Spectacular Television by Wheatley Helen;

Author:Wheatley, Helen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4713659
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2016-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Holidays, the tourist gaze and the imagined elsewhere

Joshua Meyrowitz has argued that ‘although we always sense the world in a local place, the people and things that we sense are not always local. Further although all experience is local, we do not always make sense of the world from a purely local perspective’ (1989: 327), meaning that our horizons have been expanded by the presentation in the media of places beyond our immediate locale. Whilst the television landscapes discussed thus far in this chapter have, to a greater or lesser extent, been local, or at least ‘national’, television presents distinctly ‘unlocal’ landscapes via the holiday or travel programme: in short, the far away. Meyrowitz writes of a ‘generalised elsewhere’, a mediated place and space beyond our local existence which is juxtaposed with our specific viewing contexts via television; here we instead think about an ‘imagined elsewhere’, an alternative landscape which is as specific as the places from which we view, but which is imagined, brought into being by the programme-makers and traversed and viewed on our behalf by a series of different diegetic figures. Whilst a wide variety of programming genres, from documentary to the cookery programme, extend our knowledge and understanding of this ‘imagined elsewhere’, the remainder of this chapter is particularly interested in how the ways in which holidaymakers, tourists and travellers engage with landscape are visualised on screen.

A growing body of literature considers the relationship between tourism and the media; beyond John Urry’s account of the ‘tourist gaze’ (1990), David Crouch, Rhona Jackson and Felix Thompson’s wide-ranging collection on this subject proposes that ‘there is an overarching and necessary interdependence between tourism and the media […] The media are heavily involved in promoting an emotional disposition, coupled with imaginative and cognitive activity, which has the potential to be converted into tourist activity’ (2005b: 1). For these authors, television is one aspect of the media which both creates expectation and desire around a particular site of tourism, and also teaches us what to do, and how to view, when we are in that place. Fred Inglis also proposes that ‘television is the source of the imagery with which we do our imagining of the future, and the holiday imagery now so omnipresent on the screen […] is one of the best places to find our fantasies of the free and fulfilled life’ (2000: 5). Whilst Inglis proposes that the holiday on television offers an imagined future, this chapter proposes that it also offers us an imagined elsewhere and, more specifically, an imagined landscape.

The holiday programme has a long history on British television which extends back well before the advent of the BBC’s long-running holiday programme, Holiday, in 196916 and its ITV equivalent, Wish You Were Here?, originally broadcast in 1974.17 On BBC television the holiday programme initially developed out of afternoon programming made by the Women’s Television Department where much of the consumer-focused programming had found its home. From the beginning of 1952, for example, the long-running magazine

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