50 Years of Television in Australia

by Nick Place

  Consumers are being asked to fork out between $700 and $1500 for a standard-definition set-top box decoder (STB), the cheapest way to go digital. A high-definition STB will be pushing $1500.

  And despite ‘built-in,’ standard-definition sets being around the $5000 mark, integrated high definition sets are likely to cost close to $8000, and though neither are actually available to purchase yet, consumers are being told that digital is the only way to go. Channel 10’s digital TV website, for example, says that if you buy another analog set it will be outdated almost immediately. But television importer Alex Encel told The Guide that wasn’t true, pointing to Britain where 99 per cent of new sets sold two years after the arrival of digital TV are still analog.

  When the numbers don’t add up

  March: Since having taken over conducting Australia’s TV audience surveys on 1 January, the data being supplied by ATR/OzTam system has stunned the industry. The previous Nielsen system has continued to operate, and the marked difference between the results of the two systems has industry observers, media buyers and network executives dumbfounded.

  Each system used similarly rigorous selection processes to choose the homes they included, and similar technology to record and collect daily data, yet Seven was suddenly beating Nine in key timeslots and SBS was awarded a much larger slice of the market.

  Some hit shows were no longer pulling the viewers they’d thought, while the volatility of figures derived from the new system suggested audiences for popular imports like E.R. were bouncing around by 100,000 from one quarter hour to the next.

  What was that old line about lies, damned lies and statistics?

  ON DEBUT

  > McLeod’s Daughters – family drama set on a cattle station in South Australia

  > The Saddle Club – children’s horse-themed drama series

  > The Academy – ABC documentary following defence force recruits through the academy

  > Long Way to the Top – the history of Australian rock

  > Always Greener – lighthearted ‘how the other half lives’ drama of a bunch of city and country dwellers (below)

  > The Big Arvo – afternoon successor to the kid-centric The Big Breakfast

  > Room for Improvement – home renovation program: think Ground Force; think indoors

  > Chains of Love – a person is attached by chains to four members of the opposite sex

  > Sit Down, Shut Up – sitcom about staff at a secondary college

  > Corridors of Power – a lighthearted look at how two MPs jostle their way to career advancement

  > Bush Mechanics – young Aboriginal men show how to repair bung cars

  > Love is a Four-Letter Word – a bunch of 20-somethings portray life around their inner-Sydney pub

  > Cybergirl – children’s drama about a futuristic female whose superpowers help solve big crises

  > Sue McIntosh Presents – chat program

  > Life Support – comedy highlighting the inanity of lifestyle programs

  > Aftershock – science series hosted by Richard Fidler

  > Dimensions – nightly program on people, health, media and motoring

  > Australian Talks – George Negus chairs live topical debates

  9/11 news marathon

  September: The devastating events that unfolded in New York on 11 September shook us on a global scale, and television’s response reflected the enormity of the tragedy.

  News reports of the terrorist attack monopolised TV broadcasts for two days and nights, from just minutes after the first plane had struck the World Trade Center’s north tower at 10.45 pm.

  Ten’s Sandra Sully was the first to break the news on Australian TV at about 10.50 pm, crossing to CNN’s vision of the World Trade Center on fire, and by about 11.30 pm the three commercial networks had launched continuous coverage.

  With John Howard visiting Washington, and Lleyton Hewitt having only days before he won the US Open at Flushing Meadows, New York, each of Australia’s five networks had correspondents in both America’s capital and the Big Apple.

  While events like this make things like ratings seem trivial, Nine clearly pulled the majority audience as the disaster unfolded. Drawing on feeds from American news networks ABC and CBS, Nine drew 623,300 viewers, Ten (CNN feed) attracted 412,000, Seven (NBC) 359,700, ABC (CNN) 261,900 and SBS (BBC World) 55,000.

  Green Guide critic Ross Warneke praised Australian television network’s presentation of events, describing it as ‘less hysterical, less clichéd and more focused on the facts rather than speculation’ than the American equivalent. He was also impressed by the decision made early on – both here and in the States – not to replay the footage of people leaping to their deaths from the towers. Once was well and truly enough.

