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.Buckingham also uncovers this atti-tude but, unlike Hobson, does not linger to consider what this might say aboutthe relation between the institution of television and its audiences.Instead, heoutlines the corporate planning that mobilized these relatively unexaminedassumptions about the TV audience and that influenced the nature of theproduction:Prior to the launch of the BBC s new early evening package, its audience atthis time of the day tended to be predominantly middle-aged and middle-class.In order to broaden that audience, EastEnders would have to appealboth to younger and older viewers, and also to the working-class audiencewhich traditionally watched ITV [the competing commercial network].Thechoice of a working-class setting, and the broad age range of the charactersthus also made a good deal of sense in terms of ratings.In addition, EastEnders sought to extend the traditional audience forBritish soaps, which is weighted towards women and towards the elderly.125CENTRAL CATEGORI ESHaving a number of strong younger characters, it was argued, meant that theprogram would have a greater appeal for younger viewers than other Britishsoaps.& Strong male characters would also serve to bring in male viewerswho were traditionally suspicious of the genre.(Buckingham 1987: 16)As Buckingham s group interviews later discovered, younger viewers categori-cally refused to identify with the young characters and instead located theirinterest in the slightly illicit behaviours of the adults.Such details reveal howshaky the production team s assumptions could be, and their unreliability aspredictors of audience reaction.As Buckingham says, the producers concep-tion of the text s relation with its audience was  confused and contradictory(p.27), a dead end for anyone hoping to explain EastEnders success in buildingits audience.Consequently Buckingham moves to a more  reader-orientated approach toexplain the audience s active production of meaning.Such a phrase invokes theinfluence of reader-response and reception theory within literary studies, andBuckingham depends substantially on this tradition in his second chapter.Healso acknowledges the debates within the field of media and cultural studies those surveyed in Chapter 3 and in this present discussion  and situates himselfin the (by now) familiar role of one who is in search of a balance between thepower of the text and the autonomy of the reader:Perhaps the most critical problem & is of balancing the  text and  readersides of the equation.On the one hand, there is a danger of favouring the textat the expense of the reader: certain kinds of psychoanalytic theory, forexample, regard the text as having almost total power to position and even to construct the reader, and leave readers very little room to negotiate.Yet, onthe other hand, there is a danger of favouring the reader at the expense of thetext: certain reception theorists, for example, effectively deny that texts existat all  instead, all we have to work with is an infinite multiplicity of indi-vidual readings.(Buckingham 1987: 35)Following Eco, Buckingham suggests that the problem is exacerbated when wetalk about soap opera because it is intrinsically a more  open form, offering multiple levels of interpretation.Even with soap operas, however, the possibili-ties are not unlimited; one can still  talk about readings , says Buckingham,  notas infinitely various, but as differentiated in more or less systematic ways (p.37):126AUDI ENCESWhile I would agree that it is ultimately impossible to reduce a soap operato a single  meaning & it remains possible to specify the ways in which itinvites its viewers to produce meaning.If one cannot say what EastEnders means to its audience, one can at least say a good deal about how itworks.For example, the ways in which the viewer is allowed or deniedaccess to privileged information  whether we are  let into secrets or keptguessing  plays a significant part in determining our interpretation.Likewise, the extent to which we are invited to  identify with particularcharacters  and the different types of identification which are encouraged also serves to orientate us towards the text, and enables us to make senseof it, in specific ways.(Buckingham 1987: 37)Buckingham appropriates an aspect of literary reception theory here, in hisapplication of Wolfgang Iser s notion of textual  invitations.From this perspec-tive, texts do not produce or determine meaning, they  invite their readers toaccept particular positions, to explore particular speculations or hypotheses, toshare particular information (the  public secrets of Buckingham s title) deniedto some of the characters themselves, to call up memories of earlier events in theserial, their specific knowledge of the programme.Such invitations occur withinthe narrative itself, within constructions of character, and within theprogramme s constitutive discourses  its particular formations of  commonsense.This process does not necessarily work to construct a unitary, non-contradictory reading of the text; rather, the  ways in which [the viewers] arelikely to respond to these invitations & are potentially extremely variable and, inmany cases, contradictory (p.83).Children as audiencesAlthough Buckingham never actually employs the term ethnographic, that tradi-tion of audience research underlies much of Public Secrets.To discover how asection of the audience responded to the  invitations of the text , Buckinghamconducted a series of small group discussions with a total of sixty young peoplebetween 7 and 18 years old, all from London.The groups were organized by age,but the racial mix varied.The discussions lasted one hour and twenty-fiveminutes on average, and were conducted in schools or, in a minority of cases,youth clubs.Buckingham describes them as  open-ended , although he directedthem with  fairly basic questions about viewing habits and about favourite orleast favourite EastEnders characters:127CENTRAL CATEGORI ESSometimes, generally towards the end of the discussion, I would draw thegroup s attention to characters or stories which they had failed to mention, atleast partly to discover if there were reasons for this.Finally, usually forabout the last twenty minutes of the session, I would screen a videotape ofthe last few scenes from the latest episode of EastEnders, occasionallypausing the tape to invite comments from the group.(Buckingham 1987: 158)Buckingham says this constituted a  relatively self-effacing role for the inter-viewer, which allowed the group to set its own agenda for discussion.He realizes,of course, that the situation and his role in it were highly artificial, but denies thatthis had any serious effect on the success of the discussions or on the insights theygenerated.One would have to accuse Buckingham of naïveté about what mightconstitute a genuinely  open-ended discussion and about the role of the inter-viewer in ethnographic work, but the research often illuminates the children srelationship to the programme.Unlike Morley, Buckingham actively interprets the children s responses;descriptions of tone and delivery often accompany the quotations from theirconversations [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]