Capstone media

Americanization of British Television’s

Psychological Impact on British Identity

Christina FriisMSPP

Capstone Project

“There was some irony, perhaps, in the fact that the same satellite technology that brought the Moon landing from Houston to London, had four years earlier sent to an expectant American audience live images of the funeral of ‘the greatest Englishman’ – the End of Empire versus the Dawn of the Space Age.”2

July 1969: (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

Moon Landing

“For Americans, this was Britain of the past, heritage Britain, an anticipation perhaps, amid the media hype of ‘swinging London,’ of the coming decade’s fascination not with British Pop but with transatlantic nostalgia. For the British viewing the Apollo mission, satellites brought an America of thundering Saturn rockets, of power and modernity, and if Britain could reciprocate by at least receiving those signals, as a plugged-in partner, the closest it itself could actually get to space travel was the London studio where the American director Stanley Kubrick had turned Arthur Clarke’s fiction, 2001, A Space Odyssey, into at least celluloid reality.”2

Close, yet Far

“The Moon landing, viewed from Trafalgar Square, is then a moment that can be unpacked in a number of different ways. Most obviously it made a graphic statement about a common humanity – but also about a shrinking Atlantic and American technological hegemony. If Anglo-American viewing was coparticipation, as in so much else it was the British receiving and the Americans giving. It was an event that celebrated, if in those flat American tones, the common language of a medium that made each accessible to the other as never before, and yet it highlighted a difference.”2

The Listener “’[T]hey export an awful lot to us,’ the British author

Gillian Freeman observed in 1969.”2

“‘We may well end up peeling the protective foil from a TV dinner as we watch a re-run of Those Were the Days which weren’t even our days in the first place.’”2

© 2007 Cengage Learning

Ambitious, but rubbish

“‘American jokes [on television] were incomprehensible.’”2

- William Hardcastle

“’I don’t think there is any particular pro- or anti-American attitude in regard to imports. If the British public like a programme, they will like it; if they don’t they will call it “American rubbish”’”2

- Alan Howden

Photo credit: dailymail.co.uk

Alistair Cooke

“As the decade wore on, it and many other nostalgia-drenched programs were crafted to appeal, like Alistair Cooke’s avuncular, Edwardian voice on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, to an American audience that, as Antoinette Burton has observed, ‘has been and remains the audience perhaps ripest for performances of Britain’s eternal Britishness.’”2

Masterpiece Theatre Intro

Masterpiece Theatre

“The press release announcing the coming series called it ‘intelligent television for people who don’t ordinarily watch television.’”2

“Cooke himself was unimpressed (‘The script was not a masterpiece, either original or adapted’), and it had not been especially successful in Britain. But, introduced by the ‘quintessential Englishman,’ it found viewers ready to respond, not only to ‘powerful signifiers for an American audience.’”2

Upstairs, Downstairs

“Staff interviewed director, writers, and actors and in the end were persuaded by the promise of [Upstairs, Downstairs]’s ‘split sociology’ (what Cooke called‘a foolproof formula forensnaring a massaudience’) – Upstairs for ‘the snobbish kick’ of elegantly costumed aristocratic elitism, Downstairs forthe cozy realm of humanized ordinary folk.”2

Photo credit: amazon.com

Back-flow

“Programming designed to advance a stereotypical version of historic national identity and class relations that would sell in the United States was also consumed at home. Paradoxically, the British search for a challenged national identity was in some degree reinforced and encouraged by products crafted for the transatlantic market. As Dominic Strinati has perceptively if tentatively suggested: ‘Americanization may also take the form of Britain selling to Americans “Americanized” representations of itself, and bringing back American produced and validated versions of “Britishness”’”2

Transatlantic Tourism

“By and large… tourists… came to find what they romantically imagined England or London to be – Dickensian, small-scale, quaint, class-defined; different, that is, in aspect and character from the modern familiar back home… ‘Heritage’ perfectly resonated with their expectations.”2

Photo credit: David Perdue

Credit Where It’s Due

“Americans themselves not only played a part in the recovery of a struggling British economy but had a significant and unappreciated role in the redefining and retrenching of Britishness itself. American tourists expected to experience a Britain that was historically familiar and perhaps bring some of it back home, and the ‘industry’ accommodated their expectations. At the same time, British media were more vigorously exporting to the States (or hoped to) and needed to present themselves in a language the American market expected and would understand.”2

Duke of Bedford

“‘I find this reverent interest in Englishness rather comforting nowadays, when mourning our decline has become such a fashionable pastime.’”2