  Some bounce in the old roo yet

  August: Some 34 years after Skippy first bounded onto our TV sets, the world’s most heroic marsupial is back, with a little help from modern technology. All 91 episodes of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo have been digitally remastered from the original 16 mm negative being held at the National Film and Sound Archive, and have been sold to broadcasters in France and Norway by Southern Star Sales, which holds the international rights. Produced from 1967 to 1969, the series has now been bought by 80 countries.

  ‘Tch tch, tch tch tch tch,’ Skippy told The Guide.

  All Aussie success

  August: The latest offering from Working Dog, the team behind Frontline and The Panel, is making its presence felt on Sunday nights. All Aussie Adventures introduces us to the well-intentioned but essentially inept outback adventurer Russell Coight (Glenn Robbins), who bumbles his way through a mishmash of clichés in the Aussie bush.

  The program smacks of The Comedy Company of old, in which Robbins played Uncle Arthur, and which dragged audiences away from 60 minutes for two years in the late 1980s.

  Last week, AAA pulled 1.62 million viewers in the mainland capitals (an increase from 1.41 million when it debuted) while 60 Minutes attracted 1.81 million. AAA’s success, especially with viewers aged 16 to 39, has Ten considering scheduling a regular local comedy show on Sunday nights once the series is finished.

  The Secret to success

  July: Ten’s new series may be about the lives and loves in an apartment block à la Number 96, but rather than sex and scandal, The Secret Life Of Us’ producers insist their show is built on something far more interesting: moral ambiguity. It’s a character-driven series, starring accomplished film actor Claudia Karvan as doctor Alex, Samuel Johnson as writer Evan and Deborah Mailman as the effervescent Kelly.

  ‘What we were trying to avoid was what you could almost call the television of the last century: blokey cops, doctors and lawyers, a plot-driven show with superficial characters,’ one of the show’s two writers Christopher Lee explained to The Guide.

  ‘On Secret Life there’s no plot as such. There’s just the depth of the characters and the questions that we ask them, the problems that we put in front of them.’

  It’s an approach that’s been enthusiastically received, and a financing deal with Channel 4 in Britain means the series starts on TV here in the uncommon position of being in the black.

  And Media Watch is … where?

  It looks like Media Watch won’t be returning to our screens this year – but nobody at the ABC seems too keen to tell the viewers.

  The contract of host Paul Barry was not renewed at the end of last year, and there have been claims that the decision was driven by the anger of ABC management (read Jonathan Shier) over an end-of-year interview he did with chairman Donald Macdonald.

  Now it looks like the program has also been axed, though there has been no official announcement yet.

  MEMORIES

  > The first episode of Always Greener is the highest-rating Australian drama debut ever.

  > Six years after it premiered around Australia, the multi-award-winning ABC mini-series Blue Murder is finally allowed to air in New South Wales and Canberra.


  > David Stratton notches up 20 years of hosting of movies on SBS.

  > ABC announces the approaching launch of its two new digital channels ABC Kids and FLY.

  > After the success of Bardot, Popstars returns for a second season and spawns Scandal’us.

  > Interactive TV is trialled in Orange, allowing viewers to order pizza without having to get up off the couch.

  > Shaun Micallef hosts the Logies for the first time and delivers some great one-liners.

  > Eric Bana leaves ABC drama Something in the Air to star in Hollywood blockbuster Black Hawk Down.

  > Renaissance TV, programming that targets the over-55s, arrives to fill in the previously empty daytime timeslot of Melbourne’s Channel 31.

  > The Ten switchboard receives 240 complaints after American comedian Scott Capurro presented a three-minute ‘comedy’ routine on Rove Live that included material on paedophilia and suggested Christ was a gay man. Executive producer Craig Campbell resigns in the fallout.

  > Nine’s weekend current affairs flagship Sunday turns 20, with Jim Waley and Helen Dalley continuing to impress.

  > TV and music legend Graeme ‘Shirley’ Strachan dies tragically in a helicopter accident.

  > Pizza breaks into top 100 rated shows, making it the most successful locally produced SBS drama.

  > Six-part mini-series Changi, written by John Doyle, makes a much-hyped appearance on the ABC.

