Vamp
government legislation (see video recordings
acts, 1984, 2010). See audience: fragmenta-
tion of. See also topic guide under media:
technologies.
▶Sean Cubbitt, Timeshift: On Video Culture (Come-
dia/Routledge, 1992).
Video/DVD games Like so many examples of
popular culture, the video/DVD game has
incurred condemnation for being anti-social,
a threat to the minds and mentality (not to
mention the eyesight) of the young, who are seen
to be the main players, and loaded with harmful
features. However, games have also achieved
cultural status and have been claimed by some
critics as amounting to an important art form,
while ‘cult status’ is awarded to some of the
protagonists of such games.
A key trend in marketing has been the cross-
pollination between films and games and the
opportunity games-players have to read the
‘the novel of the game’. With the convergence of
digital technologies, games feature on the menus
of palmtop computers and mobile phones (from
2011 in 3D), though manufacturers have become
sensitive to the use of the word ‘games’, prefer-
ring to market their products as multimedia
entertainment centres.
Video nasties A market that developed in the
1980s of specially-made-for-video films of
a singularly nasty, brutal and sexist nature.
Court action in the UK in 1982 against several
of these fi lms led to their enforced withdrawal
from circulation, but, to the considerable
disgust of Mary Whitehouse and the National
Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association – among
many others – there was no order made for
their destruction. However, the Conservative
government brought in rigorous controls of
video nasties with the Video Recordings Act,
1984 (see next entry).
In 1994 there was dramatically renewed inter-
est in the possible eff ects of video nasties on
behaviour following the Jamie Bulger case, in
which two 11-year-old boys were convicted of
murdering the small boy they had abducted. Th e
judge in the trial, Mr Justice Morland, conjec-
tured that the boys may have been infl uenced by
seeing Child’s Play 3, whose plot paralleled, to a
degree, the real actions of the killers.
Th ough this connection was dismissed by many
in the TV and fi lm industry, there was support
from child psychologists, in particular from
Elizabeth Newson, Professor of Development
Psychology at the University of Nottingham, who
spoke of the need for special concern when chil-
dren – or indeed, adults – are repeatedly exposedappeal to the values of the target audience. See
culture; ideology; myth; news values;
vals typology.
Vamp Early word for sex-star in the movies. In
1914 producer William Fox (1879–1952) created
a star by going to the farthest extreme away from
screen-idol Mary Pickford, symbol of purity and
innocence, and imposing a parody of sensuality
and eroticism on Th eda Bara in the fi lm adapta-
tion of the Kipling poem, A Fool Th ere Was. Th e
word ‘vamp’ was used in the publicity for the
fi lm, whose fi nancial success helped Fox set up
his own studio, among the most important of the
1920s.
V-discs In 1943, during the Second World War
(1939–45), record companies and musicians
agreed to waive fees and contractual rights to a
series of very high-quality musical off erings to
the US forces. Such recordings, many of them
by giants of the jazz world such as Benny Good-
man, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, are
now prized by collectors.
Verbal devices in speech-making Max
Atkinson in his illuminating study of the speech-
making techniques of politicians and other
well-known contemporary orators, Our Masters’
Voices: The Language and Body Language of
Politics (Methuen, 1984), analyses various forms
of what the Shorter Oxford English Diction-
ary terms claptraps – linguistic or non-verbal
devices to catch applause. Particularly successful,
says the author, is the list of three, which stimu-
lates audience response, reinforces that stimulus
and then pushes it to the climax. Antithesis is
also an eff ective claptrap (‘I come to bury Caesar,
not to praise him’). Atkinson cautions the
would-be orator that these devices require skill,
timing and judgment to be eff ective, and that
claptrap ‘always involves the use of more than
one technique at a time’. See topic guide under
language/discourse/narrative.
Video Wikipedia defi nes video as ‘the technology
of electronically capturing, recording, process-
ing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a
sequence of still images representing scenes in
motion’. Cassette tape video dominated the late
1970s and 1980s until overtaken by the DVD (see
digital video disc).
For audiences, video recording equipment
made time-shift viewing possible, while video
cameras made fi lm-making a viable proposition
for all (see youtube). Video recording on tape
or on disc has benefi ted every aspect of public
communication, though confl ict over formats
has occurred in highly competitive markets,
and an intruder into free expression has been