Perfect Match is the most watched television programme in Australia at the moment. Its presenters, Greg Evans, Debbie Newsome and, now, Tiffany Lamb, have ridden to personality status on its back, and the producers' confidence in the mixture of sexual innuendo and public humiliation is signified by their manner of dealing with the summer lay-off. Unlike Blankety Blanks, the previous top-rating game show which ran repeat episodes over the summer, Perfect Match, (with parodic grandiloquence) ran 'The Best of Perfect Match.' This retrospective series was unusually narrativized - it gave updates on the current status of the relationships it had set in train; in the more customary format, it is the ambiguous spectacle of embarrassed contestants confronting each other for the first time, and the returnees attacking their partner's voice, appearance, habits, and class which seems to be irresistible. It is this aspect of the programme which is the starting point for this discussion.
Perfect Match is an American concept which has undergone extensive transformations to produce the Australian version. Nick Roddick has summarized the format for British readers (who are soon to have their own version, hosted by Cilia Black):
The rules of Perfect Match go like this: a man (or a woman: the game alternates) is on one side of a divided stage; hidden from him (or her) on the other side are three women (or men) -or girls and fellas, as Greg likes to call them. The contestant gets to ask his or her prospective dates three nudge-nudge questions each; the dates give clever answers, and the contestant picks the cleverest, or the dumbest or the most suggestive. Meanwhile Greg quips, the audience giggle, eyes sparkle and a few brand names get mentioned (Roddick, 1985: 235).
Not the most objective of descriptions, but even it concludes with the remark that Perfect Match, 'is, of course, compulsive viewing.'
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The format does not necessarily guarantee that it will be 'compulsive viewing,' and we can demonstrate that because Perfect Match has a history. During the heyday of the teenager in the sixties, Australian television offered another version of the same format, then called Blind Date. It was paternalistic, innocuous, free of innuendo or any invocation of sex. Rather than a dirty weekend, Blind Date offered a meal out with a chaperone; it was compered by a disc-jockey, Graham Webb, who was liked by the kids because he played rock'n'roll and tolerated by the adults because he looked clean and wholesome. Webb was more wimp than pimp; he was almost in loco parentis, a benign donor who supervized and mediated in the beginnings of romance. The object of Blind Date was romance and marriage, and its matches were carefully constructed as the product of complementary 'personalities' rather than personal appearance. There was no talk of 'looking for a rage' or a 'good time,' and there was no regular return segment to test the programme's success rate. Finding a mate was a 'worthwhile' project in which Blind Date assisted its contestants, with none of the cynicism implicit in Greg Evans' treatment of both the returnees and the new partners meeting at the screen.
The difference between these two versions of the same format are numerous, despite their linear relationship, and in those differences we might be tempted to locate indices of social change. Certainly the confusion around the appropriate role for women -as prey or predator, as spoil-sport or good-time-girl - which marks the discourses of Perfect Match is either a response to, or an appropriation of, feminist critiques of gender relations. Perfect Match is anything but unified, however, so whatever social change one might want to examine within its discursive formations will be neither complete nor comfortable.
The questions asked in Perfect Match provoke responses that continually negotiate the opposition between discourses of difference and individuality, and those which draw on a range of established class, gender and subcultural codes in order to locate the contestant within a personality 'type.' The programme is marked by such contradictions, as conflicts of all kinds are exploited by the compere's handling of the contestants. However, although Greg Evans may be, in turn, sarcastic, critical, sexist, even anti-sexist, any final judgement is symbolically (sometimes literally) thrown over to the audience at the end of each segment. While there is a particular complex of attributes which contestants tend to share - Stephen Crofts (1986) cites, among others,
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sexy, youthful, casually but smartly dressed, sporty, healthy and narcissistic - these attributes do not always produce the identical responses in the compere, the studio audience, or the viewers. There is a dominant type, of course, and a number of conventions have emerged which tend to determine answers to questions. Nevertheless, these conventions are not without internal contradictions and can be mobilized to support widely differing ideological positions.
