera (or, more exactly,
studiedly do not pay attention to it). In television documentaries, scenes are
rare, most likely because of their fundamental ambiguity. If we tum on our
television set and discover a scene, it might take a little time for us to decide if
we are dealing with fiction or with non-fiction. This ambiguity usually is
quickly resolved. First, the style of shooting suggests either a documentary or
a certain type of fiction that borrows from the conventions of documentary
and news reports. Second, we quickly realize we have no major character, no
plot, but only bits of ‘real life’. Here is a major difference from the documentary
tradition of the cinema: scenes are central, and were from the very
start (what is Nanook of the North [Robert Flaherty, 1922) but a succession of
scenes). Major documentary directors (Frederick Wiseman, Raymond
Depardon) are famous precisely for using mostly or only ‘scenes’ of real life.
The same documentary directors exclude what is the staple of television
documentaries: the interview excerpts and the acousmatic commentaries. The
interview excerpts (with or without the interviewer’s questions) are somewhat
similar to the ‘interventions’ of continuity television. However, they belong to
a different temporality. The editing suggests someone engaged in recollecting
a variety of encounters and presenting them to us. The interviewer might very
well be, when there is just one, the documentary ‘anchor’, the one in charge of
the direct address (even though he does not always do all the interviews).
Interview excerpts (from documentaries but also from news reports) can be
divided according to the category of interviewee, elite and vox pop following
a division I have suggested (1982) independently from, but similarly to
Hartley (1982). Elite interviews are named and might have a chance to have
their voices turned into a voice-over, illustrated by some images (especially in
documentary and current affairs programmes, where there is more time for the
editing than in news reports). Vox pops, anonymous interviewees, are not
named, are sometimes presented as groups (a series of brief interviews with
similar questions; or group interviewing) and have much less chance to enjoy
the political privilege of having their voices turned into voice-overs.
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Bourdon, Live television 547
The most typical sequence of some documentaries, absent from news
reports, is the acousmatic commentary. It is specific because the voice is avisual.
The voice is less involved in talking to us than in ‘speaking a text’,
with a grammar which is not that of spoken, improvised language. The credits
might actually state: commentary read or given by, in cases where a famous
actor has hired out his voice. That slow and static voice has some pretelevisual
ancestors, between teaching and preaching. We could compare it to
the voice of an invisible priest at the back of a temple. It is a voice of
authority, which dominates the picture, in the name of a carefully prepared
and recorded text. The question of the authority of the voice is central to
television: be it in involved commentary, or in voice-over news, the absence
of the speaker goes along with a sense that the voice knows, that it is there to
explain, continually, the event or the story to us. The acousmatic voice still is,
in all cases I have been able to observe, a male voice, sometimes called the
‘voice of God’, as Comer (1996: 29) has reminded us. Even more than for the
direct address, the politics of the voice on television is heavily gendered.
Edited television: advertising, music videos, credits, propaganda
These four sequences seem to have little in common. We might well start with
the credits, which have a lot to teach us about edited television in general. At
the start, as in film, credits were musical sequences. As television became
richer, and more competitive, credits have changed, using more images and
increasingly complex editing. Credits have many functions, far beyond the
naming of those who are given credit. They signal a recurrence: the same
familiar programme is coming back to us. They vary according to genres, and
also to location. Opening credits which try to draw us into the programme, use
the whole gamut of visual and sound resources. Conversely, for many
continuity and live programmes, the closing credits are often rolled over the
silent set, where the viewer can see the host and guests, the newscaster and the
interviewee, still talking. Just like advertising, credit sequences are a major
place for trying out and experimenting with new techniques, such as digital
effects and computer graphics.
Advertising and music videos are more complicated than credits. The
regime of belief they establish stands somewhere between fiction and nonfiction.
They are often built as little fictions, with a story sometimes related to
the song for music videos. At the same time; the viewer is reminded that it is
only a song: images of a story are interspersed with that of the band playing,
or of the singer singing. In advertising, we are reminded that this is only an
advertisement: the product is there, after all, to contradict the idea of an
autonomous story. Not all advertisements are built as fictions. Many resort to
a celebrity addressing the audience to promote the product.
