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Editing techniques used in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) in the UK undermine narratives of hardship and structural inequality in representations of the living places of welfare claimants. This research identifies the affects of a televisual syntax – or 'visual grammar' – of spatial stigma in FWT. Using original data generated in a study of Channel 5's documentary series On Benefits (2015–2019), we conduct a visual grammar analysis to argue that cutaway editing, which inserts camera shots of toilets, canine excrement, and fly-tipping into programmes, undermines potentially sympathetic representations of poverty communicated via narrator voiceovers, and/or verbal testimonies of participants. Our findings show that cutaway editing is a significant feature in the production of On Benefits and is oppositional to the articulated narrative. The research concludes that cutaway editing in FWT generates disgust towards the living places of benefits claimants, which is productive of a powerful visual grammar of spatial stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations of place and space in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) are under-researched, contributing to neglect of spatial stigma in austerity culture. In this article, we combine agnotology – the study of manufactured ignorance – with visual grammar methods to examine Channel 5's Britain's Benefit Blackspots (2017) to address why FWT is spatially significant. We argue that televisual representations of the abject 'welfare claimant' in Britain have a spatial dimension, evident in repeated camera shots of derelict, deindustrialised, litter-strewn outside spaces and large sofas, overflowing ashtrays and dusty corners inside homes. We conclude that FWT's representations serve two functions: first, they obscure the spatial inequalities inherent in austerity policies by reducing social problems to constructed social types and their places and ways of living and, second, they enable sets of socio-spatial assumptions that become unquestioned ways of reading and understanding disadvantaged and disadvantag ised spaces of residence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to the claim that there is a critical neglect of age and ageing across media and television studies. It does so by arguing an exploration of the insights from the fields of critical gerontology/Age Studies and Media Studies allows critical scrutiny of the intersection between populist stereotyping of age, the pedagogic function of the makeover culture, and the prevailing public policy discourses that place responsibility on individuals, notably women, to hold back their old age. This article extends the argument that the pedagogical function of the makeover is to train us into culturally inhabitable bodies, to claim that age shapes what corporeal and cultural dwellings are currently intelligible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of a purported shift from humiliation to the benign exemplified by the marked contrast between How to Look Good Naked and What Not to Wear, this article examines the cultural work performed by the 'space of the benign'. We identify three main mechanisms -- body appreciation, synthetic friendship and suspended sexuality -- which manipulate existing constructions of female friendship and homosexuality to produce the host as the 'gay best friend'. As such, the host sidesteps the heterosexual scopic economy while seeking to re-place women within it, and avoids the censure frequently directed at female presenters. At the same time, by coaxing women towards an acceptance of their body as is, How to Look Good Naked provides a 'feel-good' sense of empowerment while preserving individualistic framings of body problems and solutions. We conclude that the show rehabilitates women within the heteronormative scopic economy, and reinscribes them as neo-liberal consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw on 'new' class analysis to argue that mockery frames many cultural representations of class and move to consider how it operates within the processes of class distinction. Influenced by theories of disparagement humour, we explore how mockery creates spaces of enunciation, which serve, when inhabited by the middle class, particular articulations of distinction from the white, working class. From there we argue that these spaces, often presented as those of humour and fun, simultaneously generate for the middle class a certain distancing from those articulations. The plays of articulation and distancing, we suggest, allow a more palatable, morally sensitive form of distinction-work for the middle-class subject than can be offered by blunt expressions of disgust currently argued by some 'new' class theorising. We will claim that mockery offers a certain strategic orientation to class and to distinction work before finishing with a detailed reading of two Neds comic strips to illustrate what aspects of perceived white, working class lives are deemed appropriate for these functions of mockery. The Neds, are the latest comic-strip family launched by the publishers of children's comics The Beano and The Dandy, D C Thomson and Co Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]