Cyprus television and global postmodernity

The expansion of television that swept across Europe in the1980s reached Cyprus in the 1990s. The first private radio station, Super, was established in 1990 and the first private television station, Logos, in 1994. Since then, sweeping changes have led from the monopoly of a single public channel, the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation, to a pluralism of seven national and seven local television channels, as well as to numerous regional and local radio stations. This, in turn produced a renewed interest in issues of regulation, which resulted in the establishment of the Cyprus Broadcasting Authority, as well as greater attention being paid to production practices, programme content, and audience readings and consumption. All of this occurred within a context of wider political, economic and social change in Cyprus.

After independence from Britain in 1960, Cyprus was ushered into a period of economic modernisation. Markides (1977:68) usefully characterises this change thus:
The transition from colonialism to independence left the major institutions of the island relatively intact. Cyprus remained a member of the British Commonwealth and most of its external trade was conducted with the former colonial metropolis. The entrepreneurial class, the specialists in imports primarily of consumer goods, thrived as the standard of living rose. There were virtually no barriers set up by the government for the control of imports. Luxury goods were in abundance. Though Cyprus was an agricultural society, one out of six Cypriots owned a vehicle.

In spite of this modernising process, internal forces of tradition, such as the church, traditional education, and even the Co-operative Movement, helped to preserve a sense of historical continuity and traditional culture in the Island. Nevertheless, modernisation and the continuing ‘secularisation’ of Cyprus through the influx of technology, motor vehicles and a growing mass media, contributed, according to Markides, to the ‘decline and debunking of cherished traditional values and ideologies’ (1977: 79). Key historical events have also enhanced a growing sense of change in Cyprus.

Firstly, following the struggle for National Liberation between 1955 and 1959, the ensuing London/Zurich Agreements effectively established an independent Cyprus. However, their terms failed to completely satisfy either the majority Greek-Cypriot or the much smaller Turkish-Cypriot communities. This was most noticeably expressed in serious inter-communal ‘incidents’ in 1963, which led to the Turkish-Cypriots withdrawing to the northern part of the Island. Finally the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, resulting in the partition of the Island, created new, stark realities of the cultural as well as territorial separation between the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities.

Yet, despite these historical ‘mishaps’, economic progress continued in the years after 1974, particularly in the ‘unoccupied’ south. ‘Financial progress,’ according to Theophanous (1995: 16) ‘concentrated mainly on tourism, the extension of the public sector, the construction industry, the export of agricultural and light industry products, initially to Arab countries (1974-84), and the gradual increase of services…’ Even though it cannot yet be classified as an advanced capitalist economy, nevertheless its emphasis on services, particularly tourism, has helped to foster some elements of a postmodernity in contemporary Cyprus. Further, a broadcasting pluralism, which has led to wider access to television programmes originating outside Cyprus, particularly from the USA and Greece, is providing viewers with an increasing range of globally diffuse socio-cultural representations which can be seen as relevant to the postmodern condition.

Postmodernism and contemporary Cyprus
This article focuses on one of the consistently most popular programmes on Cyprus television, To Kafenion (The Coffee Shop), to illustrate how popular television can be used to examine some of the tensions associated with the postmodern condition. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of theories of postmodernism, but it is appropriate to set out, briefly, those tenets that have guided our analysis.
Postmodernism highlights the inappropriateness of ideas of progress based on rationality and scientific objectivity, which take no account of cultural differences. It further suggests that it is no longer possible to distinguish the real from the copy, the natural from the artificial, so that we experience a world characterised by consumerism and packaged lifestyles, where cultural tradition collapses into pastiche and parody. Postmodernism challenges the relevance of master narratives, particularly their emphasis on unity, totality, systems, institutions and structure, and points, in contrast, to the importance of local knowledge, fragmentation, difference, otherness and agency, where the individual, bombarded with a multiplicity of fragmented signs and images, loses a sense of continuity between past, present and future. (Lyotard, 1984; Featherstone, 1995; Jameson 1991; Crook et al, 1992).

Postmodernism and television
The media, and television in particular, are frequently implicated in the condition of postmodernity. Bignell (1997: 161), suggests that ‘postmodernist thought claims that all “real meaning” is vanishing because experience and reality are now shaped or “simulated” by the discourses of the media.’ The blurring of the real and the copy is facilitated by the very reach of the communications technologies that produce and disseminate information and images. For Baudrillard (1983; 1993) we live in a culture of floating signs and images in which television is the world and all we can do is watch the endless flow of images, without recourse to moral judgements. As Ang (1996: 3) notes, ‘television itself has undergone massive postmodernisation, manifested in a complex range of developments, such as pluralisation, diversification, commercialization, commodification, internationalisation, decentralisation, throwing established paradigms of understanding of how it operates in culture and society into disarray.’