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Music videos might be interpreted as a complex generic configuration.
Before they emerged, there had been filmed singers in variety shows or in
musicals, always addressing the audience while singing. They established the
power of the song as a popular, semi-fictional genre. The singer both tells a
story and represents, through gestures and attitudes, the story for us. What is
new about the music video is the way the story is represented. Beyond a basic
continuity (of the music, and, to a lesser extent, of the singer’s face), there is
an extreme discontinuity of the editing (with, however, an often cyclic use of
the same series of shots in different locations). This discontinuity seems to
embody the power of the singer to become someone else through the music,
and to create one or several new worlds through his songs. We could define
the music video as a rhetorical game between sound continuity and visual
disruption, which has created its own conventions: the viewer expects the
disruptions in editing, according to certain rules, but first and foremost we
have the presence of the singer. This modern form is easily combined with the
archaism of continuity television. The same disjoined singer is also interviewed
in a studio, or on MTV, within the traditional conventions of continuity
shooting (save for the odd camera angles, which have also created their
own conventions).
The voice, the verbal
Whether acousmatic or visualized, almost all television voices have
something in common: they are at the service of verbal language that is
clearly understandable, whether in sports commentaries, in variety shows
or in news. Even more than in the movies, there is not only ‘vococentrism’
but ‘verbocentrism’ (Chion, 1994). The technology of the microphone and
the work of television mediators (hosts and journalists) are to a large extent
used mostly to convert voices into clear language. The ‘in-between’
situation, so frequent in real life, where voices are clearly saying something,
but something we do not completely understand, is banished from
television, and largely from films, with, again, some major exceptions
(Jean-Luc Godard being one).
In continuity television, a certain dose of confusion can be tolerated, but
within certain (evolving) conventions. First of all, the moments of
confusion are limited. After a row, the host has to show he is in control
again. Second, the confusion belongs to a certain sub-genre, the talk-shows
of tabloid television. In the 1980s, the American Geraldo, the French Droit
de Reponse (Right to Reply), the Israeli Popolitika (Here is Politics), were
debates where noisy rows were part of the expectations of viewers, but
within certain limits. Each has one or more famous episodes where it went
beyond its own limits, and had to fall back within the borders of the
‘acceptable scandal’ that is part of their substantial definition as a genre.
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Television voices are always clear. But there is more: television is
always talking. That is a convention which might be stronger than the
social and moral conventions of what can be said: something has to be
said. On television, almost everything can be said, as long as television
keeps on talking clearly. News journalists are often said to be desperate
when they have no pictures to illustrate a major event. But the need for
words is as pressing as the need for images. Silent images are rare. Silent
looks are even less frequent. This is probably an interesting zone which is
rarely transgressed. What is a silent look, instantly directed at your own
eyes It is heavily charged, either positively (seduction), but mostly
negatively (aggression, madness), as Barthes (1980: 175) has noted. The
doubt cannot be easily dissipated. We cannot interrogate the figure on the
screen, and react as we would do in real life, simply turning away or
responding aggressively: ‘why are you looking at me like that’ The silent
look brings us back to the absence of the characters on the screen, and then
to the fact that there is no event, no fact, only a flow of pictures. Television
has to use the voice to bring about a phenomenological presence as
completely as it can.
Fiction, seriality, live television
Finally, although fiction (at least in today’s television) is no longer live,
and sometimes only shot live (some sitcoms), it is influenced by the
context of television. Let us start with famous television actors: beyond the
fictional story on the screen, viewers can often follow, through television
itself and other media, the real-life story off the screen. Behind the
character, the actor is always there, much more than in the cinema. Some
actors find this worrying. Others use it. Peter Falk is Columbo. In France,
the actor Roger Hanin is the policeman Navarro (the character he has
embodied for years in a famous crime series). The use of the name
sometimes oscillates between the real-life name and the character’s name.
In comparison with the movies, the suspension of disbelief is not quite the
same. We might watch a story, but we also watch Peter Falk playing
Columbo, knowing he will come back next week.
