"The audience has decided...": Children's Television Play as a Socio-Material Assemblage.

This article examines the play and peer interactions of Gitano (Spanish Roma) children aged 5 to 17 around the television reality show Gran Hermano (GH, the Spanish adaptation of Big Brother) during summer 2001 in a central Spanish city. Using a linguistic ethnographic dataset, the study analyzes how children creatively appropriated GH media scripts, re-signified their physical environment, and incorporated research technologies into their play, conceptualizing GH play as a socio-material assemblage that intertwines social interactions, material objects, media resources, and spatial settings. The children's enactments included mimetic reproduction of show routines (e.g., eviction ceremonies), hybridization with other media genres, and collaborative use of ethnographic recording devices as play props, illustrating emergent, multimodal, and more-than-human dimensions of play. The findings highlight children's active and inventive engagement with media and materiality in informal urban play spaces, offering a framework relevant to understanding contemporary child play as dynamic socio-material processes.