Watching talk: Gender and engagement in the viewing of audience discussion programmes

I felt really good because I’d spoken because in the past I’ve actually spoken to friends about it and they hadn’t been in difficult situations and so they couldn’t quite relate and strangely enough the audience was really really sympathetic and I felt more empathy with them than I had with friends who hadn’t been through it. It felt really like the audience was on your side so it was actually a really nice feeling, you felt like you were being supported. (Woman participant in a studio discussion) What is the significance of conversations held in public places? How can diverse, even conflicting, publics meet to resolve their arguments? Is open access programming a democratic opening up of elite broadcasting prac-tices or just a new form of cheap entertainment? A nexus of these and similar questions is currently being addressed by debates across different disciplines concerned with the public sphere and the mass media. In this article, I present an audience-based analysis of one particular public place for conversation and argument, in order to examine how these broader questions relate to, and may be informed by, consideration of concrete examples from audience research. Specifically, I shall focus on the relations between gender and genre in audience responses to audience discussion programmes. The double use of ‘audience ’ is not accidental here, for when audiences at home watch (and talk about) audiences in the television studio (who talk about everyday life outside the studio), our traditional categories of media analysis are challenged. Text (or author) and audience, public and private, expert and ordinary person, information and entertainment, critical and normative, subject and object- all are problematized by a genre in which ordinary people are invited to participate in a television studio debate about topica