The central area around which such conventions have grouped themselves is, inevitably, sexual relationships and gender roles. Both questioner and questioned, male and female, are keen to represent themselves as ready for anything, a good sport who is 'fun-loving,' likes 'a rage,' enjoys 'having a good time,' and is looking for an 'adventure.' Such phrases occur as frequently in the utterances of women as in those of men, but they do not serve equivalent functions for both. Men are still allowed the 'natural' role of the sexual initiator, for instance; a pair returning with some degree of satisfaction from their weekend were asked if they were going to see each other again, and the girl said she would 'kill him if he didn't call.' Further, offering oneself as a partner in a 'good time' (here, a euphemism both for sex and for its deferral) carries different potential meanings for men and women. Although this is a familiar strategy for males, it is a relatively recent inversion of male discourse by women. As such it can be received in a number of ways: positively, as a signifier of the colonized striking back, or, negatively, as the usurping of the male role - the latter, the more conventional way of seeing feminism within the wider cultural context of the show. The more positive reading is partly supported by the fact that there is some licence allowed women to express their own inverted sexism on the show. One returnee spurned her date because 'he's the kind of guy who doesn't get many knockbacks, and I just loved knocking him back'; another contestant accused a particularly pimply male of 'growing up into a little boy.' One female who had otherwise given 'ready, willing and able' answers summarized her view of men with the film title, 'The Good, The Bad and the Ugly:'
Clearly, the symmetry of the alternating male/female prize is intended to defuse accusations of sexism. Yet this arrangement takes place within a wider asymmetry of gender relations - an asymmetry which is revealed by the commutation test of imagining Debbie as the beautiful, witty compere and Greg as the handsome, vacuous assistant. Men and women are not treated equally by the programme. Greg Evans employs what Bill Lewis (1984:45) has called the droit de seigneur of the television compere
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in his conversations with 'the girls'; women are particularly the target of innuendo. Of a female contestant who has just won a diving enthusiast he asks 'Do you dive?,' and the large-breasted are regularly greeted with 'I just love the way you bounced out here.' As such moments indicate, although physical appearance is not involved in the contestants' initial choices, it is a key element in the evaluation of those choices, in the returnee segments, and in the viewers' participation. Whenever physical appearance is a factor, the sexual politics skew towards the male; the female body is far more extensively colonized by male discourse than the reverse. This does not, however, simply invert Perfect Match's attempts to mark itself off from such colonizing discourse. Firstly, the politics are not static anyway; the advertising industry is increasingly exploiting the male body as the object of female desire. Secondly, while Perfect Match's attempts at a kind of progressiveness may not be convincing, they remain sufficiently uneasy and contradictory to discount accusations of their being simply inoculatory.
Although an important discursive domain in the programme, gender is not the only site around which ideological conflict occurs. Contradictions are pervasive, even in the simplest of the show's represented values - in the conflation of health with consumerism, for instance.
Perfect Match occupies a complicated discursive grid which is continually traversed by contradictory and opposing discourses of race, gender, class and the whole battery of 'lifestyle' mythologies. Its refusal to rigidly position its audience seems to enable it to sweep up a large and disparate viewing audience. This fact should encourage us to question how rigidly popular television actually does position its audience. In the case of Perfect Match, far from confusing its audience with the resultant ambiguity, the proliferation of different social/ideological positions is an essential part of its appeal.
Perfect Match is unlike its predecessor in that it is not solely in the business of cosily confirming myths of romance, love and marriage; its relation to its audience is much more aggressive -shocking, disgusting and outraging them as often as it constructs a conspiratorial convergence of attitudes and values. Importantly, too, the narrative it presents would not lead one to have confidence in romance, love or marriage - or in Perfect Match as a facilitator. Although the programme maintains an interest in the future of relationships, its returnees are usually unimpressed with
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each other and the overall effect of the programme is to reveal the peaches and cream colour-scheme and the heart-shaped icons of the titles as parodic. The episode in which two contestants actually married stood out as anomalous and bathetic since it had to endorse the very concepts it normally exposes.
As a game show, Perfect Match is atypical. The completion of the game - the despatching of the couples for their holiday - is neither the point of narrative closure nor the resolution of the constructed conflict. There are few real 'winners' in Perfect Match - if 'winning' assumes the finding of one's perfect match. The prize - the commodified body of the partner - is much more ambiguous than a BMW. The hierarchizing that occurs at the end of Sale of the Century, with the winner unequivocally singled out, does not customarily occur in Perfect Match. To 'win' would be to match the viewers' selections, and given the disparate nature of the audience, this is only a possibility - not a probability. The failure to select the same partner as the computer is a further qualification, and there is also the 'test' of the weekend to pass. Since so few pass this test - as in finding both the weekend and their partner enjoyable - winning seems less important than having participated in the spectacle of Perfect Match. This emphasis on participation - becoming part of the domain of television -and the particular nature of this participation - the rigidly constructed performance to which it contributes - moves the show away from the category of game and towards that of ritual.
