Life Swap: Celebrity Expert as Lifestyle Advisor

The British National TV awards of 2005 were significant for their legitimation of the celebrity expert as firmly embedded within television culture. Voted for by the viewing public, the emergence of this category not only demonstrates the proliferation and popularity of such figures across the daytime and evening schedule but also allows for the problematisation of their role within contemporary culture. This chapter seeks to explore both how and why this role emerged and the mixed outcomes of the promotion of such expertise. Experts regularly mediate between many aspects of the public world of the market and the private construction of self and home, but is the eventual outcome always that which the terms of the genre intend? Turning to David Chaney’s argument (1996), access to lifestyles, an integral feature of late modernity, are made available through vast communication networks which produce images that make styles and experiences familiar on an unprecedented scale. It is within this media environment that the ‘celebrity expert’ emerges: “eminent professionals in their field whose talents have been harnessed by television in popular entertainment and lifestyle programmes” (Turberville, 2005).