Lifestyle television programs have proliferated since the 1990s, focusing on topics like home improvement, cooking, fashion, and self-improvement. These shows promote norms of consumption, gender, and bodies. They can be understood through the concepts of governmentality and the panopticon, representing a form of power that shapes individuals' behaviors and identities through surveillance and the promotion of experts. Their rise is linked to broader cultural shifts around home ownership, women's roles, and changing leisure practices in late 20th century Britain.

1. Does My Bum Look Big In This?
Lifestyle TV, Social Surveillance of Classed & Gendered Bodies
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2. Lifestyle TV
 Television‟s two-fold system:
1. Public Service Ethos
2. Commerciality
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3. Lifestyle TV
 As Gareth Palmer points
out, „television has now extended to
directly fashioning people – for their
own good, of course‟
 (in Holmes & Jermyn, 2004: 189)
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4. Lifestyle TV
 Rachel Moseley suggests that „the
privatization of the public sphere in recent
decades has led to a shift in the ethos of
public service broadcasting, with television
taking on a new role in the “care of the
self, the home and the garden, addressing
its audience through a combination of
consumer competence and do-it-yourself
on a shoestring”‟.
 Cited in Tasker & Negra, 2007: 228
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5. Identifying lifestyle TV:
Homes/Gardens
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6. Identifying lifestyle TV:
Food and Bodies
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7. Proliferation of Lifestyle TV in the 1990s
 Home and Gardens  The Self
 Real Rooms (BBC 1997)  Style Challenge (BBC
 Changing Rooms (BBC 1996)
1997- 2004)  Looking Good (BBC 1997-
 Ground Force (BBC 1997- 2000)
)
 She‟s Gotta Have It (CH 4
 Better Homes (ITV, 1999)
1998)
 Cookery
 Delia
 Ready Steady Cook (BBC
1997)
 The Naked Chef (BBC
1999)
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8. Sir Jonathan Miller
editor of Monitor, 1964-5; BBC, 1970
 Every time I switch on the television, I see someone
stooping with a spoon, then sipping from it, and then
turning to someone next to them and going „Aaaah‟. The
BBC is becoming a form of...wall-filling. If it‟s not
broadcast cookery programmes, it‟s about decorating
your house or about vets, or Men Behaving Badly. Soon
there‟ll be Vets Behaving Badly.
 Miller, 1999: 20 cited in Brunsdon, 2003: 6
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9. Lifestyle TV
Daytimisation of evening
schedules
„the daytime schedules, always
the domain of the housewife, the
mother with children, the retired
and the hobbyist‟ have shifted to
the evening slots in „a day for
night makeover takeover‟
 Brunsdon, 2003: 7
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10. Lifestyle TV
 Feminization of evening schedules
 Displacement of „masculine‟ programming
 Diminution of „serious‟ programming
 Current affairs, documentary
 The public sphere
 The „political‟
 Realism
 Experts
 „softening up‟ = „soaping‟ and „celebrity
lifestyling‟. A turn to a more consumer led
approach.
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11. Brunsdon, 2003: 8
 „we can hypothesize that it is not lifestyle
programming alone that is producing an
audience that is available to view. If the home
and person have always been expressive
sites, more people are spending more time and
money on these pursuits than ever before, in a
culture where the gap between rich and poor
has continued to increase. Although the
lifestyling of British television has attracted
attention as being symbolic of a deterioration in
that television, it is perhaps more helpful to think
of it as being one element in the more general
„lifestyling‟ of late 20th-century British culture.‟
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12. Brunsdon, 2003: 8
 Ambivalent
 Not simply „scheduling solutions‟
 TV engages with wider cultural shifts
1. Increase in home ownership
2. Female entry in to the workforce
 More disposable income
 Greater visibility in TV industries
“Many of the lifestyle shows are made by independents
many are fronted by women and many have production
teams with quite high proportions of women” (2003:8)
3. Changing living and consumption practices
1. Falling birth rates/Single occupancy households
2. Privatisation of leisure (i.e DIY, cookery)
= one element in the more general lifestyling of late
C20th British culture (2003:8)
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13. TRANSFORMATION NARRATIVES
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14. Governmentality;
The Fashion Police
 In a world where „it is now widely agreed and
understood that “appearance is
everything”‟, „people now understand television
as an active agent of transformation‟.
 (Palmer, 2004: 184, 189)
 Michel Foucault – Governmentality
 Operations of power in modern society
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15. Governmentality;
The Fashion Police
 The process of what Nikolas Rose describes
as “„governing the soul‟ or the
production, shaping and management of
subjects useful for the purposes of the state
and its associated insituitions‟”.
