2. Producing the Imagined Audience of Offensive Screens

This chapter explores how audience members tend to distance themselves from television programmes they find ‘offensive’. People we spoke to often experienced this kind of content as ‘disgusting’, thereby affectively producing a distinction between the self, and those tasteless, ill-informed others for whom the programme is supposedly intended. And yet, as we will discuss in this chapter, this border is far more porous than assumed. By drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, we illustrate the ambiguous nature of offensive television content and how people shift in and out of the category of the imagined audience of offensive screens. We also discuss how strategies of displacement feed into the myth of the omnipotent, sovereign audience/consumer, and consider how the link between offence and consumer choice becomes relevant for commercial and public broadcasters.