4. Audiences Speak Back: Re-Working Offensive Television

This chapter addresses audiences’ questioning of what they perceive to be ‘offensive’ material on television, not only with regard to its ‘realness’ but also in terms of its social functions and role in society. Through the development of critical responses to the text depicted, for some audience members, overtly offensive material that aims to marginalise particular groups enabled strong forms of emotional responses, through deeply affective engagement with texts. Offensive, provocative television, we suggest, is more than a negative disposable—television content that openly provokes or offends might become an important site where citizen-audiences perform a kind of audiencing, which moves individual disgust or upset into a contribution to publicness.