Levi-Strauss (1966:32-33) distinguishes between games and rituals, pointing out the importance of winners in games, their establishment of a hierarchy which creates a disjunction between otherwise equal groups or individuals. Perfect Match does not produce this kind of disjunctive conclusion. Rituals are conjunctive rather than disjunctive, bringing about a relation between two initially separate groups. Rituals have a confirming function in symbolically dealing with conflicts in order to reassure and reconfirm membership of the social or cultural group. The pleasure Perfect Match offers through its explicitly artificial conjunctions is made possible by their ritualistic function - as a familiar, symbolic series of activities known to the viewer and offer to them as spectacle and meaning.
A ritual may not vary in its structure but it can vary in its specific performance. For those watching the spectacle, the repetition is familiar and pleasurable rather than boring or meaningless, and it allows variants which occur within a performance to be highlighted and exposed to detail scrutiny. Perfect Match is
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structured around two moments in which the performers are exposed to the power of those watching. The first of these is the 'meeting,' when the two contestants are framed on either side of the divided stage, unable to see each other but on display for the viewer. Tension is allowed to build, then the dividing screen is withdrawn and they are required to salute each other in some way. The second moment is also marked by the use of a division as the focus of attention. This is the returnee segment where the contestants watch a tape of their comments about their partners. As the tape rolls, the insets allow the viewers to observe the couple's reactions.
Both rituals expose the performers/contestants to public embarrassment at best, humiliation at worst. The meeting is the less arduous. Its main source of discomfort is that there are few experiences (outside of viewing television) which could prepare one for meeting one's partner for a weekend in Singapore on national television. The situation tests the most rehearsed and cool, and terrifies the average (one contestant could be observed developing a nervous rash during the wait on the other side of the screen). Competent performance is almost without codes, so the potential for being viewed as incompetent is limitless; microphones record what is said, cameras record what is done, and the convention of kissing on meeting is fraught with the problem of the clash of noses, the choice of target and so on. It is a performance for which the only training is the regular watching of similar performances on Perfect Match, noting the repertoire of behaviour that successfully represents itself as appropriate.
Such is the difficulty of the ritual - the abstract definition of the performance - that very little response to the revealed body occurs. Sidelong looks, averted eyes, or nervous laughter are cues the audience observes but this observation is sharpened by the lack of any more obvious information on the screen. In meetings where the embarrassment is clearly acute - they may not manage to kiss, or may avoid looking at each other - the compere is there to point this out to the couple and to the audience. The viewers' pleasure here is various. One mode of pleasure seems to privilege the viewer over the viewed to the extent that it is almost sadistic - the watching of the meeting as a spectacle of embarrassment. Viewers' speculation on the choice competes with the readings of the couples' reactions - reactions that require close attention since they are so strenuously constrained by the situation itself. The couples' second chance (for a more appropriate reaction) occurs when they are informed of their holiday destination; they may perform this reaction more efficiently than the first. But it is also
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a second chance for the viewer to develop the hypotheses provoked by the first clinch. For the audience, though, this is a less important moment - the commodity of the weekend is often more interesting - as is the announcement of the computer's judgement on the couple. The ritual as observed and performed, then, involves dealing with a meeting with someone of the opposite sex, where the meeting is structured to the point of eliminating most signifiers of individuality or 'personality,' from which there is no escape (the 'ritual must go on'), and yet in which personal performance will be evaluated. It is like the sub-teen's nightmare of the girlfriend's doorstep on the first date, replayed into millions of homes ten times a week.
The second moment is more ritual than game since competition is so oblique; it is an inter-textual competition with previous contestants within the domain of television, as well as an entirely private competition occurring within the domain of the contestant's own 'extra-televisual' life, where sexual success is measured, valorized and attached to the individual's character. For the contestant at least, the distinction between television and 'real life' does not exist at this point. This may explain the otherwise surprising frankness of the expressed judgements. Here, contestants on television make the kind of remarks one might expect to hear in private, but not from performers on the screen; they complain their partner was too fat, too immature, too common, or (in one case) that they seemed better suited to playing with boy scouts. Generally, the studio audience seems most animated by the more lacerating exchanges. Although this creates the ambience of a blood sport, it is also true that anyone (male or female) who does not appear to give their date a fair trial provokes murmurs of resentment from the audience and a chiding from Greg Evans.
