2 REPRESENTATION OF SOCIAL GROUPS

 Bikers boys- according to Dick Hebdige, certain groups form sub cultures with specific identities that they signal through clothing and music codes. Here, the biker boys wear leathers, boots and tattoos. They also signal membership of their musical affiliations through references to heavy metal music: Ozzy Osbourne.

Austalian gap year student: We have noticed that Australians and New Zealanders are often depicted in media texts as having New World qualities of breeziness , humour, and irreverence for Old World conservative, stuffy, and traditional values. For example, characters like Crocodile Dundee and The Castlemaine XXX beer adverts contain comic representations of bold and breezy stereotypes. Our protagonist is a gap year student from Australia who has come to work in a UK restaurant and she is alternately exasperated and amused by the “Britishers” she finds.

Stereotype: Celebrity chef (left Heston Blumenthal) cutting edge molecular gastronomy, obsessed with inventing new recipes with scientific approach. High profile TV appearances. Our chef (right) is modelled on this stereotype.

We have chosen a comic stereotype relating to body image here: fat people are often stereotyped in a negative way as figures of fun; Dawn French, for example, is famous for drawing attention to her large appetite in comedy sitcoms such as The Vicar Of Dibley. 

Magazines and online news sites are crammed full of representations of celebrities: Their clothes, their escapades, their spending habits, their love lives and their holidays seem to have an inexhaustible fascination for readers. We depict celebrity stereotypes as being empty headed and obsessed with their body image.

This social stereotype is the posh social climber, like Penelope Keith in The Good Life.

We introduced them with wine being swirled in front of them as they are the kind of people who think of themselves as wine connoisseurs. This kind of customer likes to bandy about famous restaurants and hotels that they have dined in to show off. They are also the kind of people who follow trends in the press about the latest diet fads. Theyre likely to shop at waitrose and want to know all their food is ethically sourced and of the finest qualities. The recent horse meat scandal is likely to have appalled them and made them suspious of whatever they put into their mouths. At restaurants they are likely to talk very loudly and ghautily in an RP accent like Lead Better in The Good Life.