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Chapter 1
introduction




This is a book about television presenters and it refers to the programmes on
which they appear by the industrial term presenter-led. this is a very useful
term indicating the first of the tasks of a presenter to lead the programme, to
guide it from the front, but also to lead it to the viewers and the viewers to it.
Certainly once a presenter becomes well-known, he or she can draw viewers to
a new show, but what about unknown presenters? One of the tasks of this book
will be to look at where presenters come from. By the time they arrive on the
main terrestrial broadcast channels and certainly in prime time, very few of them
are completely unknown and so they can do this latter mode of leading, even
if they are themselves moving over from another field or section of it, as the
professional sports figures who take up commentary and hosting do.
Presenter-led programmes constitute a significant proportion of the television
schedule, even if this is not apparent from the focus of most television studies,
which prefers to consider scripted fictions of various kinds dramas, soaps and
sitcoms. the proliferation of television channels consequent on the growth in pay
services and the shift to digital broadcasting has meant an increase in presenter-
led shows because by and large they are cheaper than dramas. of course there
is the occasional high profile presenter like Jonathan Ross, whose 6,000,000
annual contract with the BBC could be cited to demonstrate otherwise (and was
a focus of the 2009 BBC inquiry into whether the Corporation was paying too
much money for people whose specific talents could not easily be identified), but
for the most part presenter-led programming is cost-effective comparatively
cheap, popular and able to deliver many hours of programmes. even during the
various discussions of the 2009 move of american presenter Jay leno to prime
time and his replacement by Conan oBrien in the late night chat show slot,
the comparative cheapness of presenter-led programming was commented on.
apparently an episode of The Jay Leno Show cost nBC $Us400,000 compared
to an (unspecified but presumably high end) scripted drama which could cost up
to US$3 million (Farhi and Moraes 2010: 11).
it is not customary to consider the news or current affairs programmes or
blue chip documentaries as presenter-led, nor as particularly cheap, but they will
be considered here because individual people move between these programmes
and the lighter formats that fit the term more easily, and because the work that
is done by newsreaders, political reporters and expert commentators like David
Attenborough or David Starkey is remarkably similar in many respects to that
of the more than 100 people around the world who have fronted Who Wants to
be a Millionaire? or the smaller number who guide the evictions of Big Brother
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contestants, or to television cooks like Nigella Lawson and Bill Granger. They are
intermediaries between the programme and the viewers, cultural intermediaries
even, bringing information about (slightly) new ways of being and thinking to the
attention of the television audience. When pierre Bourdieu introduced the term
cultural intermediaries in Distinction, he named television presenting among
the occupations engaged in promulgating information about the art of living
(1984: 359), although he did not expand on the activities involved explicitly and
he was far from approving about the whole category.
the programmes at the heart of this study will be ordinary television ones
(Bonner 2003): gameshows, chat shows and talkshows, lifestyle and reality
shows, time of day shows whether morning, afternoon or evening/tonight ones.
the frequency with which the less respectful term show appears in the genre
terms is indicative. Like many writers on television, I alternate programme
and show to provide a bit of variety to the prose, but in the formal language of
television producers, schedulers and senior network executives, the distinction
is meaningful. Presenter-led shows of these kinds do not represent the prestige
side of television and senior executives in the field have shown astonishment
that an academic would want to pay attention to such programmes and people.
their prevalence here is for several reasons; their presenters are expected to
work from and display their personalities far more than is the case on news or
blue chip documentaries; they occupy more of that part of the schedule which
is presenter-led; and the presenters operate as cultural intermediaries to a much
greater extent than do those on other presenter-led programmes.
the prestigious programmes will be paid some attention: not only the news
and current affairs ones (which are never publicly referred to as presenter-led),
but sport and occasionally science and business. some reference will also be
made to childrens programmes, though the more specialised aspects of this
category are beyond my expertise. For the most part though, if there is a named
person speaking on-screen directly to viewers, it fits the brief. Most examples
will be drawn from the United Kingdom and australia. occasional american
instances will expand an observation, but usually only when the programme
involved has screened in the UK or australia and even so only when drawing on
academic commentary about it. the web of reference within which television
presenters operate is too varied for more than two cultures, similar and both
familiar to me, to be drawn on. presenters operate as sites for media convergence
and did so long before the internet arrived. Books and magazine articles
promoted their programmes and extended their presence from the very start
of broadcasting and continue to do so now, in company with websites and on-
line streaming. personal appearances and scandals help and hinder careers and
programmes and some knowledge of these and of the more mundane day-to-day
press mentions, as well as the ephemeral bits of public opinion overheard on
buses or in queues or in water-cooler chat also feed in to the picture and word
of mouth circulating about a presenter. a rich understanding of this material is
needed to underpin analysis.
