Description
The Repair Shop (BBC One/Two, 2017-present) has been something of a surprise success for the BBC, regularly drawing six million viewers after moving from the afternoons to Wednesday evenings. The programme’s popularity can be attributed to how it reiterates traditional televisual qualities, such as intimacy, the ordinary, comfort and care. Yet its success also tells us something about the normative dynamics that underlie these qualities – in particular, in relation to able-bodiedness. This paper explores how The Repair Shop’s focus on repair and restoration reiterates what Tobin Siebers (2008) calls the ‘ideology of ability’. Each episode of the programme focuses on restoring the broken, on bringing objects ‘back to life’, on replacing parts and re-animating objects. In doing so it suggests that smooth, controlled movements and whole, working parts are valued over the broken, or the frozen, or the stuttered. Consequently, the state of ‘disrepair’ is presented as an abnormal, temporary state from which we desire to return. Such a foregrounding of able-bodiedness is furthered through the programme’s interest in skilled labour. Extending Alexia Smit’s work on ‘tele-affectivity’ (2013), I argue that the programme relies on what I call the kinaesthetics of craft - small, precise, and repetitive actions often framed in extreme close-up – for much of its affective, intimate address. This focus on skilled labour sets up a hierarchy between who can ‘fix’ and who (and what) must be ‘fixed’, one reiterated further in the fact that many of the participants suffer from terminal illnesses. Yet if The Repair Shop’s success lies in how it embodies traditional ideas of the ‘televisual’, then it might also tell us something about how such televisual qualities are structured by the ideology of ability. How might the reliability of repetition, or the smooth movement of flow, for example, reiterate the norms of ablebodiedness? My paper thus aims to extend work on disability and television studies beyond representation, to consider how properties of the medium itself might be entangled with the ideology of ability| Period | 27 Jun 2022 |
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| Event title | Critical Studies In Television Slow Conference : Outliers of Television Studies |
| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |