Dick and Dom in the Place/Space to Be: ‘Bogies’ as Situationist-Carnival
Authors: Richard, B. and Woodfall, A.
Editors: Noel, B.
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Place of Publication: Edinburgh
Abstract:Children’s television has often been at the centre of highly contested debates about what constitutes ‘childhood’. Indeed scholars (e.g. Postman, 1994) have suggested that television is due in part to having prematurely brought about the end of childhood. Others are more nuanced in their criticism of this “grandiose fatalism” (Buckingham, 2010) and conceive of children as active in their own mediated spaces.
This chapter examines the BBC children’s television show Dick and Dom in da Bungalow (2002 – 2006) and the way it fostered what could be seen as a radical situationist carnivalesque space - that allowed for a temporary rupture in order and structure. The show’s ‘zoo format’ combined live studio segments with pre-recorded stunts. It was this combination of near unpredictable live interactions with children, and the pre-recorded disruptions of often ‘adult’ formal spaces during the show’s segment ‘Bogies’ that is our focus. ‘Bogies’ followed the two presenters as they occupied ‘quiet’ spaces - where behaviour is shaped around adult behavioural norms - like museums, libraries, restaurants, theatres, yoga classes and even a university lecture theatre. The core premise of the disruption being that the presenters would take it in turn to ‘dare’ each other to shout ‘Bogies’ at ever increasing levels. Here the presenters can be said to be temporarily appropriating the place, and inverting normative relations and power structures.
The series was (and still is) quite radical television, and there were even calls in the UK parliament for the show to be taken off air. In this chapter, primarily drawing on the work of Bahktin and de Certeau, we will argue that ‘Bogies’ constituted a situationist carnivalesque moment, in which the ‘story’ on screen cuts across and resists formal structure, providing a counter to the “humourless seriousness of official culture” (Dentith, 2003), but nonetheless acts as a ‘safe’ and contained act of rebellion as this subversion “still requires a knowledge of the order of the world, which it inverts and…incorporates” (Hutcheon, 1989). A seemingly anarchic moment bringing to the surface tacit/concealed power relations - and potentially drawing others into the carnivalesque - but as the presenters leave the occupied ‘space’, and behaviour within it soon reverting back to its pre-rupture ‘place’ norms.
Indeed, we will further argue that debates about the appropriates of the content of Dick and Dom in da Bungalow, and the calls for the series to be axed, were more about a fear of childhood (see Hancock, 2009 & Renner, 2011) than any serious concerns about harm; the formal adult space of television itself auto-correcting – which in itself is carnivalesque. Finally, the series has been recently revived by Dick and Dom for a more ‘adult’ theatre show, presumably providing further instances of ‘safe’ rebellion for a now mature audience, who are nostalgic for ‘contained’ subversions of power structures.
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Richard Berger is Professor of Media & Education at Bournemouth University, UK. Early in his career, one of his lectures was disrupted by Dick and Dom, and has gained an ‘afterlife’ on Youtube.
Source: Manual