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■ the language of television 38
■ Connotations and codes 40
■ Mise-en-scène 41
■ Image 49
■ sound 53
■ structure and editing 56
■ Case study: Bon Appétit’s Gourmet Makes 62
■ summary of key points 68
■ Bibliography 68
DOI: 10.4324/9781315619675-3
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10.4324/9781315619675-3
Television Style and Form
This chapter sets out theoretical frameworks for studying television programmes, advertisements, etc. as ‘texts’, including semiotic approaches to relations between image and sound. It explores the components of the televisual image, sound and editing, providing the tools for detailed textual analysis. Rather than being devised specifically for the study of television, these ideas began in the discipline of Film Studies. Textual approaches to television are powerful ways of discussing the meanings made of television by viewers, but they also have some drawbacks.
Textual approaches tend to focus on textual detail at the expense of institutional context and history, and to neglect the ways in which television is understood by audiences. A productive analysis of a programme would combine close textual analysis with some of these approaches to produce a depth of analysis. The chap- ter ranges widely across different television genres and forms, showing how tex- tual approaches to television can explain how meanings are made in them, where these meanings come from and how they might be understood critically. It ends with a case study of an episode of the YouTube series Gourmet Makes from the Bon Appétit channel, showing how close textual analysis can be used to explore a text in detail.
The language of television
Semiotic approaches to television, as to any other kind of meaning-making activ- ity in society, begin by identifying the different kinds of sign that convey mean- ing in the medium (Bignell 2002). The principle of semiotic analysis is to begin from the assumption that television has a ‘language’ that producers and audiences of television have learnt to use. One of the twentieth-century founders of semiot- ics, the Swiss linguistics professor Ferdinand de Saussure, regarded spoken lan- guage as the most fundamental of human meaning-making practices, and argued that all other media could be understood analogously with spoken language. He sought to explain the functioning of spoken language at a particular point in time, describing the system of language as langue (which means ‘language’ in French) and any instance of language use as parole (which means ‘speech’ in French). The
‘language’ of television would be the whole body of conventions and rules for conveying meaning in the medium, while any example of a particular shot or sequence of television would be an instance of parole, an example of this system in use. The language of television consists of visual and aural signs. Television’s visual signs include all the images and graphics that are seen on the screen. Aural signs consist of the speech, sound and music which television produces.
Many of television’s visual signs closely resemble the people, things and places that they represent in both fictional and non-fictional programmes. Signs that
text an object such as a television programme, film or poem, considered as a network of meaningful signs that can be ana-
lysed and interpreted.
textual analysis a critical approach which seeks to under-
stand a television text’s meanings by undertaking detailed analysis of its image and sound compo- nents, and the relation- ships between those components.
semiotics the study of signs and their meanings, initially developed for the study of spoken lan- guage, and now used also to study the visual and aural ‘languages’
of other media such as television.
sign in semiotics, something which com-
municates meaning, such as a word, an image or a sound.
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resemble their object in this way are called iconic signs, to distinguish them from signs which themselves have no necessary relationship to what they signify. The word ‘cat’, for example, is a symbolic sign, meaning that the letters on the page or the sound of the spoken word ‘cat’ is arbitrarily used in English to signify a particular type of furry four-legged animal. A television image of a cat, however, closely resembles the real cat that it represents, and is thus an iconic sign. The conventions of representation in television most often rely on the iconic nature of television images to convey an impression of realism whereby viewers accept that the television image denotes people, places or cats, for example, which exist in the real world. But this acceptance of the realism of television’s denotative signs is reliant on the conventions of composition, perspective and framing which are so embedded in Western culture that the two-dimensional image seems simply to convey three-dimensional reality. The power of these conventions can be seen when television represents objects that do not exist in the real world, such as alien spacecrafts in Doctor Who or the dragons in Game of Thrones. Often these images are not images of real objects, or models, but are created entirely by computer generated imagery (CGI). Yet because the images of them obey the conventions that audiences recognise from the language of television and other visual medi- ums, viewers can both recognise what they are and accept them as if they were real. These conventions include:
■ Perspective
■ Proportion
■ Light and shade
■ Shot composition
Semiotics therefore has a particular interest in the conventions such as these, called codes, which govern how signs are used in conventional ways to represent or denote believable worlds.
Television signs that denote speech, the ambient noises of a represented envi- ronment or the music accompanying a visual sequence are also used according to codes in the language of television. The analysis of television using semiotic meth- ods has tended to focus more on image than sound, but sound is important to the viewer’s relationship with what is on the screen. Until recently television screens have been relatively small, so sound has played an important role in communi- cating story information. Compared to the immersive experience of cinema, the domestic experience of watching television often competes with other activities in the same room (such as talking, eating, doing chores or using a tablet or mobile phone). In order to grab the distracted viewer’s attention, sound is used to call out to the viewer. This is very noticeable in television news programmes, which are punctuated with loud brass music to draw the attention of the viewer, as well as to connote the importance of news as a programme genre. Although television images and sounds are often iconic and denotative, seeming simply to convey what the camera and sound recording equipment have captured, these signs have been processed through the various professional norms, industry practices and conven- tions of meaning-making that have been consciously or unconsciously adopted by both the makers and audiences of television. These ways of working and ways of understanding are among the codes that structure the language of television.