The spectacle provided for the viewer is one of embarrassment, even failure. Success, in the achievement of a perfect match (however that would be defined) is an unlooked-for bonus that occurs very rarely. Perfect Match is like a specific application of Candid Camera, or another show that sells embarrassment - The Gong Show - in which private conceptions of oneself are publicly punctured. Such shows ritually confirm the power of television, specifically its celebration of the domestic and the everyday rather than proposing, for instance, its potential as high art. Each of these shows construct their performers/contestants/victims as the object of the power of television and thus place the viewer in an especially privileged position. On the one hand, the situation in which embarrassment takes place is both televisual and social; the conflation of the 'real' and its representation produces an impor-
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tant potential for audience identification: would I have done that? On the other hand, this kind of involvement is not necessary or essential. After all, we are given more information than the contestants and can make less risky judgements, and the compere functions more as a mediator between the spectacle and the audience than between the contestants and their performance. The power of the audience is both voyeuristic and narcissistic, but the distance allowable between the audience and the spectacle goes beyond that which is normally constructed as voyeuristic in, for example, the feature film. The viewer's power and privilege derives not only from observing and possessing someone else's behaviour, but also from the viewer's relative freedom from the constraints which determine that behaviour. So, the viewer is at least as much an observer of a performance as an imaginary participant. Crofts' (1986) point, that the contestants matter less than the audience, is apposite here. The performers in Perfect Match are always subordinated to the game/ritual being played out, and the freedom the viewer has in reading the meanings generated is greater than the freedom allowed the contestants to contribute their own.
The power of television, then, is confirmed through ritual. However, it is difficult to see the rituals having a specifically reassuring function in relation to the representation of marriage, romance or love. Rather, the opposite seems to be the case. The representation of incompetence in the attempts to form sexual relationships dramatizes conflict as intrinsic to marriage, romance and love. In Britain there used to be a game show in which famous athletes competed with each other at sports they were no good at; the interest was divided between seeing how well they did at such sports, and watching them reveal reassuringly normal limitations. Perfect Match has something of this effect; its enormous appeal is drawn from the fact that the games they play no-one in the audience is good at, although they are both expected, and would like, to be. So, if one were to map Perfect Match for social change, the deep ambivalence and scepticism it reveals in ideologies of sexuality would be primary features of its topography.
II
In a discussion of television quiz shows, John Fiske argued that they served to smooth over social division and inequities by displacing talent, ability and education with luck or chance (Fiske, 1983). The function of such shows was to naturalize exist-
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ing social conditions, situating success or achievement as the product of good fortune rather than the efficient working of a discriminatory system. To carry such a view over onto the ideological work accomplished by Perfect Match, presumably, would be to argue that it too naturalized prevailing sexual attitudes and gender relations - 'smoothing over' conflicts and contradictions by displacing choice or discrimination with luck or chance (the computer is decorative rather than structural, in my view). Blind Date certainly worked like that, actively invoking romantic and sexist myths in its representation of true love and marriage.
Yet there is not much that is 'smoothed over' in Perfect Match. As pointed out earlier, Perfect Match is not marked by much ideological or discursive unity; in any one programme, opposing discourses - feminist and sexist for instance - can be seen actively competing for dominance. Perfect Match is not marked by much ideological or discursive unity; in any one programme, opposing discourses - feminist and sexist for instance - can be seen actively competing for dominance. Perfect Match's relation to existing social conditions can vary from the celebratory to the sceptical. Further, the viewer is placed in a different position to the viewed than is usual in quiz shows; envy, admiration of skill or talent, or even the constructed identification with a contestant, is not consistently maintained. A major qualification to any view of the show as simply naturalizing existing social relations is, then, its ambiguity. Aspects of this have been noted throughout this analysis as I am arguing that the contradictions are finally structural.
