Documentary ‘investigations’ of the commercial sex industry have been a significant presence in the network schedules since the mid-1990s. This has contributed sub­stantially to the increase in explicitly erotic sexual imagery on mainstream television. This was also the case earlier in the twentieth century with cinema, when documentary acted as a stage in the development […]

In addition to the focus on women’s reproduction, there has been a preoccupation in the biological and medical sciences with the question of sexual difference. In medical textbooks prior to the nineteenth century, drawings of male and female anatomy, based on the dissection of dead bodies, had emphasized the degree to which women’s sexual organs […]

In the opening of ‘An Everyday Miracle’, part 2 of The Human Body, a voice-over tells us, ‘Professor Winston continues his remarkable journey inside the human body.’ Then we are told, over a pulsating red fleshy wall in a white circle: You ’re looking at a baby’s heart. It’s beating 120 times a minute. But […]

The feminist scientist Donna Haraway has argued that science evolves through complex, historically specific storytelling practices rather than through a detached analysis of the ‘facts’. She has drawn attention to the political and economic interests that are reproduced by the narratives of science (Haraway 1991). The most powerful of these in relation to the wildlife […]

A market governed by co-productions and by the competitive pressure to capture large and diverse audiences to justify high budgets has led to generic innovation in wildlife programmes during the latter part of the 1990s. In the same way as the rest of tele­vision’s documentary output, the discourses of sobriety that have dominated wildlife programming […]

There is a perceived tension between the detached, objective pursuit of knowledge about the world in ‘quality’ science programmes and the popular appeal of emotion, drama and storytelling. Yet this dichotomy is not as clear-cut as it might at first appear to be. I will be arguing here that science is not as ‘disinterested’ or […]

Science and wildlife documentaries occupy a pinnacle of respect in the rhetoric of public service broadcasting. They exemplify the epitome of ‘quality’ factual television in contrast to the docusoaps that dominated the schedules in the latter half of the 1990s. Although associated in the UK with the public service ethos of the BBC and the […]

Sensationalist moral discourses dominate the tabloids’ approach to celebrity scandals and emerge on television in the more popular styles of factual programming, such as daytime talk shows or primetime news and current affairs programmes, in which the intermittent potential for scandal afforded by celebrities is supplemented by the exposure of ordinary people’s deviant behaviour. The […]

The reason why scandals generate such intense audience interest is because of their ambivalent symbolic form. That is to say, they allow for the expression of transgressive impulses as well as a reassertion of normative ideals in a ritual process that occurs over time. In this respect they can be compared to the traditional popular […]

The contribution of the confessional television interview can be seen as an important corrective for women caught up in sex scandals. It is a place where they can exercise some control over the presentation of the story as it circulates in the public sphere. Certainly, this appears to have been the case in recent scandals […]