iconic sign in semiotics, a sign that resembles its referent. Photographs, for example, contain iconic signs resem- bling the objects they represent.
symbolic sign in semiotics, a sign which is connected arbitrarily to its referent rather than because the sign resembles its refer- ent. For example, a photograph of a cat resembles it, whereas the word ‘cat’ does not: the word is a symbolic sign.
realism the aim for representations to reproduce reality faith- fully, and the ways this is done.
denotation in semiot- ics, the function of signs to portray or refer to something in the real world.
code in semiotics, a system or set of rules that shapes how signs can be used, and therefore how mean- ings can be made and understood.
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Connotations and codes
The iconic and symbolic signs in the language of television are often presented simply as denoting an object, place or person. But signs rarely simply denote something, since signs are produced and understood in a cultural context that enriches them with much more meaning than this. These cultural associations and connections which signs have are called connotations. When we analyse a piece of television we think about this as denotation – what do we see? – and connotation – what does it mean? For example, the head-on shots of newsread- ers, wearing business clothes, seated behind a desk in news programmes not only denote the newsreader in a studio, but have connotations of authority, serious- ness and formality which derive from the connotations of desks, office clothes and head-on address to the camera. These connotations derive partly from social codes that are in circulation in Western society, but also from television codes of news programmes that have been conventionalised over time. Newsreaders speak in a neutral and even tone, which is itself a sign connoting the objectiv- ity and authority of both the newsreader and the news organisation that they represent. News presenters are usually shot in medium close-up, full face, under neutral lighting. This code conventionally positions the newsreader as a mediator of events, who addresses the audience and connects them with the news organisa- tion’s reporters, and with the people who are the subjects of the news (Figure 2.1).
The mediator functions as a bridge between the domestic world of the viewer and the public worlds of news. Even though news programmes now feature newsread- ers sitting on desks with their scripts in their hands, or standing up and walking around in the studio to connote a degree of informality, the desk, their clothes and the head-on address to camera remain because they are so much a part of the coding of news programmes.
Television news programmes use music with loud major chords played on brass instruments in their title sequences, and these signs carry connotations of importance, dignity and drama. These title sequences also feature computer
connotations the term used in semiotic analysis for the mean-
ings that are associ- ated with a particular sign or combination of signs.
close-up a camera shot where the frame is filled by the face of a person or a detail of a face. Close-ups may also show details of an object or place.
title sequence the sequence at the opening of a television programme in which the programme title and performers’
names may appear along with other infor- mation, accompanied by images, sound and music introducing the programme.
Figure 2.1 Krishnan Guru-Murthy delivers the Channel 4 news
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graphics in fast-moving sequences, syntagms in semiotic terminology, connoting technological sophistication. The function of title sequences in television news programmes is to establish the status of news as significant and authoritative, and also to differentiate one channel’s news programme from another, providing brand recognition.
It is important to remember that the meanings of television images and sounds are not naturally attached to signs. The pleasure and understanding which view- ers gain from television often depend on the significance of how signs relate to each other in a particular context, and it is often misleading to carry over the con- notations of a sign in one context into another. In the long-running police drama series Inspector Morse, for example, Inspector Morse drove a red Jaguar Mark II saloon. In combination with the connotations of Morse’s affection for real ale, codes of politeness and love of classical opera, the car had connotations of tradi- tion, ‘classicness’ and Britishness. By contrast, in the police series of the 1970s (such as The Sweeney, in which the Morse actor John Thaw played a main charac- ter), Jaguar Mark II saloons were often driven by gangsters and had connotations of the criminal underworld, the glamour of crime and bravado. In analysing a television programme semiotically, signs gain their meanings in three main ways:
■ By their similarity with other signs in the same programme
■ By their difference from these surrounding signs
■ By their relationships with uses of the sign in other contexts
Television relies on its viewers’ often unconscious knowledge of codes and their ability to decode signs and their connotations, and assemble them into meaning- ful scenes, sequences and stories.
Close textual analysis of television draws on the techniques developed in Film Studies, as seen in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction (2019). When performing close textual analysis of television we look in detail at style and form in a shot, sequence or scene, thinking about how it is organised and structured. We ask ourselves what do we see (denotation) and what does it mean (connotation)? To walk through the components of television style and form this chapter breaks television down into different components. Choices by a programme’s creative and technical team about the use of mise-en-scène, sound, image and editing shape and convey a programme’s meaning.
Mise-en-scène
Mise-en-scène refers to ‘the contents of the frame and how they are organised’
(Gibbs 2002: 5). In Television Studies this term is at times used to refer to a range of creative components, including camerawork. As we separate camerawork out in this chapter, this section on mise-en-scène follows Jeremy Butler (2018) in includ- ing the organisation of setting, costuming, lighting and actor movement.
