Why Audiences Love Drama Programmes

Drama programmes are popular because they show the audience themselves. In other words, they RE-PRESENT an image of what they think they are or would like to be. It helps to reinforce people's sense of their own identity, and their sense of belonging to a particular group of people with shared values and interests. The extent to which an audience identifies with a character depends on how the programme uses stereotypes of:

Gender
Age
Ethnicity
Sexuality
Class and status
Physical ability/disability
Regional identity

The concept of representation is explained in more detail by Stuart Hall, an influential media theorist, HERE.

So, TV programmes represent certain groups of people on screen, and that representation may or may not be what those people are actually like. The point is that society has ideas about what people should be like, and that set of ideas is what we call IDEOLOGY. There are other definitions of what ideology means if you're studying, say, Politics, but for our purposes, it is the system of stereotypes which society collectively holds about certain groups.

The consequence of this is that ideology is also about POWER. Who has power in society? Who gets to make the rules? Who is acceptable and who isn't? You may believe that because we live in a liberal democracy everybody is equal and nobody is more powerful than anybody else, but it's not the case. It's what we would like to believe about our society but it simply isn't true.

If you find this hard to accept, think about the following questions:

• How would your friends react if you came out and said you were gay? (Especially if you are sporty.)
• Does your Mum earn more money than your Dad?
• Who stayed at home to look after you when you were a baby?
• How many black or asian Prime Ministers have there been?
• If you were in a wheelchair, how easy would it be to get into the Media classroom?

TV Drama programmes which show representations of people who conform to expected social stereotypes also reinforce entrenched power structures in which white, middle-class, heterosexual men are the most privileged group.

TV Drama in Broadcaster's Schedules

To get some idea of how important the genre of TV drama is to broadcasters, do a quick bit of research.

Go to the BARB website. BARB is the Broadcasters Audience Research Board, and it compiles charts and statistics of what people watch on TV.

Go to the “Top 10s”
From the alphabetic list of all available channels, select BBC1, and click on the “View Figures” button at the bottom.
Now examine the list of the top 10 programmes watched on this channel. How many of them would you classify as drama?
Now repeat this exercise for BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5. You may want to do this in a group to save time.
What percentage of the top-rated television programmes on terrestrial television are drama?
Does any one particular sub-genre dominate the ratings?
What conclusions can you draw about the importance of TV Drama to broadcasters?

Hopefully you'll see that drama programmes are incredibly popular with audiences. It is therefore important to study exactly what kinds of images these programmes are presenting to us about ourselves, and how this is done.

TV Drama Genres

Genre means a ‘kind’ or ‘type’ and is a way of categorising films and TV programmes. Before you start studying TV drama, a broad television genre, you need to think about the role genre plays in broadcasters’ and television producers’ thinking as well as in audiences’ viewing. This will help put into context your detailed work on the TV drama genre.

Think about your own television viewing:
What did you watch over Christmas?
Do you normally watch these programmes during the rest of the year?
What are some of your favourite TV programmes?
Why do you like them?
Are you aware that you are looking at a programme in a particular genre?

Genres can be HYBRIDS.
(A hybrid genre is a mixture of two or more different genres.)
Genres can be divided into SUBGENRES.
(A subgenre is a very specialist form of the genre with its own particular forms and conventions.)

Introduction

The purpose of this unit is to assess your ability to analyse a media text, as well as your understanding of the concept of representation using a short unseen moving image extract. In this case, an extract from a television drama programme.

Secondly, it will assess your knowledge and understanding of the British film industry - its production processes, distribution strategies, use of technologies and related issues concerning audience reception and consumption of media texts.

The examination is two hours (including 30 minutes for viewing and making notes on the moving image extract) and you have to answer two compulsory questions. The unit is marked out of a total of 100, with each question marked out of 50.

There are two sections to this paper:
Section A: Textual Analysis and Representation (TV Drama) = 50 marks.
Section B: Institutions and Audiences (The British Film industry) = 50 marks