This process of actors being actors more than characters culminates in
sitcoms. As much as it is a fiction story, we watch a theatrical representation
being broadcast, aware of the presence of the audience (live audience
or simulated audience through recorded laughter). The actors often play
with a specific detachment, sometimes criticized as bad acting. In a famous
French sitcom, the bad acting has interestingly been analysed as offering a
chance for young viewers to identify more with the actor and less with the
character. More precisely, it is as aspiring actors and stars that viewers can
think of themselves as having more chance to participate, some day, in this
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550 Media, Culture & Society 22(5)
kind of fiction than in fully fledged fiction (Pasquier, 1999). This
hypothesis could be generalized in relation to many sitcoms and soap
operas. The stereotyped or simplified way of acting, the heavy coverage of
the real-life character by the media between the episodes, and the very
duration of the series create a sense of real-life temporality, sometimes
lasting for years, very specific to television. In that sense, Jerry Seinfeld is
closer to Dan Rather than to a movie star. Some viewers can actually view
the whole flow of television as nothing but a life-long serial about the life
of television celebrities.
Finally, television fiction can be affected by the phenomenon of liveness
in another way. Watching television live is also watching non-recorded
television. It is well known that viewers mostly record movies and series.
The case of soap operas and sitcoms might be different: they might be
recorded, but viewers who want to keep up with the series, especially if
they share it with other viewers, might prefer to watch it live or with only a
small delay. Watching fiction live may help us to become part of a specific
interpretive community, and, beyond, of a national audience.
Live television as IUXaWUDWLRQand fulfilment
The overall picture of television is thus one where a technical possibility
always somehow winks at us (it might be live), but the occasions where the
promise is actually fulfilled are rare. This is one of the reasons that leads
viewers to become suspicious, at times, of the fair-play of television. In
1988, the French anchor Anne Sinclair interviewed Mikhail Gorbachov in a
weekly magazine in which she usually interviewed celebrities in relation to
the news – a programme known to be live. However, as she explained
before the programme, specific reasons had prompted her to record the
interview in Moscow the day before. This did not prevent at least two
viewers from sending letters of protest to Le Monde (the major French
daily newspaper) accusing her of lying when they ‘discovered’ that the
programme had been recorded: they had probably missed the opening
apology. Chromakeying the statement: this programme looks live but has
actually been recorded, could not have solved the problem. Or it might
have done, but this is just not done on television: it would be tantamount to
printing over a copy of a famous picture: ‘this looks like an original, but it
is only a copy’. The work of live television in the age of recording has to
try and keep its specific aura.
Television professionals are aware of the suspicion which weighs on
liveness. During the shooting of a continuity programme, if a guest wants
to take off his jacket, he will be advised not to do so. In the world of
continuity television, it is better if things change under the viewers’ eyes,
so that we might be sure the change is not the result of post-production
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Bourdon, Live television 551
editing. If some major change occurs, it is the job of the host to explain
why. Thus, for example, if during an advertising break some new guests
join the host, they must be introduced alongside an explanation that they
have joined during the break. The event is live in as much as it is innocent,
in that it does not seem to play tricks on the viewers.
This contributes to the explanation of an aspect of television analysed by
Beverley Houston in a famous article, where she contrasts the completeness
of the cinematographic spectacle with the dissatisfaction of television
viewing. Cinema is based on the closure of a fictional story, allowing for a
momentary but deeply satisfying identification with the story’s characters
(rather than with actors). According to Houston:
Of cinema, we say: I want the cinema experience again. At the ideological
level, the goal is to reinforce the unified subject as an intermediate step in
reproducing a certain social world. This is not the definitive work of television.
Its function is more directly linked to consumption, which it promotes by
shattering the imaginary possibility over and over, repeatedly reopening the gap
of desire. . .. Of television, we say: I always want it as I have never had it.
(Houston, 1984: 184)
In the American context, Houston relates this permanent frustration to
the part played by television in the service of consumption. However, the
experience of television as frustration, as something we ‘never quite have’,
goes beyond the specific context of commercial television. The seduction
of commercial television might be related to the seduction of liveness. If
we never have television, is it not partly because we never or very rarely
experience the fulfilled promise of live television Dayan and Katz (1992)
have noted that major media events are sources of intense emotion and
satisfaction to viewers. There are reasons related to the specific events they
studied. Media events, however, are moments when television is, at last,
without the shadow of a doubt, fully live. Because of the importance of the
event, the sense of risk is very high: something very specific, very unusual,
compared to the daily flow of television. The sense of satisfaction is shared
by professionals and viewers, creating another unusual phenomenon of
communion between the institution and its ‘clients’ – no longer clients,
almost participants.
