Transnational Television Remakes

Claire Perkins, Constantine Verevis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317213352
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Providing a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes, and assembling an international team of scholars, this book draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation. While recognising the commercial logic of global television formats that animates these remakes, the collection describes the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a one-way process of cultural homogenisation, but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another. More specifically, the chapters attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialisation and distribution are prevalent.

What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series shape an audience's reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of 'Quality TV' impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges both the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture, and the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

Television format traffic: public service style

Albert Moran

Screen Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

Beginning in 1998, there has been an explosion in the flow of television programme formats worldwide witnessing to the advent of a global television system for programme production and distribution. In fact, this kind of programme adaptation and remaking had a long gestation that reaches back even before the beginnings of regular television broadcasting to the early 1940s. Media scholars were very slow over the subsequent half-century to register what was taking place, let alone inquire into its dynamics and critical significance. If programme remaking was noticed at all, it was understood in high culture terms as confirmation of crassness and materialism operating in commercial television. Critical research added a further charge of media imperialism to describe the supposed national and social outcomes of such a practice. However, since the 1990s, scholarly inquiry has affected a seachange in its engagement with the phenomenon of television programme remaking that was prompted not least by a realisation that its commercial and cultural operations and consequences are more interesting, intriguing, and multi-dimensional than was earlier thought. In this context, three programme format transfers that happened between the UK and Australia in the 1960s are examined. The three sets of programme transfer constitute a rich, engaging area of analysis for several reasons including the fact that they were ‘live’ programme formats whereas their exchange took place in a public service context, the latter being a sector that usually falls under the critical radar. Drawing connections of this kind across an imperial cultural space can make a significant contribution to transnational television history from a comparative Anglophone perspective.

Introduction

Produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), The Aunty Jack Show (1972–73) launched the comically satirical figure of Norman Gunston (Garry McDonald) (Moran and Keating 2007, 28). As a naive and inept would-be television personality at large aspiring to have his own Tonight-style show – which of course happened the following year (The Norman Gunston Show, 1974–1975) – Gunston lampooned many celebrities and practices in Australian popular culture, especially in the realm of television. This included producer Reg Grundy’s routine of adapting numerous US television game show programmes for the Australian commercial television networks (Grundy 2013a, 55–97). Although Gunston’s jibes about programme remaking might have passed over the heads of most of the public at large, it did strike a nerve with cultural nationalist critics such as Phillip Adams who long lamented Australia’s commercial cultural dependence on the USA. For Adams and other cultural commentators, the North American tie constituted evidence of home-grown debasement of cultural taste on the one hand and Yankee cultural imperialism on the other. The fact that Gunston’s attack was mounted from the programme confines of the public service broadcaster, the ABC, appeared to safeguard that cultural institution from these charges of unoriginality.

In point of fact, the ABC was no different to the other Australian television networks when it came to sourcing programmes to fill its schedule. Like them, it imported a significant amount of canned or finished programmes (Waisbord 2004) from elsewhere and supplemented this with locally produced shows. On the surface at least, there appeared to be significant variations between the practices of the ABC and the commercial networks. The former sourced most of its imported programmes from the UK with a leavening of the US shows across its schedule whereas commercial stations looked first across the Pacific before acquiring the occasional show from the UK television. The ABC produced its local programmes in-house whereas the commercial networks farmed out a good deal of their Australian programming needs to local independent producers including Reg Grundy Enterprises.

And yet continuities also persisted here so far as the overseas sourcing of programme ideas for local remaking was concerned. However, cultural traffic directions were different. The ABC looked to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for programme ideas for adapting and remaking, thereby indicating that even if British imperial power was no longer as it once was, nevertheless, there still existed a world wide Anglo broadcasting empire in which Australia had an allotted place (Potter 2012).

