Learning modernity: lifestyle advice television in Australia, Taiwan and Singapore

Abstract

This article examines the role of lifestyle advice television programming in Australia, Taiwan and Singapore. Lifestyle television in the Asia-Pacific region includes a range of ‘popular factual’ formats from cooking and health shows to reality-style make-over shows and consumer advice programmes. What unites these shows, from Singapore's highly popular Home Décor Survivor to Taiwan's Lifestyle Experts and Australia's Better Homes and Gardens is their concern with instructing their audiences in everyday life skills while showcasing the latest consumer products and services. In this article we argue that, in inducting ordinary viewers into the ‘art of living’ these increasingly ubiquitous forms of advice television are playing a significant role in shaping social identities, consumer practices and personal lifestyles in the region. The lifestyle format takes on particular significance in Asia with the emergence of ‘new’ formations of consumer-oriented middle classes characterised by lifestyle aspirations that are shaped in complex ways by national, regional and global influences. Drawing upon a ‘multiple modernities’ approach, this article examines the pedagogical role of lifestyle TV in three different cultural contexts, foregrounding the way in which it negotiates varied global and local formations of lifestyle culture and consumption.

Keywords:

• lifestyle
• multiple modernities
• television

Notes

1. Contemporary lifestyle programming also has links to DIY culture and forms of domestic masculinity. See Lewis’ (2008) discussion of masculinity and the development of modern lifestyle advice.

2. Focusing variously on ‘alternative’, ‘other’ and ‘hybrid’ modernities, such an approach leads away from the once presumed opposition between a modern west and a non- or pre-modern non-west, and toward renewed attempts, in Ong's words, ‘to consider how non-western societies themselves make modernities after their own fashion, in the remaking of rationality, capitalism and the nation in ways that borrow from but also transform western universalizing forms’ (1995, p. 64). Thus, while Holden and Scrase (2006) point to the ways in which popular media modes like television act as conduits for forms of ‘mediated modernity’ across Asia, a comparative modernities approach usefully extends this model by foregrounding how particular geocultural locations frame and specify locally pertinent processes of modernity.

3. The Biggest Loser is a weight loss ‘make-over’ show that combines a ‘warts and all’ reality-lifestyle format together with a competitive, boot camp approach in order to both transform and reform ‘aberrant’ overweight citizens into slimmer, go-getting versions of their former selves.

4. Since the segment was filmed, Long Jun'er and her family have transformed the house into an upscale bed-and-breakfast cum gallery; they also run an organic restaurant. Both feature the painstakingly ‘cosy’ interior decoration style featured in the house discussed here.

5. The ‘collective uchi’ (interior) in Holden and Hakan's terms.

6. MediaCorp is owned by Temasek Holdings, an investment arm of the Singapore government.

7. Arts Central (which features a variety of mostly foreign English-language programming often with Chinese subtitles) also offers a regular 9–10 pm lifestyle slot including imported shows like The Hairy Biker's Cookbook (a UK cooking-travel show) and Outback Café, an Australian travel food show hosted by indigenous presenter Mark Olive.

8. According to Tay Lay Tin, a Senior Executive Producer with Chinese Entertainment Productions, lifestyle TV audiences are primarily housewives supplemented by students at primetime. She argues that, given long work hours in Singapore, workers tend not catch programmes in the 8–10 pm slot instead watching after 10 pm (a time slot dominated by news and documentaries). Interview with Tay Lay Tin, Senior Executive Producer, Chinese Entertainment Productions, Singapore, January 2008.

9. In Singapore as in Taiwan, make-over segments have featured on beauty shows but these shows have tended to be oriented towards niche audiences. At the time of writing, a new full-length beauty show was being aired on Mediacorp 8 at 8.30 pm on Friday. Featuring the same host as Good Food Fun Cook, Follow Me to Glamour is a reality-style ‘outdoor game show’ based around the search for suitable candidates to undergo beauty make-over sessions in public.

10. While western lifestyle make-over shows often involve lifestyle experts invading people's private domestic space, this occurs less on Singaporean lifestyle shows where much of the action tends to be set in public or studio space.

11. Thanks to Tay Lay Tin for bringing these points to our attention.

12. Interview with Tay Lay Tin, Senior Executive Producer, Chinese Entertainment Productions, Singapore, January 2008.

13. While Singaporean TV might be seen to legitimate global middle-class lifestyles there are limits to the kinds of cosmopolitan lifestyles it will portray. For instance, featuring queer-identified actors or hosts is a no-go zone for Singapore TV (although it can feature camp hosts who are ‘read’ by the audience as gay) as evidenced by the recent case of a home make-over show that was fined for featuring a gay couple who wanted to transform their game room into a new nursery for their adopted baby. ‘Singapore TV station fined S$15,000 for showing a ‘‘normal’’ gay family’ (retrieved from http://www.fridae.com/newsfeatures/2008/04/25/2047.singapore-tv-station-fined-s-15000-for-showing-a-normal-gayfamily).