Television and Everyday Life

deus ex machina
of post-
modernity. Jean Baudrillard (1981), in particular, offers an analysis of the
medium’s role in creating a culture of eternal self-reference and simulation.
This is a version of hybridisation certainly, but it is one that takes little account
of sociological or historical processes. Baudrillard expresses a view of the
consequences of the medium which, in its own failures to make distinctions, is
itself symptomatic of the condition he criticises. I hope to avoid falling into
the same trap. I return to a discussion of his analysis of television later in this
chapter.
The remainder of this chapter will consist of the following discussions: a
brief account of the rise of the suburb as an international phenomenon and
expression of modernity; a discussion of the relationship between suburbia
and communications; an account of the problem of what I will rather loosely
call the suburbanisation of the public sphere and television’s role in creating
it; a discussion of the soap opera as television’s suburban genre, 
par excellence;
and finally a discussion of hybridisation and simulation as ways of accounting
for the particularity of television’s suburbanness in post-modern culture.
SUBURBAN PASTS AND PRESENCE
In the city, Mars and Vulcan had become friends. Venus, neglected, sought
the consolations of domesticity in a distant suburb.
(Mumford, 1938, 210)
The first suburb was probably built in Calcutta during the late 1770s.
Chawringhee Road was the site of the development of well-ventilated free-
standing houses, ‘good habitation(s) in an open airy part of town’ which William
Hickey recommended as essential for the life of the employees of the East

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Television and Everyday Life
India Company at the time. These houses, increasingly with verandahs, soon
became the fashionable mean between houses in the centre, and the garden or
country residences—‘bungilos’—away from the city (Girouard, 1985, 242).
Both the form and content of the suburb, both its function and its aesthetic,
derived from this colonial beginning. Suburbs were rapidly to spread first to
Britain and to the early suburbanisation of London, and then further afield. As
they spread they expressed the changing political economy of Western
capitalism: an increasing amount of surplus capital and surplus time, initially
for the upper and middle classes, then belatedly, for others in the population.
The suburb was the product, Thorns (1972) argues, of five separate but related
factors: increased mobility, congestion in the cities, increased availability of
land (and funds) for building, the emergence of Town and Country Planning
legislation (in Britain) and the engendering of social aspirations which
associated the suburb with respectability, a high status and an essentially middle-
class way of life.
The history of the suburb is at once a history of a built environment, socially,
culturally and economically distinctive but also socially, culturally and
economically dependent, a history of an idea and a history of an ideal. The
first London suburb, in St John’s Wood, contained gracious Palladian and neo-
colonial cottages and villas, both detached and semi-detached, with their own
chapel, inn, assembly rooms, pleasure garden and cricket ground. By 1813–14
it had developed into a complete suburb popular with people who ‘wanted to
live cheaply, quietly or conveniently for visits into or out of central London—
which meant artists, architects, writers, retired East India Company officials
and rich men’s mistresses’ (Girouard, 1985, 277). Not far away, Regent’s Park
was being developed, modelled on the city of Bath, but inscribing once and
for all the ideal intermixing of country and city—urban development around a
park—which was to provide the model of much mid-and late Victorian
development of middle-class suburbs both around London and increasingly
on the edges of the industrial cities of the Midlands and the north of England.
The suburb was an attempt, by and for the middle classes, to get the best of
both worlds: the country and the city. The early examples can be presumed to
have inspired those who sought this particular hybrid utopia in specific acts of
social engineering. Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the Garden Cities
Association wrote in 1898, in what became a seminal treatise, that: Town and
country must be married and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope,
a new life, a new civilization’ (quoted in Appelby, 1990, 22).
But the bulk of suburbia, both in this country and elsewhere was unplanned
(Oliver 
et al.,
1981). And even if the ideal was middle-class, the residential
and domestic environments often were not. Crucial for all suburban
development were advances in transport, both public and then private. Railways,
omnibuses, trams, and then the motor car, all, both in Britain and the United
States, released a population from its locational dependence on the city. The

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59
separation of home and work became increasingly attenuated. Both time and
space were split between production and consumption, work and leisure (King,
1980). Whole cities, perhaps most extremely, Los Angeles (Brodsly, 1981),
grew rapidly, spreading low-density housing and low-density culture across
enormous expanses of suddenly valuable real estate. The ideology of home
ownership, the demand for single-family houses, the urgent need to provide
cheap housing for the demobbed soldiers, particularly in the US after the war,
all contributed to the growth of the suburb, all contributed to the creation of
the suburb as the dominant form of housing in Western society in the twentieth
century.
The patterns of suburban growth obviously varied from country to country.
And in particular the British and the American experience differed, in terms of
its timing (US suburbia was an almost entirely twentieth-century creation), in
its character (much more consistently middle-class in the US) and in its planning
(the various attempts through the garden city and new town experiments, as
well as the involvement of the State in trying both to control unplanned
development and provide homes for working people in Britain) (Thorns, 1972;
Harvey, 1989). None of this was conducted, however, without a set of ideals
and values that enshrined the suburb as an escape from, and a solution to, the
ills of industrialisation. On the margins of the city, absorbing the countryside,
providing single family household units for the middle class and those aspiring
to become middle-class, the suburb offered a standardised dream, embodied
in standardised units (pre-fabrication of buildings and components became
the norm) within which, however, individuals could, and did, express their
own individuality (see Miller, 1988).
This tension between standardisation and individualisation, between
uniformity and diversity (a tension which I have already identified in my earlier
discussion as being at the heart of culture) appears most forcibly as a
characterisation of suburbia in Seeley 
et al.
’s (1956) study of Crestwood
Heights, a middle-class suburb of, presumably, Toronto.
The name itself, Crestwood Heights (although in fact it is a pseudonym in
the study), is emblematic. It signifies the sylvan and the romantic, ‘the
suburb that looks out upon, and over, the city, not in it or of it, but at its
border and its crest’ (ibid., 1). The inhabitants of Crestwood Heights,
middle-class all, depend on the city economically, but are economically in a
position to buy into the North American dream, through their ability to
purchase the privacy and the sunlight, the spacious houses and the gardens
of the suburb, their cars, their freedom to travel, their sense of conquering
both time and space. They can draw on the cultural excitment of the City and
the peace and tranquillity of the not-too-distant wilderness of Northern
Ontario. But they can return from both to the material and technological
comforts of home: mass produced but individually consumed: customised in
use and in display:

