Provocative 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.

This chapter investigates how people experience and negotiate the fine line between humour and offence in the context of television. Since humour exists not only in comedy programmes, but can also be found in advertising, reality television or even factual television programmes such as political discussions, we were attentive to any moments at which our participants detected ill-fitting humour when watching television. We explore what exactly people do with humorous content they find offensive, not what this kind of humorous content does ‘in general’. Such a contextualised approach illustrates the ethical and transformative potential of so-called ‘negative’ affect. Thus, rather than perceiving offence as an ‘ugly’ feeling with merely negative consequences for society, this chapter demonstrates that the avoidance of offence can also operate as a strategy for evading responsibility and action and thereby hindering social change.

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.

This chapter explores the expectations audiences articulate about regulatory processes behind television content they find offensive. First, mapping people’s responses on to the conceptual pairing of citizens and consumers, we find audiences aligning themselves with citizen interests, even when, often on the surface, they respond to media regulation and institutions with suspicion. Second, we find that complaints that make it to media regulators are just the tip of iceberg. Third, in investigating people’s expectations of actors and institutions in their responses to television content that startles, upsets, or simply offends them, we note that it is crucial to treat a conversation on free speech and censorship with caution.

This chapter concludes the book with six key findings from the analysis presented in the preceding chapters, and concludes with some thoughts on the policy-relevant aspects of audience responses to offensive content and on future research. The chapter notes first, that avoiding the feeling of being offended can operate as a strategy for evading responsibility and action. Second, identity-forming ‘us-and-them’ boundaries invoked by audiences to describe taste cultures are actually porous and thus need constant reinforcing and maintenance. Third, the neoliberal sovereign consumer judges which television programme is offensive through the device of ‘choice’. Fourth, feelings of offence operate often in and through the body, but they sometimes stay discursively unarticulated. Fifth, affective, bodily reactions to offensive television content can create a productive space with potential for action. Sixth, humour regimes continue to matter, but are intersected by exclusionary taste cultures where being offended is perceived as ‘uncool’. The chapter argues that in terms of the regulatory treatment of offensive material, the category itself is currently insufficiently defined and populated. And finally, the chapter posits that a conversation on the subject matter of ‘offensive’ content is readily derailed into a conversation on free speech and censorship, which is an unproductive and reductive outcome.