  > Gold Logie: Georgie Parker

  > Hall of Fame: Ruth Cracknell

  COOKING SHOWS

  It doesn’t sound like the most gripping television – some cook wrestling an egg or a rack of lamb. But a modern phenomenon of the small screen is the cooking show. If you can make something more exotic than toast, and crack jokes while you’re doing it, then you could be the rock star of the new millennium – the celebrity chef.

  Here’s one we prepared earlier

  Who really runs to the kitchen after their favourite cooking show? For most of us, TV cooking is a departure from our usual fare and a chance to ooh and aah at recipes we’d never dream up alone. But let’s be honest, while these shows intrigue, they rarely shift us from the couch. The proof of their enduring presence, however, is in the eating of the pudding.

  Initially, Australian cooking shows found their audience in early women’s programs such as Your Home and Women’s World. Later they became regular segments of daytime or late morning TV. Margaret Fulton, Gabriel Gaté and Iain Hewitson all found niches at Midday with Mike Walsh, Ray Martin or Kerri-Anne. Fulton, in particular, became something of a superchef for Australian audiences. Attributed with ‘teaching the nation how to cook’, she brought ‘magic’ to everyday meals and superseded the standard chops, peas and a dollop of mash.

  Practicality drove the popularity of these early shows. The recipes were uncomplicated, the methods were simple to follow and the ingredients were readily available. Fast forward a few decades and all that had changed. Food had become an event, chefs were superstars and ingredients were sourced from unlikely places like Morocco, France or Vietnam. When superchef Jacques Reymond deconstructed some of his dishes in Secret Recipes, he made Margaret Fulton’s straightforward style of cooking look just a little tame by comparison.

  Australian cooking shows also have a fine tradition of getting out of the kitchen and roaming the countryside. From 1968, Graham Kerr on The Galloping Gourmet pioneered the ‘food with scenery’ format by whipping up mouth-watering titbits while simultaneously gushing over the backdrop. Later, the exuberant Peter ‘Where’s the cheese?’ Russell Clarke’s Come and Get It followed suit. Stefano de Pieri cooked up a storm with produce from the Riverina on Gondola on the Murray and Iain Hewitson fronted the aptly titled Huey’s Cooking Adventures.

  The sometimes controversial, always camp Bernard King was a contemporary of Margaret Fulton, who quickly outgrew his apron and became a larger ‘personality’. In many ways he was a prototype for superstar chefs like Jamie Oliver and the voluptuous Nigella Lawson (although on a completely different scale). King stepped out of the kitchen when he became the ‘evil’ judge on talent show Pot of Gold. Meanwhile, his studio-bound cooking show, King’s Kitchen, was a ratings winner and King would go on to become a regular guest on many daytime variety shows, with ideas for a spectacular sponge or the latest marinade. Later, Geoff Jansz’s What’s Cooking? and Ian Parmenter’s Consuming Passions would also prove that cooking in the TV studio was no impediment to attracting viewers.

  Britain’s Jamie and Nigella played their part in shifting food from the domain of housewives to the kitchens of funky young things. Following up, Ben O’Donoghue and Curtis Stone toured Australia with their surfboards on Surfing the Menu, targeted squarely at Generation X, and Jason Roberts appealed to the fashion conscious on Fresh.

  Ever since Fulton first sliced and diced for the small screen, Australian TV has mirrored the increasingly outward-looking nature of Australian society and embraced food from other cultures. Elizabeth Chong’s Tiny Delights, Dorinda Hafner’s A Taste of … and Kylie Kwong’s Heart and Soul series have introduced us to new cuisines or built on our knowledge of, say, Chinese food, while also offering thoughts on the cultures from which they came.

  Along these lines, cooking shows have been merged with other formats. Food TV is often dressed up as a travelogue – SBS’s superb Food Lovers’ Guide to Australia – or a documentary – Antonio Carluccio’s Italian Feast or Madhur Jaffrey’s A Taste of India. The networks’ latest attempt to garner ratings is to disguise recipe television as a game show. Taking a cue from Japan’s unlikely hit, Iron Chef, Aussie audiences have been subjected to high-pressure cook-offs such as Beat the Chef, Ready Steady Cook and The Surprise Chef with Aristos Papandroulakis.