Baudrillard (1983,1993), goes further and suggests that television has led to the end of the social, in that social encounters become simulations with an ‘as if’ hyperreal quality. But, Featherstone (1995) reminds us that whilst the ’as if’ world is heightened by television’s ability to collapse time and space, where immediacy can destabilise reality, we should not presume that the postmodern experience of television is a semantic black hole in which either producer manipulation or resistant audiences hold sway. Both are still in play.

Consumer culture’s fragmented sign play is rendered even more complex by the introduction of signs and images drawn from other cultures. Postmodernism asserts that it has discovered a greater degree of cultural complexity than can be explained by modernity’s concern for unity, generality and synthesis. These complex combinations of difference, otherness and local diversity, point to the importance of global configurations to the postmodernism project, precisely because globalisation stimulates deglobalising reactions, a renewed interest in localisms, regionalisms and nationalisms (Featherstone 1995).

Television, consumption and postmodernity in Cyprus
International pluralism in the media, together with increasingly westernised patterns of consumption have been leading Cyprus towards a media postmodernity. Westernisation, with its social icons of consumer culture, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Levi Jeans, and the emphasis on the English language, has been an ongoing process in the Island for the last three or four decades. Media pluralism in Cyprus has further diversified an audience dispersed and traumatised by historical and political circumstances. Television in Cyprus, has become a complex and sophisticated medium of information and entertainment, both local and at the same time global, that fragmentises its audiences with an abundance of viewing opportunities. Eager viewers are presented at the same time with an imported western culture which coexists with the familiar representations of Greek and Greek-Cypriot culture, presented via the two primary languages of the country, Standard Modern Greek and the Cyprus dialect (Richards, 2000). There could be no sharper reflection of Ferguson’s point (1995: 197) that ‘the multiple discourses initiated by globalisation in the areas of economy, politics, society, ecology and culture, must take into consideration not only the rhetorics and parameters of discourse, but also the complex realities operating in the local and national frameworks of individual countries.’

Many of the fictional programmes on Cyprus television, both imported and locally produced, have become a basis for everyday discussion, as well as key self reference points, with the result that the reconstructed realities of television can assume more importance than ‘real life’. But Cyprus is still a country with a place-bound identity, resting on the motivational power of tradition. The commodification of tradition in Cyprus television can most clearly be seen in ‘glocal’ adaptations of American programming. A very important example of this is To Kafenion (The Coffee Shop), which began in 1997, is still running, has been successively broadcast on three different channels, and enjoys a consistently high position in audience ratings amongst all age-groups (Roussou, 2000).

The programme has retained its original production values, which closely resemble those of the American programme ‘Cheers’, and constitutes a very interesting example of a local production which transcends the very tradition it purports to encapsulate. At the same time it offers a platform of television representations which hover between the parameters of tradition, modernity and postmodernity on issues of ideology and mythology, a situation found in many countries where television has to relate the particular to the universal.

The programme has five main characters; the coffee-shop owner, an unemployed petty criminal, the son of a rich mother, a shady taxi-driver and a flighty hairdresser. The plots of the different episodes in the serial revolve around the relationships between these characters, their problems and their insecurities, as well as their eventual search for support and solidarity from each other, even though the viewer knows they are in various ways, flawed characters.

They are, at first sight, a strange lot. Takis Svistos the coffee-shop owner, wears a typical white apron, has protruding teeth, and a silly grin on his face for most of the time. He appears to be stupid and is anxious to comply with the wishes of the coffee shop clients Stavris, perhaps the most significant character, is unemployed and spends his time, morning and afternoon, in the coffee shop. He has no financial means, and resorts to swindling the other clients to meet his need for cash. He is cunning, pretends to know a lot about the world, far more than more than everybody else, and makes fun of and patronises all the other characters.
Mikis, the only character in a suit and tie, comes from a rich family, but is tied to his mother’s apron strings. Kokos, the taxi driver, uses corrupt English words and phrases that he has picked up on the job, and brags about his success with girls, particularly non-Cypriots and tourists. Kristia, is a neighbouring hairdresser, who appears to be an emancipated young woman, and who uses the coffee shop, which is unusual for women, to drink and interact with men and to share in their problems and their little conspiracies against each other.