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although my main focus will be on people and programmes from the 1990s
and the subsequent decade, some earlier examples will be drawn on for two
related reasons. on the one hand my interest in where presenters prominent in
that period come from and how the role of television presenters came to be, will
send me back further, on the other and even more important is a very specific
interest in presenters who have managed long careers on television. it is my belief
that such instances can be extremely informative about the whole field, and so in
some instances programmes from the 1950s and 1960s will be discussed. Jonathan
Bignell has written about the consequences of choosing particular examples in the
production of narratives and pedagogical practices centred on television drama
(2005). The tension between representativeness and exceptionalness he discusses
needs acknowledgement here, although not all of his suggested components of a
desirably reflexive practice can be followed for this study. The potential corpus
of examples is huge and has to be managed in ways that combine a degree of
transparency of the methods employed, with an attempt to balance my own viewing
practices with elements of representativeness. More examples will be drawn from
the UK than from australia, not only because of the greater population, greater
number of television channels and longer history of television broadcasting, but
also because more British originating programmes are screened on australian
television, than australian ones in the UK, thus British programmes are an intrinsic
part of australian television in a way that australian programmes (pace the teen
soaps) are not of British. As far as possible though I will avoid giving detailed
consideration to presenters whose work I have not seen in its country of origin.
presenter-led television is less evident in DVD releases generally and in those
catering either to nostalgia or to educational markets than is the case for scripted
fictional programming. Some presenter-led material is screened only once, while
others seem to have a very extended afterlife on pay channels. Infotainment like
cooking programmes provide examples of repeated programmes also available on
DVD, while time-of-day programmes, like morning shows, demonstrate the reverse.
Far more than was the case in what John Ellis calls the age of availability (2000),
the production date of a programme identifies merely the start of its circulation, as
the practices of american syndication which have long seen programmes live on
for decades as a matter of course, come to be applicable to British and australian
situations. Canned programmes, those sold internationally for screening as-is,
often long after their original release date, have long screened on the old free-to-
air channels, but now pay and digital channels keep such a mix of old and new in
circulation that dating shows to more than a decade seems rather meaningless.
Certain programmes and presenters will be drawn on quite heavily and i will
mention a couple here to indicate further the kind of factors influencing my choices.
as a scholar whose research areas encompass ordinary television, celebrity and
womens magazines, I am very familiar with arguing the significance of apparently
trivial everyday material, yet even so, when i announced my intention to study the
work of Rolf Harris, I was surprised at the extent to which I needed to defend
my decision. Both as a British-resident australian and as a presenter with over
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50 years on-screen, Harris was over-determined as a case study for this project.
He proved enormously fruitful, both representatively and as an exceptional case.
Trisha Goddard was also valuably both British and Australian, though unlike
Harris, almost all of whose programmes are British made, she has had significant
separate careers in each country. the last three sentences have also raised another
problem, perhaps too small to be termed methodological. it is though a problem of
nomenclature. the domestic familiarity of presenters means that referring to them
formally by their surnames often seems false; rolf is rolf, usefully immediately
identifiable, while Harris could be anyone, but consistency in naming practices
across all presenters mentioned will not be achievable. David attenborough
will never be David, but his brothers prominence in a related field means he
cannot immediately just be attenborough. Here the distinction between ordinary
presenter-led and more serious programmes will probably be visible. More
presenters referred to will travel under their first than their family names after
the first full reference. Some academic respectability will be employed though;
despite its useful distinctiveness, i will not be calling Bruce Forsyth Brucie.
another nomenclature problem comes from the noun and verb host. its gendered
character makes presenter and present always preferable, but sentences can
become overloaded with words developed from present, so sometimes, even
when the gendered specificity of host is not required, it will be used for variety.
