Reality Television, Working Practices and Duties of Care

This project will be the first to develop a theorisation of care in the cultural industries by holistically considering the interrelations between production, participation and policy in the UK's reality television (RTV) sector.
RTV is a significant and highly controversial site of media production that has rapidly expanded over the last two decades with an increasing share of the UK's £1.48bn global TV export market. High profile concerns around mental health risks have led to changes to Ofcom's Broadcasting Code around improved welfare for participants, whilst broadcasters increasingly understand a need for the continued evolution of care practices across the sector. Most policy and industry initiatives have thus far focused on risk management around mental health concerns for individual participants, without any interrogation of the broader contexts of cultural labour and working practices.

This project will use a cultural industries approach (Hesmondhalgh 2019) to investigate how care is understood and experienced across reality television by asking four overarching research questions:
1. Production. How is care understood, mediated and practiced by different workers across reality television production?
2. Participation. How should the working experiences of participants inform our understanding of care in RTV?
3. Policy. How is care understood, inscribed and implemented in policy and industry decision-making?
4. Care. How can the analysis of care be incorporated into theorisations of cultural labour in the creative industries?

A large programme of qualitative empirical research across four work packages will include policy analysis, media tracking, and qualitative interviews with a diverse range of key stakeholders. The research will centre the previously overlooked experiences of production workers and non-professional participants alongside contemporary policy debates and public concerns around duties of care. The findings will be synthesized and analysed using a feminist theoretical model of care (Tronto 2013, Held 2006) to develop new insights into the interrelationships at work across RTV's media ecology in the UK. Our investigation into how care is mediated and practiced within cultural production will have wide application across academic scholarship and the creative industries.

The project will work with the co-operation of all the UK Public Service Broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Viacom/Channel 5 and Channel 4) and three key project partners. We will be partnering with BECTU, the media and entertainment workers' union, in order to understand how care is implemented in production, which will inform the creation of a report and training materials. We will be partnering with Equity, the trade union for creative practitioners, to listen to participants' voices, understand their needs, and to consider whether and how they can be formally recognised as cultural workers. This will lead to the production of a video for would-be participants which informs them of their rights and helps them to negotiate the complex terrain of RTV production. We will be partnering with the DCMS select committee to integrate findings from production, participation and policy, both to consider the current protections in place and to propose future policy recommendations. In order to generate a dialogue between our analysis of working practices and concerns around mental health, we will consult with the Chair of the British Psychological Society's Media Advisory Board (Prof John Oates) to understand how our findings can support developments around mental health protections, which will also inform our report to the DCMS select committee.
The empirical knowledge produced by this project has transformative potential for re-conceiving care in RTV production, whilst the new theoretical framework, derived from careful empirical analysis, will offer a far-reaching academic agenda for care in the creative industries more widely.