COURSEWORK PRIMARY TEXT: Institution

The institution behind "Made in Chelsea" is E4, a sister company of Channel 4. Other sister channels include: 4 Music, Film 4 and More 4.

As a bit of background, it was launched in January 2001, and it is a digital TV channel. The "E" stands for entertainment, which shows that the institution run their channel around the gratification of diversion, and pride themselves on the fact that they air entertaining programmes for veiwers across the UK to enjoy. The channel is mainly aimed at the 15-35 age group, which is quite a young audience. This is illustrated by the range of shows which they broadcast.

A lot of what they broadcast are American Imports such as the following: The Cleveland Show, Desperate Housewives, Smallville, 90210, The Big Bang Theory, One Tree Hill, and formerly Friends. Importing American shows means that they are wealthy enough to import, but perhaps they are not wealthy enough to fund the creation of such programmes theirselves. They do broadcast many British programmes too, which have proven to be very popular. They include: Made in Chelsea, The Inbetweeners, Misfits, Skins, and My Mad Fat Diary. Some US imports such as Ugly Betty are broadcast up to a week in advance of what they are on Channel Four, and they can pull in millions of viewers. The most successful broadcast to date was in October 2010, when an episode of the Inbetweeners pulled in over 3.7 million viewers.

E4 have a strong presence on Twitter and other social networking sites such as Facebook, and they also have an interactive website. Furthermore, the programmes which are broadcast on the channel are put onto 4OD, which is a catch up TV service online. All of these factors show that the institution is keeping up to date with the technological revolution, and they appreciate the fact that new and digital media is important to their target audience. Many of their programmes, especially Made in Chelsea, use hashtags throughout in order to increase their online presence. It may be argued that these factors lead to the dumbing down of the media, because E4 in particular encourage communication through the internet (many people would argue that communication face to face is much better, and would avoid this situation that we are in). However, perhaps E4 are just giving their audience what they want.

The logo of E4 can be seen above to the right. Dennotations include the colour purple, a chunky number four, and the letter E in the centre of the digit. The colour purple definitely has youthful connotations, and so suggests to the viewers that E4, as an institution, are youthful and entertaining. Many of the programmes which the channel broadcast back this first impression up, as they feature young people or school students. The Inbetweeners, for example, features a group of school boys- the audience (15 year olds plus) would be able to relate to this, and so they would gain the gratification of personal idenitifaction from this. Perhaps we can conclude that the ideaology of E4 is that it is important for viewers to be able to identify with the charcters they are watching. This would explain why we see the shows which we do.