Australian Television Culture

By Tom O'Regan

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 1993 Tom O'Regan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86373-527-8

Contents

Foreword,
Abbreviations,
Acknowledgements,
Contributors,
Glossary,
Introduction,
1 Australia's television culture,
2 High communications policy in Australia,
3 The rise and fall of entrepreneurial television, 1986–92,
4 Television's double face: Of imported and local programming,
5 Television and national culture,
6 National television in the new cultural order,
7 SBS-TV: Symbolic politics and multicultural policy in television provision (with Dona Kolar-Panov),
8 SBS-TV: A television service (with Dona Kolar-Panov),
9 An Aboriginal television culture: Issues, strategies, politics (with Philip Batty),
Endnotes,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Australia's television culture

On many counts Australian television's characteristic form can scarcely be claimed as its own. By the time television was introduced in 1956 to Sydney and Melbourne, its form had become stabilised as a free, governmentally regulated, broadcast service for a well-defined geographic area. The US had pioneered commercial television, and the British established public service and later mixed broadcasting environments (with the commercial ITV and the BBC). US and British programming models were on hand to instruct Australian program production and have continued to do so to this day. US and British programs also dominated that half of Australian television schedules taken up with imports. Given the minimal Australian contribution to television drama in the 1950s, to feature films until the 1970s feature revival, and to limited episode television drama until the mini-series boom of the 1980s (production of which has greatly declined since), these imports tended to define particular program categories. In the process they have become integral features of the Australian television landscape. Contemporary innovations such as indigenous television were first developed in Canada (Barker 1984; Brisebois 1990). Australian television audiences, in terms of their viewing habits and uptake of television are not markedly different from those in the US and Britain. They tune in and out of programs, advertisements and limited episode serials in similar ways to UK and US audiences (Barwise & Ehrenberg 1988, pp 5–7) with the percentage of Australian households with the VCR roughly matching US, UK and Canadian figures.

But if television services around the world share many technological and distribution features, these services still need to be tailored to the environmental, social, commercial, cultural and political conditions of the country in question. Television policy, regulation, programs, broadcasting, scheduling, criticism and buying take distinctive national routes (see chapters 2 and 3). The general transnational form of television represented by the US and the UK became indigenised in Australia. If this ensured there would always be close family resemblances between Australian and US and UK television, it also made Australian television subtly and distinctively different.

To understand Australian television's distinctiveness it will be necessary to look to the use made of the same television technologies, the nature of the public and commercial broadcasting mix, the local trajectories of domestic and imported programming (see chapter 4), the relation between television and national culture (chapters 5 and 6), the nature and direction of local television criticism, and of the exhibition and distribution networks for television (its market settings, and its regulations controlling television's introduction, viewing area, number of licences, and new television services).

Australia's national broadcasters (ABC and SBS) and its commercial stations are different from their British and US counterparts. Australian television indigenised imported programming concepts, often taking them some distance from their US or British original. It developed its own drama concepts with reference to Australian cultural forms and adjacent US and British programming. Audiences customised and broadcasters framed the imported programming in an Australian informational and cultural context. Similar sorts of television regulation in Australia and the US led to different outcomes. Television technologies — like videotape and satellites — were used to different ends. By the same token multicultural and indigenous television evolved their own shapes in SBS-TV (see chapters 7 and 8) and Aboriginal television initiatives (see chapter 9).

Given Australia's poly-ethnic society, the geographic dispersal of television markets, and the different television environments across the country, it is important to allow for the internal diversity of the Australian experience of television. Television viewing was different in regional Australia to the metropolitan centres (until 1990–91 most of regional Australia — making up some 30 per cent of the viewing audience — had only one commercial television station and the ABC). It was also different for ethnic groups at some cultural distance from mainstream Australian society (chapters 7 and 8). This is shown for instance, in that regional Australia and immigrant groups had a higher uptake of the VCR during the first half of the 1980s than did the rest of the Australian population (Connor Report 1985, p 405). Suchcultural disparities led in the 1980s to regional television equalisation and the 'minorities initiatives' of SBS-TV and Aboriginal television.

COMPARING TELEVISION CULTURES

Australian television should be regarded as distinct from — not worse or better than — UK and US television. US and Australian commercial television regulations governing ownership and control have mostly borne a distinct family resemblance to each other. Each prohibited ownership above a stipulated number of television station licences until the mid-1980s. In Australia the limit was two stations, in the US a limit of five VHF stations and seven stations overall. Both had localism doctrines encouraging local ownership, programming and control of television stations. Their regulation initially permitted cross-media ownership of radio, press and television franchises in the one service area and prohibited the ownership of more than one television station in a given market. Subsequently, both regulated against cross-ownership; the US in 1970, Australia in 1986. As part of a deregulationist agenda both moved after 1985 to clear up the glaring anomalies created by the limitation on station ownership rule — which, in the Australian case, saw owning Townsville and Cairns licences treated as equivalent to owning Sydney and Melbourne licences. The US raised the number of station licences permitted to twelve and set a ceiling on the audience share any one group could have at 25 per cent of the nation's population (Head & Sterling 1990, p 452); Australia adopted an audience share of 60 per cent of the nation's population, scrapped station ownership limitations expressed in numbers of stations, and simultaneously introduced cross-media ownership rules.

Despite these similarities the outcome on the ground was different. Because US networks pioneered television services they retained the control over the television service they had exercised in radio (Barnouw 1975, pp 22–96). Yet...