Perfect Match's ambiguity does not make it confusing. As I suggested earlier, it may be the most important reason for its popularity. Its mass of contradictions work in the way John Hartley describes in his discussion of television and 'the power of dirt' (which he glosses as 'ambiguous boundaries'), to 'produce more meaning than can be policed' (Hartley, 1983:76). If, as Hartley suggests, television attempts to control and limit its capacity for meaning to those meanings which are dominant, the production of ambiguity is an 'encouraging sign' of the unstable tenure of any hegemonic meaning. Hartley is encouraged by the leakage of ambiguity into the television message because 'ambiguous categories are by definition more meaningful than the two (or more) categories they transgress, since they partake of the attributes of both' (1983:75). The result is semiotic excess, a proliferation of possible readings, a weakening of any 'preferred' reading and the sense of possibility - outrageous or vulgar as it often is - that is part of the signification of Perfect Match. That the production of an excess of meaning should occur within those
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'dirty' areas Hartley describes is important, too. Perfect Match concentrates on youth, itself a dirty category that is the anomalous point in the child/adult opposition - ambiguous territory. Rather than attempting to integrate youth into either pole of the child/adult opposition (as Blind Date did with its invocation of marriage) Perfect Match does the reverse. In its inclusion of the occasional 'adult' it affords the subcultural discourse of youth imperialistic possibilities, launching takeover bids for the dominant in other less ambiguous categories. Not only is the subject matter dirty, but the programme is structurally ambiguous in its movement from game to ritual and back again. Although one certainly stops short of proposing a progressive politics for Perfect Match, its ambiguity is a breaking of the rules, a transgression to the boundaries and conventions of television that does reserve space for the reading of subordinated discourses.
There is an element of play in Perfect Match. It has some of the qualities of what Adrian Martin calls 'stretch TV (Martin, 1985:22) where a complicated relationship is set up between a formula that is both familiar and predictable, and the contradictory ability to subvert the formula's own constraints in order to suggest 'a real multiplication of possibilities.' Shows Martin includes within this category range from Hey Hey It's Saturday Night to The Young Ones. From this perspective, Perfect Match's object of sexual relations might even be seen as something of a pretext, an opportunity for play that teases and doubts at 'the real' by pushing at the television boundaries of its representation. The programme exploits the cultural function of play to enjoy a kind of privilege in that it 'encapsulates itself: its consequences are finite, and so the enjoyment of the lifting of normal constraints is one of the pleasures it provides' (Chaney, 1977:443). This feature gives it that transgressive quality, and a sense of possibility that is by no means automatically hegemonic in its political effects.
Perfect Match is ambiguous, it is ritualistic, it is excessive - the latter both semiotically and in terms of 'good taste.' It is also extremely popular. So are Hey Hey It's Saturday Night, The Young Ones, and earlier versions of 'stretch TV like Monty Python or Soap. Shows such as these tend to be categorized as 'cult' shows, a means of deferring the explanation of their popularity by invoking their effective targeting of a particular segment of the market - in most cases, that scandalous category, youth.
Perfect Match could be seen in this light but for the comprehensiveness of its audience. It is a mainstream success; the reasons
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for its success lie not only in the subject matter - sex - but in its sceptical treatment of dominant myths, its structural and discursive ambiguity, its ritualistic offering of spectacle and meanings through its contestants' performances, and its unusually active form of play within that most predictable of formats, the television game show. Describing it in this way gives it an unconvincingly modernist ring that exposes its difference from say, Monty Python, but it also underlines how atypical it is of top-rating early evening television, and, of conventional constructions of 'the popular.'
It is no news to most of us that audiences do not respond to television as undifferentiated masses, and that there will always be a variety of reading positions within even the most apparently conventional television ratings successes. Perfect Match supplies such positions but not necessarily in the way we might expect. Rather than tying these differing positions back into a single consensual model, it seems unthreatened by differences.
Theoretically, this should not surprise, but it does surprise me. My defence is that cultural studies' theorizing of popularity is still not very far advanced. Of course, the cultural studies position on the popular is marked out in opposition to the culture industry and 'one dimensional man'; against high versus low culture; against the assumption of the mass rather than the popular audience(s). However, the customary procedure of cultural studies' readings of the mass media, the emphasis placed on the construction of ideological unity, is in danger of inferring an equally undifferentiated 'mass' audience constructed by ideology rather than by the culture industry. The lack of unity which provides the heady sense of the popular in Perfect Match challenges this kind of account (implicit as it is) of popular audiences.