 Cited in Tasker and Negra, 2007: 230
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16. Governmentality;
The Fashion Police
 According to Martin
Roberts, „governmentality has been driven
as much by economic interests of capital
as the political requirements of the state ...
In the contemporary world ...
governmentality is driven primarily by the
agendas and interests of neoliberal
capitalism ... Governmentality in
postmodern societies is driven primarily by
the interests of the market rather than the
state as such‟.
 Cited in Tasker and Negra, 2007: 231
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17. What Not to Wear
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSwijjO8Zkc
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18. What Not to Wear
 “Your best friends won‟t tell you what not
to wear, but we‟re not your friends. And
we will.”
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19. What Not to Wear
 „What Not to Wear is a „paradigmatic
example of the operations of
governmentality in lifestyle television and
the role of postfeminist ideology in that
process‟.
 One of the central tenets of postfeminism
is „that sexual attractiveness is a source of
power over patriarchy rather than
subjection to it‟.
 Roberts in Tasker & Negra, 2007: 233-4
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20. Frankenstein‟s a nice guy?
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21. Frankenstein‟s a nice guy?
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22. The 360 Degree Mirror
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23. What Not to Wear – The Book
 Listing ten problem areas:
 Big boobs/ no boobs/ big arms/ big butt/ no waist/
short legs/ flabby tummy/ saddlebags/ bingo wings/
short neck/ thick ankles and carves/ camel‟s toe.
 Golden Rules for Big Arms:
 Fat arms must always wear sleeves
 Capped sleeves are an absolute no – they strangle
big arms
 Small prints cover a multitude a flabby flesh.
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24. EXTREME MAKEOVER
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25. Nikolas Rose (1990: 10 -11)
 Through self-reformation, therapy, techniques of body
alteration, and the calculated reshaping of speech and
emotion, we adjust ourselves by means of the techniques
propounded by the experts of the soul. The government of
the soul depends upon our recognition of ourselves as
ideally and potentially certain sorts of person, the unease
generated by a normative judgement of what we are and
what we could become, and the incitement offered to
overcome this discrepancy by following the advice of
experts in the management of the self. The irony is that we
believe, in making our subjectivity the principle of our
personal lives, our ethical systems, and our political
evaluations, that we are, freely, choosing our freedom.
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26. Nikolas Rose (1990: 10 -11)
 Through self-reformation, therapy, techniques of body
alteration, and the calculated reshaping of speech and
emotion, we adjust ourselves by means of the techniques
propounded by the experts of the soul. The government of
the soul depends upon our recognition of ourselves as
ideally and potentially certain sorts of person, the unease
generated by a normative judgement of what we are and
what we could become, and the incitement offered to
overcome this discrepancy by following the advice of
experts in the management of the self. The irony is that we
believe, in making our subjectivity the principle of our
personal lives, our ethical systems, and our political
evaluations, that we are, freely, choosing our freedom.
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27. Nikolas Rose (1990: 10 -11)
 Through self-reformation, therapy, techniques of body
alteration, and the calculated reshaping of speech and
emotion, we adjust ourselves by means of the techniques
propounded by the experts of the soul. The government of
the soul depends upon our recognition of ourselves as
ideally and potentially certain sorts of person, the unease
generated by a normative judgement of what we are and
what we could become, and the incitement offered to
overcome this discrepancy by following the advice of
experts in the management of the self. The irony is that we
believe, in making our subjectivity the principle of our
personal lives, our ethical systems, and our political
evaluations, that we are, freely, choosing our freedom.
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28. Jeremy
Bentham, 1791
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29. Governmentality
 „Television seems to teach us, our only option is to listen
humbly as our design skills, sense of style, or musical
talents are scrutinized and dissected, our homes
remodelled, our identities reformatted, and our intimate
histories laid bare...‟
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30. Governmentality
 Governmentality depends upon our consent, and whilst
these factors are powerful forces, „the option always
remains to throw off the selves that lifestyle television
creates for us, to be who we want to be, to think for
ourselves‟.
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31. Lifestyle television as panoptican?
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32. Further Reading
 Foucault, Michel (1991) „Governmentality‟, in The Foucault Effect:
Studies in Governmentality, Burchell, Gordon, Peter Miller (eds.).
New York: Pantheon.
 McRobbie, A (2004): „Notes on „What Not To Wear‟ and Post-
feminist Symbolic Violence‟, The Sociological Review, 52(2): 97-109.
 Palmer, G (2008) Exposing Lifestyle Television: The Big Reveal.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
 Roberts, Martin (2007) „The Fashion Police: Governing the Self in
What Not to Wear‟, in Tasker, Yvonne & Negra, Diane (eds.)
Interrogating Postfeminism. London: Duke University Press.
 Rose, Nikolas (1990) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private
Self. London: Routledge.
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