Photo credit: Royal Collection

‘You may not get ratings, but think of

the prestige.’ “Though it has been estimated that ATV’s production of

‘prestige programmes’ made expressly for the international market was a small part of their total output, there were many more productions made for domestic consumption with an eye for selling on to the States. By the seventies it is not possible easily to distinguish those productions, whether BBC or ITV, that were intended for the domestic market from those meant for export.”2

“Among at least the relatively affluent, white, educated PBS audience, the historical and social detail of the long-running series wove an attractive representation of Britatin-as-Edwardian-London. And as with those fantasists who sought out the Baker Street residence of a historical Sherlock Holmes, ‘American tourists were seen wandering up and down Eaton Place, just off Belgravia Square looking

in vain for number 165’”2

Photo credit: Ayrton Wylie

Us vs. Them

“Jeffrey Miller has pointed out, such heritage programming involved an additional problem of ‘a negotiation of “otherness” and “our-own-ness”).’”2

Doctor Who and Englishness

“‘We’ve not been obliged to observe the strictly commercial criteria that say a producer on American television has had to observe when everything has to be reduced and ironed out and made to actually work… We can toss in things that don’t have to be totally explained. We haven’t got somebody saying, (“Hey, what’s this line about?”)… That’s not the way British television works… Certainly not the way the BBC works…’”3

Keeping DW English “If the Americans had been given the basic format

of the Doctor they would have given you a wonderfully logically worked out “quirky” hero who was always the same, and you would have been able to see around all the eccentricity and predict it; whereas what we have done is leave it a bit rough around the edges… The reason we get away with it is because our audiences are more indulgent… there was something in this sort of Englishness that was valuable and was prized by the audience… (quoted in Tulloch & Alvarado 1983:178)’”3

Photo credit: Mike Taylor

We interrupt this program…

“the BBC had been importing American entertainment on film since very early in the existence of the television service, as perhaps most famously demonstrated by the fact that it was a Mickey Mouse cartoon that was unceremoniously cut off by the abrupt shutting down of the Alexandra Palace transmitter at the outbreak of the Second World War”2

Re-opening of BBC Television - 1946

“But what the idea of American popular culture provided was particularly appealing to the lower classes, as John Fiske has pointed out, ‘American popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s was eagerly taken up by British working-class youth who found in its flashy streamlining a way to articulate their new class confidence and consciousness. Such symbolizations of their identity were simply not available in ‘British’ culture which appeared to offer two equally unacceptable sets of alternatives – the one a romanticized cloth-cap image of an ‘authentic’ traditional working class culture, the other a restrained, tasteful, BBC produced inflection of popular culture. The commodities produced by the American cultural industries were mobilized to express an intransigent, young, urban, working class identity that scandalized both the traditional British working class and the dominant middle classes. The cultural alliance between this fraction of the British working class and their sense of American popular culture was one that served their cultural/ideological needs at that historical moment’ (Fiske 1980: 321)”1

How the tables have turned

“Many have criticized the decision by Arthur A. Levine of Scholastic to translate the Harry Potter books from British English into American English. …For his part, Levine has said, ‘I wasn’t trying to, quote, “Americanize” them. What I was trying to do was translate, which is something different. I wanted to make sure that an American kid reading the book would have the same literary experience that a British kid would have.”4

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Using American Britishly

“[Kelly Boyd] argues that ‘the choices made suggest the BBC employed foreign content not only to bring more variety to its schedule, but also to reinforce the strength of British culture in a period when the rise of the United States implied a decline in British power’ (Boyd, 2011: 233). In other words, by using American material in a British way, surrounded by programming that was British, showed that British culture was still able to master and control American product, and to make something different of it, something more British”1

Conationalism “Another scholar has argued that the apparently

incompatible national myths of England and the United States (good breeding and rugged success) in an era of Western decline, and offered lessons in the ‘manners’ necessary for running a (perhaps declining) American empire. Without completely accepting that such popularizations of high culture offered exactly an ‘ideological commodity’ of this nature, we can appreciate that [the show Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill (with the lead actress being American and the director being Welsh)]’s fusion and its forward-looking premise (that American savvy and British class would combine to produce a twentieth-century hero for both ‘Anglo-Saxon peoples’) represents a transatlantic conationalism flattering to many.”1

Photo credit: Taylor Rockwell

References

1Johnston, D. (2012). ‘Strange Visitor From Another Planet’: Genre, Corporate Identity and the Arrival of American Telefantasy on British Television. Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, 5 (2).

2Malchow, H. (2011). Special relations. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

3Shimpach, S. (2010). Television in transition. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell.

4Whited, L. (2003). The ivory tower and Harry Potter. Columbia [u.a.]: Univ. of Missouri Press.