This article is based on a small pilot project exploring the role, function, and meanings of second screens and companion apps for TV audiences that is contextualized by existing academic audience research. This is mapped alongside industry research and academic debate about second screens. The results illustrate some disjunction between industry expectations of usage and viewers’ everyday experiences. I argue that industries’ tendency to conflate “viewer” with “fan” indicates a less than nuanced understanding of the television/companion app audience. Further, the lean forward/lean back binary applied to digital media users and television audiences respectively points to a problematic not addressed in much industry literature, while the respondents for this research indicate a complex interplay between the pleasures of viewing that incorporates the social and the personal with the second screen and the TV text.

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briefly promoted). Richardson saw "the single bed system" as the solution to this problem (41). There were also worries-put forward by the proponents of "vital force" theory-that proximate sleeping bodies might emit damaging forces or electrical charges (45). Intergenerational sleeping was seen as particularly problematic. But co-sleeping in double beds could also be dangerous for married couples who lacked "natural affinity" (62). While "vital force" was associated with fringe medical ideas the idea was widely circulated in late Victorian culture. Hinds then moves to examine how the beds became associated with modern design in the early decades of the twentieth century. Here, Hinds convincingly traces the design history of twin beds-locating their appearance in the sale catalogues of the furniture manufacturer Heals from the 1890s. At this point "twin beds" became a recognized term, in both Britain and the United States. After the First World War, as tastemakers increasingly sought ways to consciously distance themselves from their Victorian forebears, twin beds became a useful symbol of modern living that could be adopted on a mass scale. The beds featured in schemes promoted by elite modernist designers, including Mackintosh and Le Corbusier, but they were also marketed by the British designer Betty Joel to much wider audiences who lived in smaller homes. A mark of their cultural significance is the fact that from the mid-1930s they were used to depict the marital bedroom in Hollywood films. Double beds were frowned on by British film censors, and controversy was stirred in 1947 by a film that would have shown twin beds too close together for the censors' comfort. The third part of the book deals with the relationship between twin beds and marital intimacy. Hinds argues that twin beds could recalibrate marriage-making it possible to live married life "together and apart" and creating "a new cultural inflection of the married couple" (133). Hinds convincingly demonstrates that considering how the beds could mediate marital behavior can help us understand how modern marriage worked. The use of the beds in promoting sexual continence is linked to Simon Szreter's theory of the emergence of a culture of abstinence from the late nineteenth century. The decline of the beds from the mid-twentieth century is also associated with the rise of romantic love, identified by Claire Langhamer (The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution, 2013). But Hinds is also careful to make it clear that the representation of twin beds was complex and understood in different ways. They could be seen as distancing-as in the film Brief Encounter where they symbolize the distance that has sprung by between the couple at the heart of the story. But the beds could also be a positive symbol of modern marriage. In E. M. Delafield's The Way Things Are (1927), the heroine, Laura, longs for an escape from her dull marriage-her yearnings are expressed through a desire to replace the marital double bed with hygienic modern twin...