In the early days of QVC, the wildly successful home-shopping TV channel, there were Jane, Mary Beth, and Pat. In time, they were joined by others, including David, Jill, and Rick. Today, they share the spotlight with such relative newcomers as Amy, Antonella, Carolyn, Courtney, Sandra, and Shawn.
If the names mentioned above don’t ring a bell, you can’t be among those who tune in regularly to see these hosts tout products available to order by phone or on the web. Some of these hosts have enjoyed careers that stretch back to the earliest years of the channel, which was established in 1986 before the Internet and high-definition TV. Thirty-three years later, QVC is still there, in the homes of viewers, selling them everything from shoes and steaks to baking dishes and underwear.
Home shopping has a reputation for pushing cheap, cheesy, or only marginally useful items, but QVC, the gold standard of this form of sales-as-entertainment, associates itself with brands of genuinely high quality, such as Le Creuset and Isaac Mizrahi. Celebrities, including Martha Stewart, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Lisa Rinna, turn up to promote their wares at the channel’s studio in the unlikely locale of West Chester, Pa.
For its most ardent followers, QVC is compelling not just for its products and intermittent star power. Celebrities come and go, but the many smiling hosts are draws in their own right. On home-shopping channels generally, conversations between callers and hosts are a comically reciprocal minuet, reflecting both the neediness of the caller to reach out to a semiapproachable, semipublic figure, and the neediness of the host, who must be polite and enthusiastic but also quick — after all, there are products waiting to be presented and quantities are getting limited in red.
To viewers used to the evening news or sitcoms, watching home shopping can be like entering “The Twilight Zone.” Blocks of airtime are often presented as discrete “shows,” with titles such as “Shoe Shopping with Jane” or “You’re Home with Jill.” With a stream of guests speaking about this or that product, and constant demonstrations of the products themselves, these programs could pass for a segment on, say, “Good Morning America.”
Perhaps surprisingly, though, home shopping can remind us that there is dignity in sales done well. The best home-shopping hosts are linked with that honorable American profession, the true-blue salesman. Not many QVC hosts have tested their ability to succeed in other areas, but David Venable, the impresario of “In the Kitchen with David“ has parlayed his folksy on-camera appeal into a sideline gig as a bestselling cookbook author.
Venable has something in common with the character of Ted in Whit Stillman’s 1994 film “Barcelona,” who extolled the virtues of honest salesmanship: “In true sales, you’re providing a real and constructive service, helping people make their lives more agreeable or their companies more efficient.”
Viewers have confidence in Venable, who, after tasting a dish that is filled with calories or is otherwise delicious, puts his hands in the air and spins around in a “happy dance.” Like other great salesmen, he persuades consumers to buy something by frankly displaying his own genuine belief in a product.
The bond between viewers and home-shopping hosts may be especially valuable in our digital age, in which Amazon sells products without any human intermediary and grocery stores have cut out sales, leaving customers to scan and bag their purchases without anyone to help them. Don’t most of us miss the nerdy bookseller and the friendly grocer? You’d be surprised how many people would miss Jane, Mary Beth, and Pat.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