This article mounts such an argument by examining the Australian public service television broadcaster in the 1960s. In particular, it investigates the development of three ABC programmes, two of which are still on the air, that were based on BBC predecessors with the adaptations taking place between 1961 and 1966. Parts 2, 3 and 4 of the piece offer short case studies that link the Australian programmes with the UK predecessors. None of the programmes were in mainstream entertainment genres such as fiction, comedy or game shows. Instead, the three were ‘live’ programmes, arrayed along an information/educational continuum. Two of the programmes were in the newly emergent genre of current affairs television,¹ whereas the third belonged to the genre of childrens’ television. The three case study discussions of the earlier and later incarnations of the programmes do not involve close textual analyses both because these are not readily available and because both the British and Australian versions have changed considerably over time. Instead, the principal features of these transfers are noted as springboard for the next two sections of the analysis that outline more general considerations attached to these mobilities. I offer four findings arising from the inquiry by way of conclusion.

Panorama and Four Corners

The first case study of programme template transfer between the BBC and the ABC has to do with current affairs television. Panorama began on BBC Television in 1953 as a news/information programme and continues on air to the present day. The choice of programme title was fortuitous with its promise of a wide-ranging view or outlook but without detail or specificity. In fact, in its first incarnation, the programme sometimes took the form of a film documentary. More frequently, it was a studio-based, magazine-type programme with a resident group of established, on-camera critics offering up to date opinions about art, theatre, literature and so on (Briggs 1979, 615; Crisell 1997, 94–114; Vahimegi 1994, 41). These early programmes in the Panorama series were broadcasted on a fortnightly basis where they were thought of as akin to specials or one-offs. It was not until 1955 with the commencement of the independent or commercial service on British television (ITV) that Panorama settled down as a regular weekly programme (Pickering 2004). The programme itself was revamped to become ‘a window to the world’ and shortly boasted a permanent news team that took a weekly look at politics, society and other matters in Britain and elsewhere. In this move, Panorama’s producers had possibly been influenced by the advent of the US National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC)’s Wide Wide World, which had begun in 1955 as a bimonthly look at the USA and other parts of the globe (Hyatt 1997, 465; Moran and Keating 2007, 173–74). In effect, the two programmes had the same theme: to celebrate the ability of new technology to craft a global montage of images and sounds relating to politics and other matters and to bring this to the viewing public in its own living room.

Panorama was broadcasted on the Australian public service broadcaster, the ABC, in the period 1957 to 1961 alongside a sizeable amount of other BBC programming.² The programme excited an enthusiasm on the part of the ABC’s Board of Commissioners and its general manager who were filled with the ambition of a ‘local equivalent’ current affairs television programme (Hall 1976, 55–68; Inglis 1982, 216–217; MacCallum 196, 54–55). It was decided that the latter would be produced from the ABC’s television studios in Sydney by a producer with a strong film and journalist background, Robert Raymond, working with one of the ABC’s most popular on-camera television announcers, Michael Charlton. With Panorama, and to a lesser extent, the US journalist Ed Murrow’s See It Now, which had run on CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) television between 1952 and 1955 (Brooks and Marsh 1992 791), the twosome decided that the Australian programme would retain the right to look at current affairs events and stories happening across the nation and elsewhere in the world (Raymond 1999, 23–30). Seeing the programme as one that brought stories from the four corners of the earth to the viewer, Raymond, in consultation with his superiors at the ABC, adopted the name Four Corners as the title of the new programme (Inglis 1982, 216–21; Raymond 1999, 26–27).

Like the predecessors mentioned above, most especially the BBC’s Panorama, the ABC offering initially worked with a magazine-type structure with each episode containing four different stories. Later it began to restrict its running time of 45 min to one or two stories per episode. Again, in this respect, it was following in the footsteps of the BBC (Moran 1989, 242–45; Gibson 2004). By the late 1960s, the British programme was moving away from its magazine structure in favour of current affairs stories that were receiving more extended treatment in each episode. Ironically, too, given the potential internationalism heralded in its title, Four Corners has long focused much of its energy and resources on Australian subjects and stories and long ago moved behind the scenes to extended, investigative reporting.