When considering setting we are thinking about how the world of the action is organised and staged to create meaning. Television can be shot on location or in a studio, with these spaces used in different ways in different genres. For example a chat show will include comfy armchair seats for its guests and often a desk for the
syntagm in semiot- ics, a linked sequence of signs existing at a certain point in time.
Written or spoken sentences and televi- sion sequences are examples of syntagms.
brand recognition the ability of audi- ences to recognise the distinctive identity of a product, service or institution and the values and meanings associated with it.
mise-en-scène literally meaning
‘putting on stage’, all the elements of a shot or sequence that contribute to its mean- ings, such as lighting, camera position and setting.
location any place in which television images are shot, except inside a televi- sion studio.
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host, but these are positioned within a deliberately artificial, sparsely decorated and brightly lit performance space. The chat show’s set and its action – interview, stand-up comedy, musical performances or silly games – is orientated towards the cameras, which are arranged in a multi-camera set-up with a live audience posi- tioned behind them; whereas a drama will use codes of realism to shape the studio set into a space for characters to interact as if it were a real-world space. Here the setting and production design will tell us things about these characters’ world: an armchair can be part of a naturalistically-lit living room cluttered with the accu- mulated objects of a family, a desk part of an stylishly appointed corporate office.
Television’s serialised storytelling and ability to tell a story across many years means audiences become as familiar with a character’s home as their own homes.
Karen Lury highlights how in long-running series such as soap opera these stu- dio sets can come to be ‘imbued with a series of visually-inspired memories of different characters and plot lines’ (2005: 16). Long-time viewers of EastEnders will remember particularly dramatic or emotional moments that occurred behind the bar of the Queen Vic pub or on the bench in the square.
These are examples of interior space, but studio sets can be used for exterior shooting, with studio backlots representing city space in US sitcoms like Friends and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Large exterior sets can communicate a prestige drama’s high budget and investment in world-building, as with US-Italian co-production My Brilliant Friend, which constructed a working-class 1950s Naples housing complex in a vast studio lot. This created an immersive space for shooting and aided the production’s attention to verisimilitude as a period drama. Setting and production design can efficiently communicate characters’ lives and personalities to viewers. In Korean romance It's Okay to Not Be Okay Gang-tae is the guard- ian of his autistic older brother Sang-tae and they live in a series of very small apartments. These cramped spaces communicate Gang-tae’s struggle to provide for his brother, but the bright colours and warm lighting of this domestic space communicate the safety of their family bond (Figure 2.2). In contrast the mansion of Gang-tae’s love interest, wealthy author Moon-young has vast empty rooms,
multi-camera set-up arranges action and studio space in a proscenium arch style towards multiple cam-
eras. these cameras are recording at the same time.
soap opera a continuing drama serial involving a large number of characters in a specific location, focusing on relation-
ships, emotions and reversals of fortune.
prestige Tv critical and industry term to describe high-budget flagship drama and comedy. term aims to remove hierarchical/
judgemental con- notations of the term
‘quality television’.
period drama televi- sion fiction set in the past, most often the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.
Figure 2.2 the brothers’ cramped apartment in It’s Okay to Not Be Okay
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is sparsely lit and dominated by blues and blacks with heavy wood accents. The gothic style of this space communicates her isolation and cold personality, but also gives the feeling she is trapped like a princess in a fairytale castle (Figure 2.3)
Location shooting gives fiction programmes a sense of realism and communi- cates immediacy in factual programming. Brooklyn Nine-Nine uses a Los Angeles studio backlot to represent the New York streets where its detective ensemble work, as the non-naturalism of this space is less important to a light-hearted sitcom. Whereas the police procedural Law & Order: Special Victims Unit uses codes of realism to signal the serious nature of its storytelling by shooting on location in the streets of New York. A news correspondent could give their report on an event from the same studio as the news anchor, but reporting ‘live’ from a location codes their reporting as ‘authentic’. A prerecorded report from a reporter who was present at an event can serve as a first-hand witness, as when ITV cor- respondent Robert Moore reported from alongside pro-Trump rioters as they broke into the US Senate on 6 January 2021 (Figure 2.4). This report brought some of the first official recordings of the rioters’ actions from inside the building (although many streamed their activities live on social media platforms). Sporting events are broadcast live on location, with the cameras capturing events from a stadium or arena that allows the viewer at home a close look at the action. Live location broadcasts create a co-presence, allowing the home viewer to experience a goal in a football match at the same time as the real-life spectator. During BBC broadcasts from the Wimbledon tennis tournament a presenter will often preview a match standing right next to the grass on Centre Court, in conversation with a pundit as players warm up in the background. This signals both liveness and the exclusive access the broadcaster has, showcasing their authority as a public service broadcaster.
Just as production design communicates story detail and characterisation, cos- tume also contributes to storytelling. When we are first introduced to a character their costume helps define them quickly for an audience. In Spanish teen drama Élite, how each character wears and accessorises the uniform of their elite private
naturalism originally having a very specific meaning in literature and drama, this term is now used more loosely to denote television fiction that adopts realistic con- ventions of character portrayal, linear cause and effect narrative, and a consistent and recognisable fictional world.
Figure 2.3 Moon-young’s large family mansion