Analyzing production design and audience roles in celebrity chat shows, highlighting their aesthetic significance.
This paper analyses the spatial and aesthetic use of a live studio audience as an element of design in celebrity chat shows. It establishes an aesthetic framework of un-scripted television formats using Richard Levin’s 1961 book Television by Design , identifying abstraction and stylisation as fundamental to shaping the audience and performance spaces of contemporary chat show formats. With close analysis of Wogan (1983-1991) and The Graham Norton Show (2007-2026), the categories of space, the inclusion of a studio audience, their performative functions, and their live aesthetics are established as an integral element to the design of the show format in an era of fragmented, on-demand content.
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Geraint D’Arcy (2026) studied this question.
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