The concept of The Coffee Shop is that of a simulacrum of the traditional Cyprus coffee shop, placed in an urban area of Nicosia. The decor in the television Kafenion is sparse, as in olden times, with just tables and straw chairs. There are two or three tables covered with check tablecloths, a traditional Cyprus cloth material used widely in coffee-shops, plus one table with a green table-cloth, traditionally used for gambling.

The sponsor of the programme is the Cyprus Laikon Kafekoption (Popular Coffee-Brewing Company) which has traditionally positioned itself close to working-class values and working class consumers. The term Laikon, in Greek, even though translated in English as ‘popular’ has the suggestion of ‘belonging to the people’.
The Kafenion forms an indoor mythical location where the different characters meet and where their stories unfold in parallel to each other, as though this were a domestic setting. In another reading, the Kafenion could be seen as a kind of inner circle pointing back to Masonic solidarity and brotherhood, with its own cohesion, affording the individual both an inner knowledge as well as a sense of fraternity, security and coherence, amidst the fragmentation and exile of contemporary life.

In this coffee shop culture there exists a mythical climate of equality, descending from the values of the traditional coffee shop, which took for granted that those within its confines were equal. The pictures on the walls in the Kafenion are used as conventional decoration that mix the old and the new, contributing both to the construction of a simulacrum with its own rules and norms of tradition and historical reality, as well as to western modernity. There are pictures of heroes from the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire in 1821,as well as of significant events for Greece in the second world war. There is also a framed piece of handicraft embroidery consisting of butterfly cocoons, more usual in home decoration than in public places. An old-style crystal radio set, that today exists almost as a museum piece in coffee-shops, serves to point back to the first use of radio sets in Cyprus in the 1950s. But there is also a Coca-Cola poster, placing the television coffee shop firmly in the modern, global age. These props, together with the otherwise unadorned decor, emphasise the idiomorphic, exclusive environment that redefines the social reality of the Cypriot Kafenion through the use of both mythical and traditional artefacts as well as symbols of contemporary consumption.

Tensions between tradition and change
The simple nature of the setting is enhanced by the use of very limited camera work and no external locations. But there are also conventional rituals. For example, the programme's signature tune is repeated halfway through each episode, as is a well known musical theme used by the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation, and the programme is ‘bracketed’ with the slogan ‘CyBC, 40 years of service’, all of which help to create an atmosphere of persisting values in a changing world. But tensions between tradition and change abound. The commercials before and during each episode depict a wide range of successful, happy people, drinking the programme sponsor’s brand of coffee. Yet the programme’s title song expresses despair and disillusionment about the way life has cheated the characters of success and fortune. That is why, as the song says, they are here in the coffee shop, looking for their future in the coffee-cup.

The opening shots of each episode emphasise this sense of failure. While the signature tune is being played, the entrance of the coffee shop is shown in a freeze-frame, with single shots of the five main characters being successively superimposed on the shot of the entrance. An open backgammon box with a moving dice, trying to settle into the box, is seen in the foreground. Semiotically the opening shots set the tone of a group of desperate people in a recontextualised version of the traditional Cyprus coffee shop.

The opening of each episode makes a powerful ideological point in relation to historical developments in Cyprus. Whilst in modernity the significance of the ‘people’ gained ascendance and modernity itself witnessed the rise of the coffee shop culture, which was characterised in Cyprus by the convergence of different social classes in the coffee shop, it is important to note that, even though the characters in To Kafeinon come from different social backgrounds, the coffee shop offers a kind of forum which provides only a superficial impression of social coherence. Syntactically, the plot consists of the interaction between these five people, but representations of them emphasise the weaker aspects of their characters, making their identities and relationships a metaphor of falling standards and values in Cyprus. This echoes the ’strain theory’ of ideology (Inglis, 1993: 79-80) which acknowledges that the world is a painful, contradictory and muddled place, and that people need to believe in something and have to make do as best they can with the bits and pieces of ideology which they find around them. The end result is that in the modern world most people live lives of patterned desperation.

This version of ‘the truth’, of value-systems and relationships has won over Cyprus audiences. The ideology the programme projects reflects a popular view in contemporary Cyprus, a powerful ideology of both despair and cunning, of apparent solidarity and makeshift kindness that can help people survive and adjust to a contradictory, transitional and shifting world. This is the world of the ‘inmates’ of To Kafeinon.

