A Guide to Analysing your Interpretation of a TV Programme

Where and with whom you're watching

• Are you watching alone, with friends, flatmates or family?
• Are you watching at home, in digs, in the students' union, in a pub?
• Is this typical or untypical of your viewing?
• How might this affect the way you watch?

Why and how you're watching

• Why TV and not something else? What might have been the alternatives?
• For what purposes do you think you're watching (e.g. for information, to learn, to be entertained, to consider the pros and cons of an issue)? What needs could it be seen as gratifying? How does this compare with your general viewing?
• What features of the programme might you have paid particular attention to because of your current purposes? What details seemed particularly significant to you?
• Which of your interests, concerns, roles, purposes, needs, values, attitudes or moods seemed relevant to your interpretation of the programme?
• What recent events in your own life (if any) seemed related to the programme?
• What biases were you conscious of in the programme - how do they relate to your own biases?
• In what 'frame of mind' would you say you're watching this programme?
• Do you generally enjoy watching 'with full attention' or prefer chatting to co-viewers as you watch? What might such preferences depend on?
• Did you 'choose' to watch this programme or was it chosen for you? If you chose to watch it, why did you choose this programme?

What preceded, interrupted and followed the programme?

• Did you see any trailers for it? Did you read about it in a TV listings magazine or a newspaper? How was it introduced by the continuity announcer? What sort of title sequence was used? Were there 'credits' at the beginning?
• Was the programme interrupted by advertisements? Was it interrupted in any other way?
• Were there any 'credits' at the end? Were these interrupted by a continuity announcer? What followed the programme? Did you watch that too? Why?
• How did such factors affect the way you interpret the programme?

Genre conventions

• Within what genre does the programme fall? Is this easy or difficult to decide, and why? Would your friends agree with your assignment of the programme to that genre?
• How do you know what genre it belongs to? (Authorial style, narrative, setting, props, characters, dress codes, verbal codes?)
• What do you know about this genre?
• How does this knowledge help you to interpret this programme?
• What expectations did knowing the genre lead you to have of the programme? (Were they all met?)
• Is the programme part of a series/serial? How does it relate to earlier ones? How does knowing this help you to interpret the current programme?

Targetting and preferred interpretations

• What sort of viewers do you think the programme was aimed at (age, gender, economic status, social class, ethnicity)? What evidence can you find for this?
• To what extent do you think you were part of the intended audience? How might this have affected your interpretation?
• To what extent was the programme open to interpretation (in relation to what elements might others have differed from you in their interpretation and why)?
• Isolate a particular short segment and consider what the programme-makers may have regarded as the 'preferred interpretation' (what you were 'supposed to' think about a person, location or event).
• Were there any parts where you felt yourself differing from what you imagined to be the preferred interpretation? Why and how?
• How and why did your interpretation of people or events shift during the programme?

Structure

• How would you describe the overall 'shape' of the programme?
• What 'parts' did it seem to fall into? Was there a simple sequence?
• In what ways did you relate these parts to each other (did you, for instance, have to 'refer back' to earlier events or anticipate later ones).
• Which events did you find yourself predicting? If your predictions were justified, why do you think you were so accurate?
• Which events surprised you? Why?

Participants

• Did you find yourself 'drawn to' or alienated by any of the participants? Why?
• What kinds of inference do you think you made about the participants (e.g. character, motivation, likely actions), and based on what cues?
• What comparisons did you make between people in the programme?
• What judgements did you make about plausibility?
• How far and in what ways did you relate characters to yourself or your friends?

Issues

• What kind of themes seemed to run through the programme?
• Did the treatment of any issue shock or surprise you? Why?

Production and editing conventions

• Did you notice anything about how the programme was presented? How and why?
• Focus on a very short section (no more than a few minutes long at most), preferably using a video copy of the programme. Look closely at the camerawork (zooms, pans, tracking, crabbing, shot sizes, focus, framing etc.) - what sense do you make sense of these? What about lighting and colour? Try to notice where there are 'cuts' from one shot to another. Try to explain why each cut is there (e.g. changing time, changing scene, changing viewpoint, changing mood) - what does each cut signify for you?

How reporting your viewing may transform it

• What are the limitations of this attempt to describe your interpretation of the programme? In what ways might you have distorted your experience of watching TV?

Daniel Chandler, UWA
October 1996