Live television as historical fulfilment
Why is it that the possibility of live broadcasting has remained so
important, whereas the percentage of fully live television is actually small
on general audience television I do not believe in an essentialist view of
technologies, nor am I a technological determinist. Rather, I think that
liveness should be interpreted as a development within media history as a
whole. Media technological history at least partly reflects an effort to
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552 Media, Culture & Society 22(5)
reduce the gap between events and media users. It is intimately linked to a
history of communication as speed, where we experience the rhythm of
printing presses, the use of the telegraph by press agencies, the transmission
of photographs, the circulation of films (by plane), then the circulation
of video signals through transmission and satellite. Live broadcasting, in
this context, is the quintessence of ‘news’, whose ‘discovery’ has been a
major break in the history of the press, if it has not marked the birth of the
modern press altogether (Schudson, 1978).
Why such pressure I certainly do not want to privilege either a critical
explanation, from the top down (the media economy has created a need for
consumers), or a populist explanation, from the bottom up (liveness is a
natural need for the modem citizen). Rather, there has been a mutual
adjustment between technique, society and economy. From the top, major
institutions have all used news, then radio and television liveness, to create
a connection between the masses and events (thereby reinforcing mass
sentiments). At the base, the need to connect oneself, with others, to the
world’s events, is central to the development of the modem nation, as
Anderson has noted (1991). But then, did Max Weber not write that the
newspaper was the cement of the modem nation
This historical perspective may possibly lead to an explanation as to why
most prophecies of the death of mass television have been repeatedly
belied by historical evolution. Broadcasting has not yet been defeated by
narrowcasting, particularly not by the ultimate form of narrowcasting, the
VCR, which is supposed to give one a chance to free oneself completely
from the constraints of scheduling. However, as is well known, the VCR
remains subject to the programme schedule. The only exception is in the
case of big immigrant communities who live in countries where they have
no television channels in their own language, and resort massively to video
consumption. However, most people still watch more broadcast (or even
cable and satellite) television than video. Furthermore, video recording
itself is used not to detach oneself completely from the channels’
schedules, but only for slightly delayed viewing of some specific programmes
one is not free to watch on a specific evening. This explains why
audience measurement systems can actually include part of the VCR
viewing of a specific programme in their statistics, as in the UK where this
is called timeshift viewing.
The taste for ‘live broadcasting’ (in the sense of ‘non-VCR’ viewing)
can be related to the need to know others are watching at the same time.
Furthermore, watching television ‘live’, even though one is dealing with
the broadcasting of recorded programmes, offers a guarantee that, at any
given time, the flow can be interrupted by a special newsflash. Thus, even
when we are completely engrossed in a major fiction film, we are not
completely cut off from world events. This possibility has been noted by
theoreticians of liveness, notably by Mellencamp (1990). An example: on
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Bourdon, Live television 553
the evening of Itzhak Rabin’s assassination (November 1995), the French
second channel was broadcasting a variety show, recorded as if live, a
typical example of what I have called continuity television. At the time
when the event was discovered, the show was not interrupted. However,
the information was chromakeyed at the bottom of the screen, which
created a strange sensation: what looked live was not really live. A tragedy
was taking place, and the show’s participants kept talking happily. Of
course, viewers particularly interested in the event could have always
changed to CNN, LCI (the French non-stop news channel) or to radio.