There are still two major formulations of the notion of the popular. The first defines it in terms of the size of the audience, seeing popular cultural production in terms of the reproduction of simple, conventional material for a mass, undiscriminating market. The second depends more on a grassroots conception of 'the people' that is independent of their inscription in cultural production, and which retains the possibility of resistance to dominant forms and ideologies. In this version, the people are not simply the passive recipients of cultural product, but sources of alternative kinds of cultural product. The first formulation is normally implicated in critiques of 'mass media manipulation,' the second in calls for progressiveness and opposition to domin-
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ant ideologies. Cultural studies has tended to invoke the latter version in order to attack the empiricist pedigree of the former, yet textual analyses have often implied the existence of the version they reject by failing to analyze the one they accept. The variety of television studies typified by John Ellis' Visible Fictions, for instance, may start out reading its audiences off textual forms and practices, but the result can still be a consensualized, rigidly positioned viewer who is not all that different from the viewer produced by the heyday of effects studies (Ellis, 1982). In outlining the construction of hegemony, the emphasis in much television analysis has been on consensus rather than on dissonance or difference - and understandably so. The cost, though, is that this has left the notion of popularity stranded as simply the product of the processes of winning assent to dominant ideological positions. That is, the popular is produced and imposed by the cultural leadership rather than recognized or generated by 'the people.'
This is, at best, partial. The history of popular cultural forms is full of examples of resistance to dominant models, resistance which has produced new representational forms, new forms of entertainment, new uses for leisure. However, although resistance and opposition may be frequent elements in such a history, they are not yet built into a consistent theory of the popular. Often popular culture is examined as a means to the end of analyzing something else; studies of Victorian popular fiction, for instance, have argued a case for the popular being high art in disguise rather than a specific case for the popular. Similarly - although employing very different theory - much work on the transgressions of the conventions of film and television has been aimed at discovering the politically progressive or the avant-garde, rather than regarding the popular as a sufficient destination in itself. In Australian television at least, high art. the avant-garde, and popular television do not have a lot to do with each other; yet popular television and the transgression of boundaries do. The 'high-points' in Australian television - highpoints in terms of the size of the audience as well as in terms of the production of transgressive, ambiguous programmes - provide an illuminating pre-history for Perfect Match. The deconstruction of the variety show that gave Graham Kennedy's In Melbourne Tonight its enormous audience, the shameless exposure of soap opera conventions which enabled Number 96 to establish an Australian audience for the form, and the parody of the chat show which Norman Gunston developed, are all examples of Adrian Martin's 'stretch TV - the construction of a formula which was then a location for play, for the exploitation of possibility. Such programmes are sufficiently frequent
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representatives of the market successes in Australian television to suggest that scandalizing the dominant canons of taste is a very important function of popular television.
It is the dominance of cultural studies' analysis of the ideological function of television, and, for instance, the relatively subordinated interest in the regimes of pleasure it constructs, which makes it problematic that Perfect Match should eschew the quest for a mass audience, aim for the popular, and thus achieve both. The unity of television may well be its preferred construction, but it is clear that it does not need to be unified in order to be popular. The separation and, alternatively, the conflation of notions of the mass and the popular that can still occur suggests that the terms need clearer definition than they have so far received. A starting point could be the re-examination of the Brechtian view of the popular as a relatively autonomous, if subordinated, voice competing with the dominant for representation. To recover a sense of the relative independence of the popular, as distinct from the relative incorporation of the mass, might be to understand just what it is that enables Perfect Match, In Melbourne Tonight, and Norman Gunston to be significant markers of the nature of Australian popular television in ways that Sale of the Century, The Sullivans, or Sixty Minutes are not.
Graeme Turner teaches at the Queensland Institute of Technology.
References
Crofts, S., (1987), 'The Construction of Sexuality in Perfect Match,' Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 4:2.
Chaney, D., (1977), 'Fictions in Mass Entertainment,' in James Curran et al, (eds.) Mass Communication and Society, London: Edward Arnold, pp.440-457.
Ellis, J., (1982), Visible Fictions, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Fiske, J., (1983), 'The Discourses of TV Quiz Shows or, School + Luck + Success + Sex,' Central States Speech Journal, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 139-50.
, (1986), 'The Problem of the Popular,' unpublished article.
Hartley, J., (1983), 'Encouraging Signs: TV and the Power of Dirt, Speech and Scandalous Categories,' Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp.62-82.
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Levi-Strauss, C., (1966), The Savage Mind, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Lewis, W., (1984), 'TV Games: People as Performers,' in Len
Masterman (ed.) Television Mythologies: Stars, Shows and Signs, London: Comedia, pp.42-45.
Martin, A., (1985), 'Stretch TV,' XPress: Popular Culture, Vol 1, No. l,p.22. Roddick, N., (1985), 'Strewth: A Beginner's Guide to AustralianTelevision,' Sight and Sound,
Winter, pp.250-254.
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