1st Edition

Fields in Vision Television Sport and Cultural Transformation

By Garry Whannel Copyright 1992
    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    Fields in Vision offers a comprehensive and analytical study of the international phenomenon of television sports coverage. Garry Whannel considers the historical development of sport on television, the growth of sponsorship and the way that television and sponsorship have re-shaped sport in the context of the enterprise culture.
    Drawing on archival research, Whannel first charts the development of the BBC Outside Broadcast department, and the growing battle for dominance between BBC and ITV, showing how sponsorship and the rising power of sports agents began to transform sport - not only in the UK but across the world - in the 1960s. He goes on to examine the implications of this vast and escalating global network during the 1980s by analysing the central role that stars and narratives began to play in television sport, presenting case studies of major contests such as Coe versus Ovett and Decker versus Budd. His study also takes into account one of the more indirect, but no less significant results of international televised sport - the rise of popular fitness chic and the American monopoly of the workout boom of the 1980s.
    Fields in Vision explains the development of television sport by linking its economic transformation with the cultural forms through which it is represented, offering a study encompassing not simply the sports world, but our relationship with television and the media industries as a whole.

    Chapter 1 Sport, television and culture; Part I Institutions, practices and economic relations; Chapter 2 National events and the authority of the BBC; Chapter 3 Production practices and professional ideologies; Chapter 4 BBC v. ITV competition; Chapter 5 Made for television; Part 2 Sport on television; Chapter 6 Analysing television sport; Chapter 7 Assemblage and framing; Chapter 8 Stars, narratives and ideologies; Part 3 Cultural transformations; Chapter 9 The case of athletics; Chapter 10 The road to globalisation; Chapter 11 Field of representations; Chapter 12 Audiences and pleasures; Chapter 13 Final thoughts;

    Biography

    Garry Whannel is a Senior Lecturer in Sports Studies at Roehampton Institute.