Using data from the 2008 Formula One motor racing World Championship, this thesis theorises live, televised sports events as discursively constructed "spectacles". The two key aims of the study are; (1) to contribute to our understanding of the organising principles and broadcast values in televisual representations of sports; and (2) to demonstrate how "spectacle‟ is created as a textual accomplishment. Data includes verbal commentaries, interviews, video footage, and onscreen graphics. The analysis is primarily informed by the notion of the „activity types‟ concept (Levinson, 1979), "recontextualisation‟ (Linell, 1998), and follows broadly the principles of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006; Machin, 2007). The broadcasts are shown to be constructed as a sports-magazine that consists of a variety of mediatised activities and the study examines the mediatised event in relation to the organising principles of these activities. The study also explores three intrinsic elements found in live televised broadcasts, namely "liveness‟, "domain‟ and "bimodality‟. These refer to the interplay between the „live‟ and "non-live‟ segments of the coverage; shifts across the "physical‟ and "mediatised‟ domains; and the relationship between the "visual‟ and "verbal‟ tracks respectively. Overall the thesis demonstrates how the sports-magazine format allows the programmes to introduce thematic diversity, while retaining coherence. Furthermore, the centrality of liveness is found to be problematic in the broadcasts due to live motor sport‟s potential to turn into tragedy, should a life-threatening or fatal crash occur. However, the analysis reveals that the broadcasters manage moments of great tension by foregrounding the notion of "safe-danger‟ throughout the programmes, and when an accident does take place; they use a number of reporting strategies to compensate for the lack of information during the live event.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:567544 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Evans, Claire Anne |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/44837/ |
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