Television and Everyday Life

participation in public leisure activities, or in the shared sociability of the
public or the private house. Evidence seems to suggest, however, that these
activities are becoming increasingly privatised, especially compared to the
pattern of social life in the city (Willmott and Young, 1960). And this
privatisation is precisely what is at issue in discussions of the role of the
media in the sustenance of the public sphere.
Finally, however, suburban politics also includes a more subtle but not
necesssarily any less comfortable politics of identity—a domestic politics in
which, above all, gender relations are centrally involved. These politics—
the politics of housework (Oakley, 1974), the politics of television viewing
(Morley, 1986), the politics of domestic space (Hunt, 1989; Mason, 1989)—
are all expressions not only in the private domain, but also in the public one,
of the constant negotiation and renegotiation of gender (and age-based)
identities and relations: privately in the sitting rooms, bedrooms and
kitchens of the home, publicly in the integrated or segregated gatherings of
women and men in community associations, in the organising of child care,
in the pubs or local party meetings.
5
As I have already pointed out the home
is itself an essential component in the politics of status—the suburban
politics 
par excellence
—in which an engagement with the consumer
products of the public sphere provides the basis for a subtle—and intensely
gendered—struggle for the self.
I am of course arguing that an understanding of the dynamics of these various
political processes must take television (and other media) into account.
Specifically, now, I want to concentrate on three aspects of television’s
involvement. The first is through the genre which provides, perhaps most clearly,
images of suburban life which both mythically and functionally, formally and
substantively, can be seen to be offering images and models of the suburban
way of life. The second is by considering some of the ways in which television,
both in its scheduling and in the particular temporality of the soap opera’s
narrative itself, provides a framework for the temporal structure of the suburban
day. And the third is by focusing briefly on the ways in which that genre, soap
opera, provides the raw material for the glue of social intercourse in suburban
(and indeed in other) environments: through gossip and the secondary
discourses surrounding the plots and characters of the everyday stories of urban,
suburban and country folk.