1st Edition

Television Personalities Stardom and the Small Screen

By James Bennett Copyright 2011
    240 Pages
    by Routledge

    240 Pages
    by Routledge

    Television Personalities offers an exciting, engaging approach to studying and understanding the most prominent and popular performers in television and celebrity culture. It is an original, indispensable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media, television and celebrity studies, as well as those interested in digital culture more widely.

    List of Tables and Figures  Acknowledgements  Permissions  Introduction  Chapter 1. The television personality system  Part 1: ‘TV must train its own stars’: The invention of the television personality  Chapter 2. An ‘irreconcilable opposition’: Music hall, radio and the emergence of televisual skill  Chapter 3. ‘Too much glamour?’: Glamour, gender and ‘in-vision’ announcers  Part 2: ‘‘Oooh, I’m an entertainer ... it’s what I do’: Political economy, performance and pleasure  Chapter 4. ‘You don’t know anyone ... ’: The political economy of television fame  Chapter 5. The art of ‘being yourself’: Pleasure, meaning and achievement in performance  Part 3: The television personality system revisited: Ideology, multiplatform and DIY fame  Chapter 6. Just ‘an ordinary bloke’: National identity and ideology  Chapter 7. Get Internet famous! (Even if you’re nobody)’: Multiplatform fame and the television personality system in the digital era  Conclusion  Bibliography  Index

    Biography

    Dr. James Bennett is Head of Area for Media, Information and Communications at London Metropolitan University, UK. His work focuses upon digital, interactive television and TV fame in the United Kingdom. He has published articles in Screen, Cinema Journal, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Convergence and Celebrity Studies Journal. He is co-editor of Film and Television after DVDs (with Tom Brown, 2008) and Television as Digital Media (with Niki Strange, forthcoming, 2011).

    "Television Personalities is going to be one of the defining texts in the fields of television, and celebrity studies. It is an outstanding piece of scholarship that is beautifully, accessibly written." - Sean Redmond, Celebrity Studies

    "In this useful, thoughtful book, Bennett investigates a crucial element that has gone missing from our current understanding of television: precisely how it participates in the production and consumption of celebrity. He explores the longstanding assumptions about how television stardom works, making the book essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary television." Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia