Matt Hancock, the Conservative government's Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in the United Kingdom, has just announced that the critical care workers during Covid-19 are to be issued with a blue badge. This is a 'badge of honour' to mark their commitment to the nation during this pandemic and recognise that they put their lives at risk working at the frontline of the outbreak. Yes, a blue badge. This comes after weeks of national displays of gratitude that began with support for the National Health Service (NHS) and then extended to carers. 'Clap for carers' sees neighbours stand on their doorsteps every Thursday at 8 pm, banging pots and pans, sometimes accompanied by supportive police sirens and flashing lights, to show our united public affection for those saving our lives right now during the coronavirus pandemic. During the crisis, the United Kingdom is showing its appreciation in highly visible ways: the nation's windows are adorned with children's pictures of rainbows; buildings are lit up in the blue of the NHS; murals of masked nurses as heroes are springing up on the side of buildings; farmers are ploughing NHS signs into their fields; and some people have even put their Christmas lights back up. Reflecting this surge of 'caring' nationalism, even Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister (who contracted Covid-19 after displays of macho bravado, which included boasting about shaking hands with Covid patients) stated on his hospital release that the NHS was 'powered by love'. How 'caring' and sentimental this all seems right now.This affective mood generated through the valorisation of our care staff may indeed be heart-warming, especially as a salutary response to our very real fears.

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Drawing on recent research from a project which included both textual and audience research, this paper will explore the involvement of women viewers with 'reality' TV as 'circuits of value'. These relationships cannot be adequately described as deconstructions of representations as in a text-reader framework of media theory. Rather, we examine these relationships as an extended social realm, whereby the immanent structure of reality television generates emotional connections to the labouring undertaken by participants on the programmes. 'Reality' television develops different traditions of women's genres from melodrama, magazines to lifestyle television, it drawing attention to those who need transformation. By promoting different forms of women's emotional, appearance and domestic labour, it parallels broader political shifts to an 'affective economy'. Rather than these texts producing wholly divisive moral reactions in viewers, we noticed how our audience participants assessed the forms of labour performed through their different classed resources, made judgements through pursuing connections with their own lives, and ultimately tended to value care over condemnation.

Audience studies, as they have been traditionally associated with cultural studies, have recognized relations of power at each end of the communication process, privileging the framework of ‘text-reader’ relations. This article offers an alternative method of reception analysis which seeks to overcome text/reader/context distinctions and place the communicative ‘act’ itself at the centre. It argues that broadcasting needs to be understood within the terms of communication per se with specific tools designed for that dedicated purpose. A model for reception analysis is offered which captures the specifically communicative relationship between daytime talk programmes and viewers by using a ‘text-in-action’ approach. The findings illuminate the viewing experiences as pragmatically negotiated discursive encounters, establishing the possibility of a ‘mediated conversational floor’.

One of the most striking challenges encountered during the empirical stages of our audience research project, `Making Class and the Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios' (funded as part of the ESRC's Identities and Social Action programme), stemmed from how the different discursive resources held by our research participants impacted upon the kind of data collected. We argue that social class is reconfigured in each research encounter, not only through the adoption of moral positions in relation to `reality' television as we might expect, but also through the forms of authority available for participants. Different methods enabled the display of dissimilar relationships to television: reflexive telling, immanent positioning and affective responses all gave distinct variations of moral authority. Therefore, understanding the form as well as the content of our participants' responses is crucial to interpreting our data. These methodological observations underpin our earlier theoretical critique of the `turn' to subjectivity in social theory (Wood and Skeggs, 2004), where we suggest that the performance of the self is an activity that reproduces the social distinctions that theorists claim are in demise .