The promise of liveness in contemporary television
Most of the aforementioned examples have been taken from general
audience and national channels. Let us now qualify my initial claim that
liveness will not disappear with the ‘new television’. Obviously, the
multiplicity of channels and the increased competition and ‘choice’ they
entail have some implications for liveness. The most talked-about aspect of
this transformation is the emergence of ‘global news’. CNN and BBC
World, even though they broadcast some magazines, promise the viewers
regular news bulletins and instant interruption in case of the occurrence of
a newsworthy event: they can be included in the long history of the
rhetorics of live television. One cannot be certain that these transformations
are about globalization, or mostly about globalization. In countries which
have the capital, and when the cable market has matured long enough,
producers create a national news channel, which is more successful than
the Anglo-Saxon or American model. Non-stop news channels are now
broadcasting in France, Germany and Italy; many are planned in other
countries.
The real change that CNN heralds is also related to a different
relationship with the nation, with television as a national enunciator. In the
1960s, it was the BBC (in the UK) or the ORTF (in France), which used
the promise of live broadcasting. In the 1990s, it is international (and,
increasingly, national) non-stop news channels. But, above the channels,
there is a meta-enunciator: the national or private cable company marketing
its services to the viewers. A non-stop news channel is always an important
part of the promise of this meta-enunciator. Thus, Paris-Cable promises to
Parisian viewers a ‘bouquet’ of channels, including both CNN and LCI.
Non-stop news channels might not be the ones with the biggest audience
shares, but they have another privilege. Studying remote control switching
patterns might well show us that viewers ‘check up on’ the news channels
regularly. If such a pattern is confirmed, live broadcasting might not be
disappearing – rather, it would be entering a new chapter in its history.
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554 Media, Culture & Society 22(5)
Appendix
I thought it useful to offer a recapitulation of the definitions of some elementary
sequences of the televisual flow. This is intended as a non-exhaustive reminder. It
should also be noted that similar attempts have been made by other authors, at least
for specific genres. Most authors, however, separate the visual and the verbal
elements which, in my opinion, must be combined. For continuity television, my
distinction between ‘routing turns’, ‘direct address’, and ‘involved commentary’,
closely resembles that of Goffman (1981: 235-6); for radio, between three modes
of announcing, ‘three-way’ (which includes the audience as ratified participant in
the interaction), ‘direct announcing’ (direct address), and ‘action override’ (involved
commentary). For news, see Hartley (1982: 109-11), who calls ‘accessed
voice’ what I call ‘routed turns’ or ‘interview excerpts’. For documentary, see
Comer (1996).
Elementary sequences of non-fiction television
A. Live/continuity television
Al. Direct address Look at the camera. Mediator addressing the viewers.
A2. Addressed actuality Look at the camera. Deixis (story about current affairs)
but use of the third person.
A3. Involved commentary In sports programmes or media events, off-camera
commentary of known intercessor (visualizable voice). Deixis related to the
contents of the picture (‘now we can see the goal keeper .. .’).
A4 and A5. Routing and routed turns. Mediators (routing) and participants
(routed) televisual tum-taking. Visualized voices (occasionally only visualizable,
but only for very short moments), no look at the camera.
B. Edited television
Bl. Credits No voice. Acousmatic music. Written material.
B2. Acousmatic commentary. Acousmatic voice, with an effect of reading,
sometimes background acousmatic music.
B3. Interview excerpt Visualized voice (sometimes only visualizable when the
interview is illustrated by short shots). Look close to the axis of the camera but not
directed at the camera.
B4. Non-contemporary address Look at the camera. Voice telling a story. No
deixis (e.g. historical narration within a documentary).
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Bourdon, Live television 555
BS. Voice-on news In news or current affairs programmes, off-camera commentary
of a journalist known to the viewer (visualizable voice). Sometimes live voice
on edited visual material: in that case it should be considered as continuity
television.
Note
This article was published in a shorter version in French in Reseaux 81: 61-78,
1997. It has its remote origins in a thesis written under the direction of Christian
Metz, who was not only a fine theorist but the best of pedagogues.
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Jerome Bourdon was a Researcher at the Institut National de L’ Audiovisuel,
Paris (1983-97) and since then has been Senior Lecturer at the
Department of Communications, Tel Aviv University. He has just published
‘A History of European Television News: From Television to
Journalism’, in Communications 25(1): 61-84 (2000). He is currently
working on the history of European television and on the relation between
television and collective memory.
Address: Department of Communications, Tel Aviv University, 69978
Israel. [email: jeromeb@post.tau.ac.il]
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