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Television and Everyday Life
Here, then, is the raw material from which the dream may take on a form
and shape. But selecting and rejecting elements, each family or person builds
a special version, a particular cultural pattern, like and yet unlike the
neighbours. The process is never fixed and final, for one learns to make
new choices and new combinations endlessly.
(Ibid., 10)
Middle-class suburban life—child centred, competitive, sociable (but also
lonely), exclusive, dependent on a particular balance of female domesticity
and male social and geographical mobility, security and ambition—provides a
concrete embodiment of a modern utopia (e.g. Gill, 1984) or for many, a
dystopia (Sennett, 1986, 296–7; Mumford, 1938; Lodziak, 1986 etc.). Yet other
suburban and neo-suburban developments: the Levittowns for the returning
servicemen and aspiring middle classes in Long Island, Pennsylvania and New
Jersey; the overspill estates for the working classes to relieve the pressures of
the declining inner cities; the unplanned ribbon developments or commuter
villages (what Thorns (1972, 88) calls ‘the reluctant suburb’); industrial suburbs,
both planned and unplanned, where domestic housing, and the population, is
closely linked to a single local industrial complex; the garden suburbs; garden
cities and new towns—all in their various ways, are expressions of this ideal.
Ideals will rarely match realities and these ideals are, of course, problematic
in a number of different ways. And ideals themselves have consequences. For
the history of the suburb is a history both of inclusion and exclusion, and
above all it has involved the exclusion of all those who might tarnish that
ideal, especially ethnic minorities, from full, and often any, participation in it.
Furthermore, similarity in life-style does not necessarily lead to, nor is it
synonymous with, community. Sociability and neighbourliness within the
suburb do seem to be a product very much of similarities both in culture and
position in the life-cycle. And they seem to break down when either or both of
these are not present (in a new suburb of mixed ethnic groups, for example
(Richards, 1990), or in a second- or third-generation suburb with families at
different stages in their life-cycle). Equally the ideal, or expectation, that
suburban life is in some essential sense middle-class and therefore likely to
impose, environmentally as it were, a middle-class lifestyle on its non-middle-
class residents is open to some dispute (see Wilmott and Young, 1960;
Goldthorpe, 
et al.,
1969).
Yet in all these cases, what is not in dispute is the central importance of
house and home. Those desirous of moving to the suburbs express those desires
principally in terms of their ownership and occupation of their own private
space (Richards, 1990): the house and garden, the garage and driveway, which
provide, in microcosm, their own domestic hybrid.
1
The house, as I have already
argued in general terms, is home. It is both the site and symbol of the
suburbanisation of modernity. The house is:

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The suburbanisation of the public sphere
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an impressive and intricate material apparatus, the possession of which
makes possible the [suburban] way of life, from a physical and, even, more
important, from a psychological point of view…
…the house is a valuable means of ensuring privacy in a crowded city; a
vehicle for enforcing family solidarity and conformity; a place to practice
and perfect consumption skills; a major item of personal property, which,
for the head of the family…stands as a concrete symbol of his status and
visible sign of his success.
(Seeley 
et al.,
1956, 45–6)
Within the suburban house and around it, defining the conditions of its possibility,
is to be found a complex set of social and cultural relations organised in time and
space and through gender. The division of labour, of production and consumption,
of public and private spaces and identities, of public and private times, of availability
and privacy, sociability and separateness, work and leisure, is perhaps symbolised
through the unique product of industrial capitalism, the weekend. As Anthony
King (1980, 205) describes it, the weekend was a new temporal concept released
by the material and symbolic surpluses of advancing capitalism:
defined in relation to place, a place different from the normal location of
work and residence. The weekend was not simply a duration of time but also
a spatio-temporal unit. The link was established by new modes of travel—
the railway, the bicycle and the car. With the separation of work from residence,
it had also a social dimension. The ‘working week’ was spent in town, in the
company of office colleagues, the ‘weekend’ at home (or occasionally at the
‘cottage’), in the company of wife and children.
King is writing, principally, about the emergence of the country cottage and
bungalow as second homes; an initial and exaggerated expression, it might be
suggested, of the dichotomisation of city and country that the suburb
subsequently synthesised. But in that initial separation all the elements of
suburbanisation are already clear.
The suburb (and the suburban household) is constructed in close proximity
to the world of work and the world of the city. It can only really be understood
within the particularities of industrial society’s political economy. And as such
it has to be understood in all its punishing paradoxically: as politically both
liberating and oppressing; as culturally both creative and sterile; and as
sociologically both including and excluding. Within the household, both time
and space are marked in terms of private and public domains; temporalities
are fixed by the gendered tasks of daily, weekly and annual routines. The
suburban home is for male leisure and female work. It has become possible, as
many commentators have described, as a result of developments in
technology—particularly transport technology. It has been sustained as an
economic unit, in all its contradictions, by other technologies: the refrigerator,

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washing machine, vacuum cleaner (Cowan, 1989). It also has been sustained
as a symbolic unit by communication technologies, of which the telephone
(Pool, 1977; Moyal, 1992) and the television are preeminent.