1. The document discusses lifestyle television programs and how they relate to concepts like neoliberalism, consumerism, and shifting views of masculinity. 2. It explores how public service broadcasters have adapted to become more commercialized and how lifestyle programs focus on quick fixes and consumer advice. 3. A key topic is how shows portraying makeovers and lifestyle changes can be seen as trying to "erase the unacceptable signs of lower class origins and making them respectable merely by looking respectable."

1. Because I’m worth it
Masculinity, metrosexuality and makeover TV
1

2. Excessive
¤ ‘For some lifestyle television’s excesses
are yet another sign of the medium’s
inexorable decline. Its emotional
frameworks, quick results and freakish
extremes often make the sub-genre
look like the more flamboyant cousin of
reality TV.’
¤ Palmer, 2008: p1
2

3. Neoliberalism
3

4. Lifestyle TV
4
¤ Television’s two-fold system:
1. Public Service Ethos

5. Lifestyle TV
¤ Television’s two-fold system:
1. Public Service Ethos
2. Commerciality
5

6. Quick fix, fast food
6

7. PSB’s challenge
¤ Broadcasters responded in 2 ways –
1. ‘by changing the ways in which their
programmes were made by setting up an
internal market’ and
2. by ‘marrying the pedagogic impulse to
inform, educate and entertain to bright
jazzy strands of consumer advice.’
¤ Palmer, 2008: 2
7

8. PSB’s challenge
¤ Broadcasters responded in 2 ways –
1. ‘by changing the ways in which their
programmes were made by setting up an
internal market’ and
2. by ‘marrying the pedagogic impulse to
inform, educate and entertain to bright
jazzy strands of consumer advice.’
¤ Palmer, 2008: 2
8

9. Investors in people
¤ Increased casualisation of broadcast labour force over
last 30 years
¤ Costs cut
¤ Decline of training programmes
¤ Service industry ethos
9

10. Low risk TV
10

11. The boom years…
¤ ‘Taste classifies as it classifies the
classifier’
¤ Cooking
¤ Gardening
¤ Grooming
¤ Styling
11

12. Taste and class
12

13. Taste and class
¤ In the guise of re-education the working
class can be made to see their problems
from the perspective of objective expert/
consultants who will stress performance
and character rather than anything else.
The aim thus becomes … erasing the
unacceptable signs of lower class origins
and making them respectable merely by
looking respectable.
¤ Palmer, 2008: 4
13

14. Wife Swap
14

15. Crisis and the ‘new man’
¤ Traditional masculinity understood as being in transition
1. Second wave feminism triggered numerous social and
political changes
2. Transformation of the labour market in response to
global capitalism
15

16. 3 general views
1. Masculinity as intrinsically pathological, in
constant need of management and
correction.
2. Accounts of masculine defeat (eg Faludi’s
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man).
These see men as victims of social forces out
of their control
3. The sceptical view - questions the actuality
of a masculinity crisis – feminists point out
that men still have disproportionate wealth,
authority and power
¤ Heartfield 2002, 8–10
16

17. ‘new man’ / ‘SNAG’
17

18. Metrosexuality
¤ ‘the variegated male body was up for
grabs as both sexual icon and
commodity consumer, in ways that
borrowed from but also exceeded the
longstanding commodification of the
male form’
¤ Miller in Heller, 2006, 106
18

19. Men as consumers
19

20. Men today…
¤ Men are now ‘subjected to new forms
of governance and commodification’.
The metrosexual constitutes ‘a
neoliberal subject who must govern
himself as a new aesthete, generated
from shifting relations of power and
finance’
¤ Miller in Heller, 2006, 106-112.
20

21. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
21

22. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
¤ 3 key ingredients in the reshaping of traditional
masculinity:
1. class,
2. sexuality and
3. consumer culture
22

23. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
¤ ‘Cosmopolitan queers descend on
these hapless bridge-and-tunnel
people ... [these] male losers in the
suburban reaches of the tristate area
(New York, New Jersey, and
Connecticut) who are awaiting a
transformation from ordinary men into
hipsters’
¤ Miller 2006, 115.
23

24. Commodifying sexuality
24

25. Traditional masculinity revised?
25

26. Governmentality;
The Fashion Police
¤ In a world where ‘it is now widely agreed and
understood that “appearance is everything”’,
‘people now understand television as an active
agent of transformation’.
¤ (Palmer, 2004: 184, 189)
¤ Michel Foucault – Governmentality
¤ Operations of power in modern society
26

27. 27
Jeremy
Bentham, 1791

28. Governmentality
¤ ‘Television seems to teach us, our only option is to listen
humbly as our design skills, sense of style, or musical
talents are scrutinized and dissected, our homes
remodelled, our identities reformatted, and our intimate
histories laid bare...’
28

29. Governmentality
¤ Governmentality depends upon our consent, and whilst
these factors are powerful forces, ‘the option always
remains to throw off the selves that lifestyle television
creates for us, to be who we want to be, to think for
ourselves’.
29