Television and Everyday Life

3
THE SUBURBANISATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
1
George Cadbury, one of the early pioneers of suburban utopias and builder at the end of
the last century of Bournville, an industrial village near Birmingham, wrote in a familiar
vein that ‘the only way [to improve social conditions in the smoke and grime of crowded
industrial areas] was to bring men out of the cities into the country and to give every

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Notes
179
man his garden where he can come into touch with nature and thus know Nature’s God’
(quoted in Gill, 1984, 111).
2
This is, of course, not particular to the newly mobilised middle classes of the American
suburbs. It is equally true, among others, of the English working classes (see Roberts,
1973; Martin, 1981) and of the Brazilian (Leal, 1990).
3
See Tomlinson, 1990; and Willmott and Young, 1960, 27: ‘The husbandman
agriculturalist is back in a new form, as horticulturalist rather than agriculturalist, as
builder rather than cattleman, as improver not of a strip of arable land but of the semi-
detached family estate at 33, Ellesmere Road’.
4
I shall be discussing both these issues more fully in Chapter 6.
5
Lyn Richards (1990), in particular, in her detailed analysis of the social relations of a
newly created Australian suburb, points to how the Residents’ Association and the
self-help groups which emerged in the community, and through which its own internal
politics were conducted, were also the site for a politics of class and gender which
reproduced the expected structures of division and control.
6
Lynn Spigel (1992) addresses the relationship between both soap operas and sitcoms
and the merging culture of suburbia. For her the nuclear family and the suburb are
increasingly synonymous, and the two genres functionally indistinguishable.
Nevertheless I think it is important to separate them, for in doing so a range of issues
that Spigel herself does not raise can be addressed. In the present context these include
above all the systemic nature of television’s suburbanness, and its particular embodiment
in the contemporary soap opera.
7
‘Well, it was about Meg Richardson, the widow who’d suddenly found herself in a
big house which she couldn’t afford to run, didn’t want to leave it and they built a
motorway through the land, and so she decided to capitalise on it, because at that
time motels were very new in this country, and the producer, being an Australian,
was very conscious of motels’ (Margaret French, production manager of 
Crossroads,
quoted in Hobson 1982,41). On the motel as a ‘transitional object’, see Morris
(1988).
8
Another problem with the Lévi-Straussian position is in the definition of the
boundaries of the system. Soap opera is by no means a clearly bounded system. Its
generic character is unstable and, at the margins, diffuse. It is constantly transforming
itself (as Lévi-Strauss would acknowledge) but it also shades into other forms of
television storytelling (on the limits of the notion of genre in television studies, see
Feuer, 1992).
9
There is much more to be said about soap opera specifically and the television
audience more generally in terms of gender. I will address these issues again in
Chapter 6.