The postmodern characteristic of otherness, is a very distinctive feature in the relationships of this coffee shop community. Their behaviours, ideas, actions and interactions pivot around each other’s personalities and particular conditions. The lives and characters of these people are, on the surface, disconnected and their relationships are fragmentary, all of which is in perfect accord with the disjuncture and pastiche of postmodern television. Hysteria, a feature of postmodern psychism (Kellner, 1995: 233) is lurking in every human transaction between the characters of the Kafenion. However, the fragmented, disjointed and discontinuous mode of experience characteristic of postmodern television culture is partly negated by the ideological presence of Stavris, the narrator, a stable co-ordinator, a visionary, yet a swindler, who is, nevertheless, there for everyone on every painful occasion. He is the unemployed, lazy, easy-going character, killing time in the coffee shop, stealing from the others, a petty criminal who knows enough about the world, enough English, enough Italian (no one else in the programme speaks Italian), and enough about human relationships, to constitute a pivotal, salvaging, identity in this setting .He relates to all the other characters and, whilst he cunningly manipulates them, he is the fixed point in the swinging pendulum and, on a paradigmatic level, the author, storyteller, moderator and narrator.

Despite his apparent challenge to traditional notions of heroic good, Stavris can precisely embody tensions between the traditional and the new. For example, at one point, he reads the newspaper to the assembled crowd and simultaneously offers comment on a Cyprus football team's victory whilst also observing that ‘Arafat will take us to Jerusalem.’ These scenes point back to older times in historical Cyprus coffee-shops, when the priest or the village prelate, school-teacher, or learned man, being essentially the only literate person in the village, would read the newspaper aloud in the coffee shop for others to listen to. This simulacrum of a traditional social reality invokes the mythical ‘metonymic contact’ with others, in which storytellers, priests, wise men or elders are restored to cultural visibility and oral primacy.

Of course, in the case of Stavris, we have the representation of a personality with a doubtful moral code, who has stolen Mikis's watch to pay off his debt to Kokos. But on the other hand, he has enough wisdom and social skills to handle everybody else, affectionately and condescendingly, like an elder brother in a secret brotherhood of knights. But if people have to believe in something, it is not surprising that Stavris has become not just the steady rock of the Kafenion but also a popular hero among Cyprus television audiences, a market identity in a world of changing, transparent meanings. In fact Fiske’s observation (1995: 261) about the American serial Miami Vice, could have been written about Stavris in the Kafenion:
The boundaries are blurred between the good and the bad, and the power of the dominant to control both behaviour and meanings is called into question… It is a world of fragments whose pleasure lies in their fragmentation.

But whilst the identity of Stavris (or of any of the other Coffee shop characters) may sound contradictory in a postmodern version of the television image, which is all surface, lacking in depth, portraying a multiplicity of meanings, a flat, one-dimensional wasteland of superficial images, functioning as pure noise, without referent and meaning, it does actually makes perfect sense. For even in postmodernity, television can still assume some of the functions traditionally ascribed to myth and ritual, those of integrating individuals into the social order, celebrating dominant values, and offering models of thought and behaviour.

Conclusions
The idealisation of current values in contemporary Cyprus is obvious in To Kefenion. Production approaches to the programme have established, during the past four years, an ideology of survival in a world of contrasting attitudes and social realities, which is represented through the characters of the serial. The meanings produced from the relationships of its signifiers have constructed an arsenal of contemporary power discourses that place the viewer beyond modernism and the Enlightenment of reason. The contradictory and the illogical, characteristics of postmodernity, are strongly represented in the character relationships of the serial, cast in the contrasting mythology of the past and the present. Cyprus audiences have caught on to this spirit of the strange but otherwise charming combination of mythology and ideology, a ‘glocal’ simulacrum which points to their roots, but at the same time transcends them, a reminder of the shifting realities around them. The enduring popularity of the programme should surprise no one. To Kefenion illustrates how, in postmodern glocalisation, television can still be an instrument of cultural integration.

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Nayia Roussou Ph.D is an Associate Professor and Head of the Communications Department at Intercollege, Cyprus. She is also Consultant to the Cyprus Broadcasting Authority.

Michael Richards Ph.D is Professor of Media Studies at Southampton Institute U.K., and Professor and Chair of the Media Research Group, Department of Media and Communication, University of Central England U.K.