  As television reached its 50th birthday, many food shows were being tailored for the time-poor. Focus has shifted from the simple, slow-baked meals of our past to lean, quick-fix fare. In some ways, this could be seen as a return to those earliest lessons Margaret Fulton delivered to our lounge rooms, even if the fashions, the designer cookware and enviable locations are perfectly in keeping with the ‘entertainment’ we now demand of food on television.

  TV dinners: The past is a foreign cuisine

  In 1959, TV Week was teaching us to cook sausage and bacon puffs. Simply wrap your cocktail franks in bacon, dip into batter, and plunge into a pan of hot fat. Don’t forget the cheese fritters – and there’s barely a calorie in them. First spread thinly sliced cheese with mustard and join in pairs. Dip into batter and deep fry in smoking fat until puffy and golden. Sprinkle with garlic salt and parsley. The Scandinavian egg salad, combining eggs with tomato sauce, mayo and sherry, also got hearts racing.

  By 2005, times had changed, and so had our menus. Huey was teaching us to cook Pla Hoi Shenn (or raw scallop salad), while young Curtis Stone and Ben O’Donoghue were showing us how to roast guinea fowl with goats cheese, lemon and rosemary. Kylie Kwong was teaching us to cook with bamboo and Japanese eggplants, and Stefano de Pieri had made a dish like ravioli with quail filling look as easy a dropping a piece of cheese into a pot of hot, smoking fat.

  2002

  The laughs are on the ABC this year, and there is also a changing of the guard in AFL coverage. A local drama makes big strides overseas, and we wave Hendo a fond goodbye. And wait; is that the bell tolling for reality TV?

  Drovers Run breeds runaway success

  April: Nine’s popular drama McLeod’s Daughters continues to go from strength to strength, having been launched recently in Asia.

  The series began as Nine’s highest-rating telemovie of all time in May 1996, and was in development and production for several years before debuting in August 2001.

  McLeod’s Daughters represents a couple of firsts for Australian TV – it’s the first Australian drama series being shot on a wide-screen high-definition digital TV format, and the first prime-time drama series to be filmed entirely in South Australia, predominantly on a heritage estate purchased by the Nine Network in
1999.

  The series has introduced us to Tess McLeod (Bridie Carter), who returned to her family’s property, Drovers Run, after the death of her father. Her half sister Claire (Lisa Chappell) was less than thrilled about Tess’s reappearance, and the two women struggled to adjust to each other and keep the farm running.

  The rest of the cast is a mix of new faces and old hands, including Sonia Todd, Rachael Carpani, Aaron Jeffery, Myles Pollard and Marshall Napier.

  McLeod’s Daughters was picked up by the family-friendly American cable network Hallmark, which aired it in the UK from October 2001 and has now given it the high-viewing Saturday night slot in Asia.

  If all goes well, McLeod’s Daughters is set to become one of the few Australian-made series to crack the huge Asian television market, and early indications are overwhelmingly positive.

  But some Asian critics have struggled to get their heads around the drama’s unusual premise, becoming preoccupied with its supposed undercurrents of feminism and lesbianism, and describing it as ‘Charlie’s Angels on horseback’ and ‘Flying Doctors with cows’.

  That’s the way it was …

  December: Brian Henderson, the Kiwi disc jockey who won over Australian TV viewers as host of the long-running Bandstand, hung up his newsreading glasses last month, bringing to an end a Sydney TV institution.

  Having been at Nine for 46 years, and having read the main bulletin for 40 of those, the man comedian Gerry Connolly memorably called ‘half man, half desk’ decided that, at 71, it was time to call it quits.

  Kerry Packer organised a Brian Henderson – Toasted and Roasted special to help celebrate the TV career of one of the all-time greats.

  ‘Like all his other loyal viewers, I’ll be sorry to see him go,’ Mr Packer told The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘He’s been there night after night, a constant presence in a changing world. I know we all hoped that Hendo would go on forever. After all, he’s only been with us for 46 years, so why couldn’t he score his half century?’