the this vulgar space, entertainment provides us with a period of relief from social aspiration,vulgarity of f 'en

 

The historical shift, from a society based on carnival to one based on entertainment, that can be related to 

Foucault's explanation of changing power structures within modem Europe. In seeking to be mainstream, and to be acceptable to a general, mass audience, entertainment - as disseminated by the "show business" industries - aims to appear daring while remaining unthreatening. 

A television programme of the 1980s is analysed in some depth to explore how this strategy works, and a particular aspect of note is that in attempting to appeal to all sections of a diverse audience, entertainment refuses to acknowledge this diversity, and aims to represent us as all the same underneath, with some tensions immanent in the text because of this. 

The thesis argues that modem light entertainment, as described here, a historically and culturally specific category.s to explore the development of a language around culture in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within an increasing differentiation of the cultural field allowing the consumption of particular cultural forms to confer and confirm cultivation on their consumers, entertainment aims to appeal universally to all of us. 

Thus, entertainment has an obvious classed nature, but refrains from marking its spectators off as working class (in contrast to high culture's capacity to mark its consumers as upwardly mobile or cultivated). Entertainment is traditionally understood in contrast to "art", a contrast carrying an implicitly recognised and accepted set of polarities. If culture is serious, worthwhile, lasting, demanding, creative and original, entertainment is trivial, valueless, ephemeral, easy, and formulaic. Within this construction, entertainment is essentially characterised by absence - it lacks the qualities that distinguish true culture. I argue that this polarity is not so much an external interpretation imposed on entertainment, as a strategy within entertainment itself. I refer to Bourdieu's account of the political functions of so-called "legitimate culture" in maintaining class distinction, and posit a parallel function within entertainment, which continually articulates this set of polarities, allowing entertainment texts to represent themselves as pleasurable in contrast to the hard work involved in engaging with high culture, and as universally appealing in contrast with the minority appeal and pretentiousness of "art". I explore a British film from the 1930s starring George Formby to demonstrate this point. I name this strategy within entertainment texts as vulgarity, defining this as a deliberate refusal to be respectable, and to place oneself outside of the field of culture. In setting up this vulgar space, entertainment provides us with a period of relief from social aspiration, within which we do not seek to demonstrate cultural knowledge or cultivation. This representation of itself as without artistic merit is essential to the working of entertainment, and the fluidity of the category is demonstrated by the many cultural texts which have shifted historically from the field of entertainment to that of art, and vice versa.