Identity navigation, story evaluation and recipient identification in the Graham Norton Show's "red Chair stories"

Abstract

For the evaluation of a story, story recipients rely on a narrator's identity work. Uniquely, these related processes of identity work and story evaluation unfold explicitly in the Red Chair segment of The Graham Norton Show, where "bad" stories are rejected by flipping the narrator out of a red chair, and narrators of "good" stories may walk away from the chair. We collected every Red Chair story broadcast in 2013 and analyzed these by drawing on Bamberg (2011, Narrative practice and identity navigation. In James A. Holstein & Jaber F. Gubrium [eds.], Varieties of narrative analysis, 99-124. London: Sage)'s three main dimensions of identity navigation, namely, agency, sameness/difference, and constancy/change. The analyses reveal diverging tendencies, which we bring together by means of the concept of identification, viz. (i) the story recipient's affiliation with the protagonist of the story and/or with the narrator, or (ii) the recipient's vicarious experience of the events. We propose that a story recipient's evaluation can be related to the extent to which identification is elicited. This identification is not only based on the navigational dimension of sameness/difference, as often proposed, but it is, among others, a result of the narrator's unique identity navigation along the three closely interwoven dimensions, thus also including agency and constancy/change.