The Modern Interior

sphere. The American comedy programme I Love Lucy is just one example
among many of a 1950s American comedy set within a strikingly modernlooking
domestic environment. While room sets in department stores
encouraged a level of identification with their audience with the sole purpose
of stimulating consumption, the main role of televised interiors was,
rather, to offer their audiences a level of familiarity that would persuade
them to ‘consume’ the programmes on offer. Consuming the interior in
that sense was, therefore, more about television viewing figures than
buying a set of chairs. The increasingly popular activity of diy (Do-It-
Yourself) reached the television screen in the 1950s. At that time the
emphasis was firmly upon the role of the ‘handyman’ in the house – the
constructor of shelves and the installer of kitchen units.
By the early years of the twenty-first century however, in order to
retain and expand its audiences television has had to use subtler strategies.
The domestic interior, in which people are most ‘themselves’, and
which, for many people, represents one of their largest financial investments,
inevitably plays several important roles in that context. Firstly it
is the most frequently used setting for many different kinds of programmes.
Cooking programmes are often filmed in domestic kitchen
sets. More recently a range of ‘public’ interiors has begun to feature in
television programmes, sometimes taking on the central dramatic role.
The Office, a British comedy set in the workplace which has also been very
successful in the us, focuses on that space as one which, stereotypally,
facilitates certain kinds of social behaviour. Another British television
drama series of the early twenty-first century, Hotel Babylon, is based in
a glamorous, ultra-modern hotel, closely resembling those in the Schrager
chain. The role of social realism in television programmes has also meant
that many popular drama series are set in hospitals, prisons or police
stations, among other places, in an attempt to mirror ‘everyday life’ and
make the viewer feel part of the action. Other television programmes
focus on the interior as its main subject matter. They include ‘make-over’
programmes – most famously the British Changing Rooms, which has
already been discussed in the introduction to this book. That programme
is still enormously successful internationally, playing as it does on its
audience’s voyeuristic desire to enter other people’s lives and living
rooms. 2 It embraces a theatrical ‘anything goes stylistically’ approach to
the interior, which is defined, first and foremost, as an agent in identity
formation. It also grants a significant level of power to designers, one of
the key agents of change, as we have seen, in the development of the
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