This paper considers a little-remembered British television programme from 1973 entitled No Man’s Land. It argues that this one-off, six-part studio debate series is an important but largely forgotten text in the history of mediated... more
This paper considers a little-remembered British television programme from 1973 entitled No Man’s Land. It argues that this one-off, six-part studio debate series is an important but largely forgotten text in the history of mediated second wave feminism. No Man’s Land had a strongly socialist-feminist premise: it explicitly critiqued the subordinate position of women in society; it was presented by Juliet Mitchell, while key members of its production team were feminist women; and its studio audience was populated with prominent activists from the women’s liberation movement. Significantly, it was broadcast on ITV on Saturday evenings. In this paper, I explore print media reviews of the programme, in which its politicised mode of talk was conceived as a form of ‘nagging’, unwelcome on the small screen in the spatio-temporal context of the family home. I consider this in relation to what Paddy Scannell calls the “distinctive communicative ethos” of broadcast talk, whereby audiences must not be made to feel as though they are being “got at” in their homes. In this sense, television’s “sociability”, Scannell suggests, constitutes a form of talk that is “democratic”. The paper will present examples of the ‘unsociable’ and ‘nagging’ gendered talk of No Man’s Land, and will also use feminist linguistic theory, to rethink what kinds of talk we might count as being ‘democratic’ on television.
