Constructing “ordinary people” on british television: Notes on the politics of representation

Abstract

This chapter considers two landmarks of BBC television from the early 1970s: an episode of Late Night Line-up that featured London factory workers questioning television coverage; and the ‘documentary serial’ The Family. Drawing on a close examination of how both programmes worked to raise issues of class and community, the chapter examines the work of the BBC’s Community Programme Unit, directly inspired by the Line-Up episode, and looks at two present-day examples of ‘reality’ television, The Jeremy Kyle Show (ITV) and Gogglebox (C4), in terms of their possible connections to The Family. The chapter concludes by raising questions around both representation and representativeness, asking how ordinary people are represented on television and how broadcasters define them as somehow ‘typical’.