“magic bullet”

t, the programmes can come to resemble trial by kangaroo court

e of the made-over.

abusive. Indeed, we would suggest that this abusiveness can be construed as an illustration of fundamental inequalities within the programme itself and in the wider society,

The Oprah Winfrey Show

4: 221).

Indeed, though the classic network era is defined by NBC’s, CBS’s and ABC’s unprecedented stability and control of the medium, the history of this era has been most productively written through examinations of the unevenness, struggles, tensions, and fissures that consistently troubled this veneer. Take, for instance, the “national”‐ness of the Big Three networks. As my Heartland TV argues, just as the networks became truly national in audience/market reach (not extending reliable reach to the rural Plains and deep South until the mid‐1960s) they simultaneously became intensely “local,” “concentrating all network production and business operations in New York City and Los Angeles by the late 1950s” (Johnson 2008b: 37). Through the 1960s broad public debate raged over questions of the medium and the “national purpose.” These debates point to a broader conceptualization of US network TV of the classic era as a “cultural forum” as Newcomb and Hirsch (1987b) argued, situated between understanding TV as a mere conduit of communication from sender to receiver and thinking of TV as a discrete set of texts. Conceptualizing television as a cultural forum at the interstices of industry/economics, texts/program address, social/historical context, and audience reception underscores the Big Three’s relevance and even requisite centrality in navigating “our most prevalent concerns, our deepest dilemmas” (Newcomb and Hirsch 1987b: 459). In an era characterized by the Cold War, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, government and industry officials, scholars and critics, and the public alike repeatedly questioned the networks’ commitments to balancing mass‐audience entertainment appeals and “consensus” programming with more challenging, riskier “quality” and “enlightened” program address. Would television be a forum emphasizing continuity and the integration of past cultural forms, vernacular traditions, and values? Or, would it stand “above” popular culture (Ouellette 2002)? Could or should it do both?

ower to manag

Roots

92)

They are also sexually adventurous

which reflect upon the contradictory demands of women's lived experience. The early seasons of I Love Lucy demonstrate those ambivalences and contradictions through a physical comedy that draws upon vaudeville as a medium for dissent. In these terms funny women on the large and small screen, as with vaudeville, are both funny and peculiar, exposing the construction of gender through its humorous disarticulation.

want to stage the show as a play,’ Desi explained, ‘film it in continuity in front of an audience of perhaps three hundred people, using three thirty-five-millimetre cameras and recording the audience's laughter and reactions simultaneously

live theatrical spectacle in the archaeology of early television comedy.

The vaudeville heritage on which Lucille Ball drew for her comedy performances offered a range of techniques which embodied fluid gender and sexual identities. Female and male vaudevillians created characters which often transgressed class, gender and race binaries, and the deployment of parody, mimicry and imitation was a particular province of female performers

One of the more general purposes of the Chelmsford experiments was to discover whether or not the public would be interested in wireless. A considerable number of people were, notably the so-called ‘amateurs’.19 They were even prepared to listen intently each night to Ditcham reciting the names of the main British railway lines and their London termini, hardly an inspiring subject

Broadcasting was of the greatest possible importance in relation to this changing social pattern.

In one obscure branch of entertaining there were intimations of ‘broadcasting’ before 1900. In view of recent attention paid to ‘wire broadcasting’ they are of more than antiquarian interest. It was in relation to wireless that the idea of scattering ‘sound-at-a-distance’ was first mooted. It was of the telephone not of wireless that a distinguished engineer, Frank (later Sir Frank) Gill, a prominent figure in the lead-up to the inauguration of broadcasting in Britain, wrote that ‘telephony has some of the properties both of the letter and of the newspaper: it can be clothed with privacy, given to one individual only, or it can be broadcast to millions simultaneously’.11

banning all ‘amateur’ wireless activities

The First World War harnessed the new powers of wireless to the needs of the separate armies, navies, and intelligence services. The value of wireless for such a purpose had long been recognized. Before 1900 Marconi had demonstrated his apparatus for both the British and Italian navies, and during the Boer War his company had negotiated a contract for the supply and manning of six wireless stations for use at the front in South Africa. A few days before the declaration of war in 1914 the great naval review off Spithead was dispersing when a wireless signal from Whitehall diverted every vessel to its war station. The Germans also had not been inactive, particularly in the few years before 1914. Their construction a few months before war broke out of a large wireless station—indeed what was then the most high-powered wireless station in the world—at Nauen, about twenty miles from Berlin, showed that they appreciated the value of the new means of communication. When war was imminent they were able to contact the scattered and vulnerable ships of the German mercantile marine; when war was declared they were able at once to begin broadcasting military and naval communiqués. The long association between radio and propaganda had begun. Counter-measures were quickly taken. The Admiralty assumed control of production at the Marconi Works, while a wireless interception service was immediately started at Chelmsford. ‘The interception of enemy wireless propaganda rapidly became a very considerable business. Marconi operators, bound to secrecy, worked in shifts day and night throughout the entire 4½ years, the relieving operator taking up his duties before the man relieved ceased work, so that not a single dot or dash was missed’1 The man who wrote these words, Arthur Burrows, spent several months collecting, editing, and distributing to several government departments the wireless propaganda of the Central Powers. He was to be the first Director of Programmes of the British Broadcasting Company, and later the first secretary of the International Broadcasting Union.

rform this service, were all bitter pills for the publishers to swallow. In the end, however, positions of social usefulness for both parties were carved out, and both the press and radio may well have become stronger as a result.

This action must have been at least one of the reasons for the networks' entering into the "Biltmore Program" with the publishers and the Associated Press in December of 1933. The press had been able to turn an untenable position into a strategic advantage. On December 16, 1933, the New York Times reported a 10-point plan for supplying news to radio which was drawn up and agreed upon by the radio committee of the ANPA, representatives of the press services and representatives of NBC and CBS at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City. The points were as follows: 1. A seven member committee was to be set up to supply limited news for broadcast. 2. The newspaper and press association members of the committee were to select editors who would choose the news from the three wire services. 3. News from the morning reports was to be aired no earlier than 9:30 AM and for day reports no earlier than 9:00 PM. 4. Broadcasts were not to be sponsored. 5. CBS was to dissolve its news service and NBC was prohibited from starting such a service. 6. The broadcasters were to bear all costs of the new service. 7. News bulletins of "transcendental" importance were to be furnished at times other than those specifically prescribed. 8. Broadcasters were to control their commentators so that they would just give background information and no spot news. 9. The newspapers and the broadcasters were to cooperate to limit news broadcasts of newspaper owned stations. 10. Publishers National Radio Committee would recommend the plan to the publishers and it would urge the Press Associations to adopt it.28

By 1933 the crisis was approaching. The Associated Press meeting that year ended with AP forbidding its managers from supplying news to the national networks.'5 AP, however, did nothing to prevent its individual members from giving news to local stations. The AP action was close to meaningless.

Now indeed the ostrich-publisher lifted his head and took a look at the radio programs he was printing every day. He had been giving space to this plaything, because it was a novelty and his readers were strangely interested in it. Very well: What was the "Seiberling Hour"? It was the advertisement of a balloon tire. Yes, when he glanced down the columns of his radio page, he observed with amazement and indignation that he was advertising, without charge, radio advertisers . . . even his own best customers: department stores. It was a sad, headachy awakening! He had petted and encouraged this freak, because freaks always make good newspaper reading: and here the thing was picking his pockets.4