The history of television celebrity: a discursive approach

Abstract

This article makes a critical contribution to recent discussions of television celebrity. In particular, the article argues against the use of ‘celebrity’ as a general concept (with, in some accounts, a 250-year history) – of which the ‘TV personality’ is a particular variant. The focus here is on specific meanings of ‘celebrity’ alongside other terms that have been used to define ‘media people’ on television. Taking as its case study the UK TV listings magazine TV Times between 1955 and 1964, the analysis shows that the term ‘celebrity’ was used, alongside ‘personality’ and the much more ubiquitous ‘star’, to describe TV performers sometimes interchangeably but, as the nascent TV culture developed, with meanings that became increasingly specific. In this context, the term ‘celebrity’ was used to characterise the relationship between media performers and outsiders/ordinary people – where these people encountered TV performers or were themselves involved in TV programmes. Here ‘celebrity’ is not a general historical concept, but rather a term used to define an emerging popular culture, with TV a key focus for the development of contemporary ‘media rituals’.

Keywords:

• television star
• personality
• celebrity
• ordinariness
• discourse analysis

Notes

1. Bonner’s argument appears to be inconsistent here because she does go on to discuss ‘early televisual celebrity’ by identifying the 1950s TV chef Philip Harden as ‘very definitely’ an example of this phenomenon.

2. The dates in this section are the dates of a programme’s transmission. Quotations are taken from various editions of the TV Times from 1955–1964.

3. See http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/tvtip

4. At the time of writing this article the BBC made its ‘Genome’ facility, also an online archive of listings, from The Radio Times, available online. Therefore, if this article is seen as a useful approach to this kind of historical research, it should now be possible, without too much difficulty, to introduce a comparative aspect.

5. A DVD containing 214 copies of the TV Times between 1960 and 1965 kindly provided by my colleague Tim O’Sullivan.

6. Search facilities, such as those provided by the BUFVC, need to be handled with care. In this archive ‘stars’ appears both as a noun and a verb, but it is only the first usage that counts here. In this version it also functions as a metaphor, so the occasional literal usage (as in programmes about astronomy) also had to be discounted. Finally, the appearance of this term in programme titles, such as the idiomatic Thank Your Lucky Stars (weekly from 1962), was excluded from the data, although references to performers as pop stars were included. Similarly, Four Star Playhouse and Celebrity Playhouse (1956) were discounted – on the basis that actors were not billed as stars or celebrities.

7. By 1962 Close Up has started to use this phrase to replace the 1960s’ focus on ‘stars’.

8. The dates in this section are the dates of publication of editions of the TV Times in which quoted feature articles appeared.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Tolson

Andrew Tolson is honorary visiting fellow in the Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester. Formerly he was Professor of Media and Communication at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is a founder member of the Ross Priory Group, an international seminar of researchers in the field of broadcast talk. He is the author of Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio (Edinburgh University Press, 1996) and, apart from his interest in TV celebrity, his other current research is mainly focussed on news and political communication.