With this ‘Australianisation’ of style and subject, the ABC current affairs programme might have been expected to have long ago moved away to the point of forgetting its British origins in BBC programming. Not so. Panorama now the longest running current affairs programme in the history of television continues to be important for Four Corners, itself the longest running programme on Australian television. Australian-born Michael Charlton who joined the BBC in 1962 has the rare distinction of having hosted the current affairs offspring and parent programmes. This kind of symbiosis continues to the present day. Over a half-century later, more than a dozen episodes of Panorama are re-broadcast each year by the ABC. These are slotted into the broadcast schedule every month or so as episodes of Four Corners (Pullan 1986, 3–5).

Tonight and This Day Tonight

The second case study also has to do with further developments in current affairs television. As production and broadcast technology became more flexible, mobile, easier to handle and cheaper, current affairs television was able to look beyond the monolithic model of a national weekend newspaper or magazine-type programme. One such addition was that of the daily evening weekday newspaper which offered the possibility of immediacy and topicality as opposed to the in-depth coverage in the ‘long form’ current affairs programme. Moreover, the long-established weekly current affairs programme could also constitute a kind of nursery or training ground for reporters, cinematographers, sound recordists, editors, script assistants, hosts, producers and others who could be subsequently deployed to a second programme (Inglis 1982, 216–90).

The BBC led the way in this domain with ‘short form’ current affairs programming. In fact, there were two such programmes intended for different weekday timeslots. They were scheduled next to a main evening news programme. The need to shore up the news programme came about in the first place because of the advent of Independent Television service (ITV) in 1955. The thinking was that a new current affairs programme would extend the day’s coverage with a more informed, reflective and even light-hearted account of some of the events featuring in the news that day. Tonight was first cab off the rank in the form of an early evening programme that was intended as a kind of prelude to the main evening news, featuring both brief news and current affair items usually with a light touch (Briggs 1979, 991; Crisell 1997, 93–94; Vehimegi 1994, 69). The programme ran from 1957 to 1965. It was replaced by another version of the same type, Twenty-four Hours. The latter appeared in a late evening slot and was more hard-hitting and sharper than its predecessor. Twenty-four Hours ran from 1965 to 1972 whereupon in 1975 Tonight was revived (Briggs 1979, 999; Crisell 1997, 118–19; Vehimegi 1994, 69).

This model of programme is highly topical, much closer to the news end of a continuum so that there is no record of either Tonight or Twenty-four Hours ever playing on Australian television as an imported programme. Nevertheless, with Four Corners firmly established as a weekly current affairs programme, the ABC became interested in developing a complementary weekday show that would offer additional insight and comment on news events of the day. In his history of the ABC from 1932 to 1982, Ken Inglis describes Four Corners as a ‘local equivalent of Panorama and This Day Tonight as an ‘Australian copy’ of Tonight (1982, 216–240). Yet the fact is that the ABC had a more distant and less intimate acquaintance with the BBC’s nightly current affairs programme than it had had with its weekly predecessor. Because of its more immediate and intimate tie to the UK television news, Tonight was not rebroadcast on Australian television. If it was known at all by the ABC, it was only known at a distance.

But known it was if developments elsewhere in Australian television is any guide. This had to do with the advent of an evening current affairs programme called Telescope that was quicker off the blocks than This Day Tonight, beginning on TEN Channel 10 in Sydney in 1965 (Hall 1976, 96–97; MacCallum 1968, 33). As a relatively new broadcaster having first come on the air in 1963, TEN was ready to innovate in an effort to steal a march on its more established competitors whether in the form of the commercial networks or the ABC. Like the BBC’s Tonight, Telescope ran in an early evening timeslot that was intended to support and extend the appeal of the latter’s evening news programme. But unlike both the BBC and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Transnational television remakes
• 1. Television format traffic: public service style
• 2. From The Office to Stromberg: adaptation strategies in German television
• 3. Trafficking in TV crime: remaking Broadchurch
• 4. Remapping socio-cultural specificity in the American remake of The Bridge
• 5. Between Homeland and Prisoners of War: remaking terror
• 6. The show that refused to die: the rise and fall of AMC’s The Killing
• 7. Appreciating Wallander at the BBC: producing culture and performing the glocal in the UK and Swedish Wallanders for British public service television
• 8. ‘Whose side are you on?’ The Slap (2011/2015)
• 9. Translating the television ‘treatment’ genre: Be’Tipul and In Treatment
• Index