http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3596-0701
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Abstract
In ways that directly implicate audiences in practices of consumption, an adaptation of a neo-Victorian novel set in the late-Victorian London East End, whose main character is a prostitute, dovetails the idea of city streets as places of consumption with the neo-Victorian interest in sexploitation. The Crimson Petal and the White (2011, BBC Two) is one such adaptation belonging to a larger group of recent British TV series which gaze, episode after episode, at the poverty of the historical and social other. This article argues that the double engagement of audiences in the series with acts of virtual slumming and the multiplatform consumption of the Victorians, in ways that directly impinge on questions of perception and representation, is responsible for the critical success of this text as a neo-Victorian adaptation. Specifically, the focus of this article is on the ways the audiences arguably make sense of the simultaneously spectacular and unpleasant dimensions of the Victorian pasts. The emphasis rests on the processes of mediation of these ‘unattractive’ pasts (namely via the BBC’s ‘Original British Drama’ branding strategy) and the particular aspects (such as sexploitation and slumming) which are put on display when the past is turned into an unattraction.
Notes
1. Jon Creamer, ‘Period drama with attitude’ 4 May 2011 http://www.televisual.com/blog-detail/Period-drama-with-attitude_bid-233.html.
2. Within these studies, we highlight Kucich and Sadoff (Citation2000), with the earliest publication date, whose stated purpose is ‘to begin a discussion of postmodernism’s privileging of the Victorian as its historical “other”’ (Citation2000, x, xi). Kucich and Sadoff relate the resurgence of interest in the nineteenth century with the emergence of cultural studies, attributing the origins of neo-Victorianism to two readings of nineteenth-century culture: Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) by Raymond Williams and The Making of the English Working Class (1963) by E.P. Thompson (Citation2000, xiii).
3. Audiences are here conceived in the context of twenty-first-century global markets as groups partaking a common representational orientation without sharing intimate interaction.
4. Paul Smithson, ‘BBC use editorial priorities to create brand campaigns,’ 28 June 2012, http://www.brightpathdigital.co.uk/blog/brand-pr/bbc-use-editorial-priorities-to-create-brand-campaigns.
5. For instance, the video of the song ‘Blue Orchid’ by the North American duo The White Stripes borrows from a very similar Victoriana visuality.
6. Formerly part of the B.B.C., this company is now private.
8. ’BBC One Original British Drama Olympic Takeover,’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/olympictakeover.html
9. Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4DdEOSv1ro.
10. Ian Wylie, Manchester Evening News, 6 April 2011, https://lifeofwylie.com/2011/04/06/the-crimson-petal-and-the-white.
11. Maggie Brown, ‘BBC2 scents success with The Crimson Petal and the White,’ 9 March 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/mar/09/the-crimson-petal-and-the-white-bbc2.
12. Jon Creamer, ‘Period drama with attitude,’ 4 May 2011, http://www.televisual.com/blog-detail/Period-drama-with-attitude_bid-233.html.
13. Drawing on Maxine Feifer (Citation1985), John Urry and Jonas Larsen write that ‘“[p]ost-tourists” find pleasure in the multiplicity of tourist games. They know that there is no authentic tourist experience, that there are merely a series of games or texts that can be played’ (Urry and Larsen Citation2011, 13).
14. Slum tourism has received increasing academic attention over the last decade. See Hutnyk (Citation1996) and Frenzel, Steinbrink, and Koens (Citation2012).
15. Ian Wylie, Manchester Evening News, 6 April 2011, https://lifeofwylie.com/2011/04/06/the-crimson-petal-and-the-white.
16. Jon Creamer, ‘Period drama with attitude,’ 4 May 2011, http://www.televisual.com/blog-detail/Period-drama-with-attitude_bid-233.html.
17. Marc Munden, ‘The Crimson Petal and the White: Subverting expectations,’ 4 April 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2011/04/the-crimson-petal-and-the-whit.shtml.
18. Graham Huggan defines ‘postcoloniality’ as ‘a global condition of cross-cultural symbolic exchange’ (Citation2001, ix); he notes later that postcoloniality displays an overt ‘contradiction between anti-colonial ideologies and neo-colonial market schemes’ (Citation2001, 413).
19. Jon Creamer, ‘Period drama with attitude,’ 4 May 2011, http://www.televisual.com/blog-detail/Period-drama-with-attitude_bid-233.html.
20. Ian Wylie, Manchester Evening News, 6 April 2011, https://lifeofwylie.com/2011/04/06/the-crimson-petal-and-the-white.
21. Marc Munden, ‘The Crimson Petal and the White: Subverting expectations’ 4 April 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2011/04/the-crimson-petal-and-the-whit.shtml.
22. Jon Creamer, ‘Period drama with attitude,’ 4 May 2011, http://www.televisual.com/blog-detail/Period-drama-with-attitude_bid-233.html.
23. Tom Sutcliffe, ‘Last Night’s TV: The Crimson Petal and the White,’ 6 April 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/last-nights-tv-the-crimson-petal-and-the-whitebbc2vacation-vacation-vacationchannel-4-2264384.html.
24. Marc Munden, ‘The Crimson Petal and the White: Subverting expectations,’ 4 April 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2011/04/the-crimson-petal-and-the-whit.shtml.
26. Though this falls outside the scope of this article, it is interesting to note that Jack the Ripper himself was a media creation (a fact which is emphasized in Ripper Street), and that this fixed in our imaginaries prostitution as being associated with East London, when statistics show that there were more prostitutes in the West End.