Hostess will be used only when required for historical accuracy.
one of the programmes that i will be referring to repeatedly is the motoring
show Top Gear. there are several reasons for this. it is a long running show, and in
its current version has been running throughout the latter half of my chosen focus
period. it is arguably the most watched programme in the world (that debate is
engaged in Bonner 2010a). It was popular as an imported programme in Australia
before a local format was made and the mapping of the australian presenters onto
qualities of the British originals through three different variations proved very
informative about presenting and the creation of personae from which to do it.
Finally, the operation of a three-man presenting team, all of whom are presenters
addressing the camera directly, but who operate nonetheless within a recognised
hierarchy led me to take further my analysis of presenting teams, which will be
a significant component of what is to come. In nomenclature terms, it provides
a fine demonstration of naming inconsistency. Popular discussion of the show
tends to refer to Jeremy, Hammond and May one first name and two surnames,
reflecting neither what one might expect from the internal hierarchy, nor the class
distinctions evident for British viewers.
I have taken the decision that, my concern being television, the presenters to
be included need to be both seen and heard. programmes that only use a voice-
over are not regarded here as being presenter-led. Generically then, this means
that docusoaps will not be considered. as so often after announcing such a
blanket exclusion, there are exceptions. After many years in the standard voice-
over form, the very high rating australian docusoap following Customs and
Immigration officers, Border Security, changed to using actor Grant Bowler
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speaking to camera at the start of each episode and continuing unseen, providing
the rest of the narration. The show was so established, that it seemed to make
little difference. there will be occasional other instances of docusoaps that move
towards being presenter-led. a more substantial exception comes with the case of
David Attenborough. Attenborough is a very well known, very serious presenter of
nature documentaries and his work will be discussed at various stages throughout
the book. As well as appearing very much as the bluest of blue chip presenters for
his own series like Life on Earth, he provides the narration for many more natural
history programmes filmed and written by other people. On these occasions his
is no anonymous voice-over; his highly recognisable voice evokes the whole
personality, indeed presence, known through the documentaries and the chat show
appearances promoting them, and endows the accompanying programme with
gravitas and legitimacy by association.
attenboroughs is an internationally recognised face and voice, at least
for English speakers, but some other instances operate only within national
boundaries. A familiar voices ability to evoke the face and demeanour of the
speaker may be nationally bounded and if the program is exported it can only
function anonymously. a particularly strange related australian example did
something of the reverse. When an Australian commercial network decided to
screen the imported You Are What You Eat presented by Gillian Keith, who was
completely unknown to Australians, it decided to keep her visual presence and to-
camera speaking, but to replace the voice only segments with a male voice-over
sporting a very marked Australian accent. It rated reasonably well, but sounded
disjointed and lasted just one series on air.
In identifying programmes by the channel on which they were first screened, I
am helped by the numerical nomenclature being different in the UK and australia.
The Australian free-to-air commercial channels 7, 9 and 10 have no direct
parallels in the UK and there is no channel 4 or 5 in australia. aBC here refers
always to the public service australian Broadcasting Corporation and sBs to the
Australian Special Broadcasting Service, the public service multicultural network
that is partially funded by advertising. pay is the general term for all subscription
services whether terrestrial or satellite.


The Current scholarly state of Play

several years ago when i was writing Ordinary Television, my study of non-fiction
infotainment programmes (2003), I was surprised to find very little written about
television presenting and thrown back largely on my own resources. Most ordinary
television is presenter-led, but the phenomenon of this standard component of
television systems around the world was very little investigated. There were books
concerned with individual presenters, most frequently oprah Winfrey (see most
particularly Eva Illouzs 2003 work) and some American newsreaders, as well as
some articles about historical figures, but little concerned with the practice itself, how
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it functioned and what it required. two articles, by John langer and by Karen lury,
were exceptions to that and the many citations of them attest to their importance.
Langers 1981 study Televisions Personality System was truly ground-breaking.
He was emphatic about the distinction between stars, phenomena of the cinema,
and personalities, the best that television could offer. He produced a whole range of
oppositions between stars and personalities based substantially in the characteristics
of each medium. Thus film stars were spectacular and larger than life, idealizations
to be revered and distant from their audiences, even though, following richard
Dyer and through him Morin and lowenthal, he admitted a diminution in the extent
of their divinity. personalities meanwhile were a regular, predictable part of life,
intimate, immediate and above all familiar (1981: 353-6). They were a lesser form
compared to the grandeur of cinematic fame, but comparative ranking is neither my
concern nor constant. The terminological hierarchy had precedent, but with film in
the lesser place. as richard de Cordova was to point out, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, film performers were called picture personalities with star
being used for the greater magnitude theatrical performers (1990). By the 1980s,
the regime of intimacy most evident on television had already had an impact on
film and television performers, but stars retained aspects of the extraordinary, while
personalities existed only in the domain of the ordinary and everyday (langer 1981:
355). The distinctions have been reduced by the subsequent intensified operation
of celebrity culture (and the expanded use of the word celebrity). So much of the
work of celebrity is performed in magazines undifferentiated by medium, where it
matters little whether the body castigated as too fat or pregnant, performs primarily
in cinema or on television. nonetheless, much of langers analysis remains valid
and many analysts, trying to argue for the existence of television stars, still end by
talking of personalities.
lurys article on television performance addresses many more targets, but draws
its main distinction between television actors and presenters, while acknowledging
that both engage in performances, and that there are many instances of cross-
overs between the categories. Both, she argues are constrained by casting to type
(1995/6: 119). With presenters she notes differences between the more authoritative
ones like newsreaders and documentary presenters, the more excitable current
affairs presenters, and those music hall or comedy inflected ones who present game
shows and other pieces of light entertainment. In the fifteen years since writing,
the solidity of the distinctions has eroded. Her later work expands the last of the
groupings, including detailed analyses of the work of Chris Evans (2001: 111-
25) and Ant and Dec (2005). James Bennett drew on these sources, and on my
own work, in a discussion that developed the categories of the televisually and the
vocationally skilled personalities and explored them through case studies of Cilla
Black and Alan Titchmarsh, both of whom collapse the distinctions (2008). As this
manuscript was being completed, his monograph Television Personalities (2010b)
was published. this was too late for it to be discussed here as much as it deserves.
A few articles considering individual cases are also significant. Andy
Medhursts article on Gilbert Harding (2000) and Rob Turnocks expansion of it
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(2007) provide a very strong foundation for this study as many of the consequences
of being a television personality can be seen in this example from the very early
period. Harding was known not for his presenting, which was unsuccessful, but for
being a panellist from 1951 on the game show Whats My Line? Medhurst talks
of his inability to appear in public without being mobbed and describes him as
monstrously, freakishly popular (1991: 71). It was his rudeness that shocked and
delighted his audience who considered it an act, although Harding insisted it was
just how he was. Turnock suggests that that his audience came to accept this and
valued him then for his authenticity (2007: 175). Medhurst concludes his analysis by
asserting that Harding was a paradigmatic television personality [not] enacting
a fictional role, but trading on an aspect (however heightened) of his own personal
attributes (1991: 72-3). This remains the essence of popular television presenters.
a number of discourse/conversation analysts, most notably andrew tolson,
have also contributed through close scrutiny of the words used in the course of
presenting, and their implication. Tolson suggests considering broadcast talk
through the concepts of interactivity, performativity and liveliness (2006: 13). He
uses these terms to analyse radio as well as television talk and to discuss those in
conversation with presenters as much as presenters themselves. However such talk
is directed by the presenters who are required to exhibit those characteristics even
in situations where no one else is present and they are staging their performance for
a distant audience. His discussion of celebrity is most relevant and overlaps with
his most distinctive contribution to the field his extended attention to the synthetic
personality, like Dame Edna Everage (1991, 2006).
the persistence with which the term personality turns up, despite its rather
old-fashioned sound to the contemporary ear, together with my inclusion of it in
the title, requires explication. it was completely correctly and frequently used to
describe Gilbert Harding, and langers use fell within its popular deployment, as
well as establishing clearly his concern with prominent television performers as
contrasts to cinematic stars. people were not at that stage so commonly referred
to as celebrities. personalities indicates greater substance than mere presenters
and the term can encompass those people who while not strictly used to present
programmes, still are exceedingly well-known for their television presence. There
are however very few such people left. Most have been given their own shows
or are in transition towards it. Bennetts observations about the shift of laurence
Llewellyn-Bowen to centre stage indicates what happened (2008: 37). In using both
terms for my title, i wanted not only to draw on the history associated with the term,
but also to indicate how central the projection of a personality is to contemporary
television presenting. if there are any jobbing presenters left now, it is only because
they are personality presenters in waiting. not all will succeed. the individuals i
will be referring to are all sufficiently prominent in their home territories that they
can bear both terms, but except for those parts where i need to draw on the analytic
power of personality, i will use the term presenter alone.
a different approach to the matter of people on-screen is provided, almost as an
aside, by John Ellis in his discussion of the (im-)possibility of producing an ITV
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canon. He asks whether programmes are even the right category to be searching.
perhaps, he suggests, faces should be used instead. His list of itV faces includes
more presenters than actors, but the largest category is comedians (2005: 45-6).
presenters and comedians are certainly not distinct categories; many presenters
were or are comics and the overlap in skills is significant. Lury notes it too and the
situation will be explored at length below. elliss comment on the importance of
faces to a network should not be left just as an aside. They are so significant that
exclusive contracts are drawn up for the more popular and the shift of presenters
from one to another network can be highly newsworthy.
several of the functions that television presenters serve have already been
mentioned: they lead; they act as intermediaries between the programme or the
network and the viewers, they are the face of the programme and (some) even the
channel. three other functions will be noted here, though all will be expanded on in
the next chapters. Because they are all actual or potential celebrities, they function
away from their programme as promotion for it on chat shows or in magazine
interviews. this can lead to problems where the disconsonance between what is
revealed away from the show and the persona used in presenting it becomes too
great, and several scandals showing just that will be explored. in the case of licensed
formats, presenters are one of the prime devices used to localise the programme to
its new territory. As Chris Tarrant with his laddish entertainment background is
replaced in the australian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? by blokish
football identity eddie McGuire, the programme becomes an australian one tied
in a net of different associations. the tight format requires the lifeline to still be
called phone a friend, but it functions as phone a mate and McGuires inquiries
about the character of the relationship, especially to a male contestant, imply an
expectation of mateship.
Most importantly, presenters are the hinge around which the sociable
relationship with television operates (Scannell 1991). Their familiarity within the
domestic situation, which is still where the bulk of television is consumed, the
way they speak directly to the audience assuming an intimacy and commonality,
their roots in ordinariness, the way in which their own personal details are shared
with the audience on the show or in its promotion, all operate to establish precisely
this warm, friendly aura which brings those viewers with whom it resonates back
week after week. It is one of the bases on which we as viewers choose whether to
follow particular presenter-led shows, though the possibility of a more perverse
relationship, where the pleasure lies in disliking the presenter and mocking or
abusing his performance should not be excluded.


What follows

The book is divided into two parts. The first is concerned to examine presenters
and their activities in general, while the second considers a selection of programme
types to look at variations within genres. Part I considers the function of presenters
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at greater length than the sketch above and follows it by asking where presenters
come from, identifying the primary sources as comedy and journalism. two
chapters considering the qualities of a successful presenter and the interaction of
celebrity and presenters conclude the part. Celebrity is accorded separate treatment
because not only are many presenters themselves celebrities, but one of the prime
sites for the display of celebrity, the televised celebrity interview, itself requires a
presenter.
the second part starts with a consideration of the presentation of those
programmes not generally regarded as presenter-led: news and current affairs;
documentaries; and sport. it then moves to the lightest of light entertainment:
games, quizshows and reality television, especially reality talent shows. Chapter
8 looks at lifestyle programming and its promotion of consumption, while the
following chapter examines programmes which explicitly and implicitly query
some of these ideas, primarily on environmental grounds. Certain programmes
which could have valuably extended the discussion have had to be omitted from
the detailed generic inquiry. Talkshows, parenting and relationship programmes
and time of day programmes are only discussed in the first part.