The Australian TV Book

Stuart Cunningham, Stuart Cunningham, Graeme Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000247916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Television is the most pervasive mass medium of the industrialised world. It is blamed for creating alienation and violence in society, yet at the same time regarded as trivial and unworthy of serious attention. It is the main purveyor of global popular culture, yet also intensely local. The Australian TV Book paints the big picture of the small screen in Australia. It examines industry dynamics in a rapidly changing environment, the impact of new technology, recent changes in programming, and the ways in which the television industry targets its audiences. The authors highlight what is distinctive about television in Australia, and how it is affected by international developments. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Australian television today.Stuart Cunningham is Professor of Media and Journalism at Queensland University of Technology. Graeme Turner is director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. They are editors of the leading textbook The Media in Australia and authors of many other works on the media.

Part I
The beginning

Chapter One
Studying television

Graeme Turner

INTRODUCTION

After work and sleeping, Australians spend more time watching television than on any other activity. Not all of this time is felt to be profitably spent, of course. Most of us probably spend more time grumbling about television programs, channel surfing in the hope of finding ‘something on’ or just plain yelling at the set than we do in silent, pleasurable attention. Nevertheless, television has become essential to us; at certain moments in time—the Bicentenary in 1988, the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997, Millennium Eve 1999—it is irresistible in its capacity to address the national audience. Australian television programming remains one of the key means through which we can imagine ourselves belonging to a nation of common interests and experiences. This is true across the range of programming; from special event spectaculars such as The Millennium Live through drama series such as Water Rats, soap operas such as Home and Away and high-profile sporting events such as World Series Cricket, Australians watch Australian-made programming avidly. Imported programming, too, feeds its own form of nourishment into the cultural diet of Australian audiences, offering us the seductive American paranoia of The X-Files, the dependable post-Thatcher conservatism of The Bill, the Generation X obsession with teenage angst in Party of Five, or the rich variety of national cinemas in SBS’s World Movies.

This book presents a detailed account of Australian television—the industry and the programs, the local and the imported, the past as well as the future. It is written in a way that will make it accessible to the general or industry reader as well as the student taking formal subjects in television in colleges and universities. Given the centrality of television to Australian popular culture, it is hoped that a wide readership will find it useful and enjoyable. This chapter provides a short history of how television has been studied by academics and cultural commentators, while Chapter 2 provides an historical overview of the medium’s development in Australia, together with an introduction to enduring policy issues about television. For those who are most interested in those chapters which deal with the television industry, it might be best to go straight to Part II of this book, and for those interested in specific genres or their favourite programs, feel free to begin with Part III.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF TELEVISION STUDIES

There was a time, perhaps thirty years ago, when to suggest that television was an appropriate object of study for school and university students could only have been motivated by the need to protect them against it. The possibility that television might be worth studying in its own right would not seriously have been considered. Even today, there are regular complaints about changes to school curricula which focus on media analysis rather than more traditional forms of knowledge: a familiar strategy is to represent such changes as the replacement of Shakespeare with Neighbours. While it is now widely studied in schools and universities, television—the quintessential technology of a modernised, commercialised and globalised popular culture—still finds it difficult to command respect.

One reason for this, as John Hartley (1992) has suggested, is that television’s populism and immediacy make it an unreflective—even ‘scandalous’—medium. Television finds itself routinely developing programs, circulating gossip and representing everyday life in ways which are a constant provocation to liberal ethical and moral concerns about its representations of the social world and about the cultural value of the generic forms and entertainment values it seems to prefer. The responses to television’s provocations can be contradictory. On the one hand, television is blamed for violence, depression, social dysfunction, educational disadvantage, racism and sexism; on the other hand, it is regarded as so trivial and meretricious that subjecting it to close analysis is to commit a kind of category error.

Nevertheless—and while it retains the capacity to generate reactions such as these—television today is increasingly the object of academic study. The importance of the political, social and cultural functions now performed by television is widely recognised. Institutional inquiries into television content, such as those of our various broadcasting authorities into violence on television, routinely recommend that greater efforts should be made to educate the community about the operation of the media generally and television in particular. Although generations of studies have failed conclusively to establish causal connections between patterns of behaviour and television viewing, community concern about the social implications of what we see on television continues to propose the need for a better understanding of the relation between television and the society which consumes it. There are now highly reputable international academic journals devoted solely to the analysis of television; ‘television studies’ is taught in universities in Europe, North America and Australasia, and it feeds into a significant commercial market for publishers.

This realignment of the study of television has had little to do with television itself. Among the significant shifts in focus and attention within the humanities and social sciences, internationally, over the last twenty or thirty years, has been a reassessment of the class-based division between elite and popular cultural forms. Where the traditional humanities, in particular, once defined whole disciplines partly through a principled exclusion of popular culture—literary studies, for instance, but also in many cases film studies—the new humanities which evolved through the 1980s ultimately came to accept and then enthusiastically embrace the notion that popular culture was fundamentally important and deserved to be better understood. The new areas of study which developed over this period—media studies, cultural studies, area studies, and newly theorised versions of literary and historical studies—all defined themselves against the traditional disciplines through, among other things, their commitment to extending the purchase of their methods of analysis into the textual forms consumed within, and the practices of, everyday life. As a result, we began to encounter sophisticated analyses of (for instance) popular cinema, popular music, shopping centres, the suburban home, youth subcultures and, most comprehensively, television.

The appeal of television as an object of study lay, initially, in its usefulness as a convenient means of studying something else—advertising or ideologies, for instance. In such inquiries, the television text became the site where the process of meaning production could be uncovered. However, even rudimentary analysis of television texts eventually required that the analyst knew something about the specificity of television as a textual domain. As the interdisciplinary fields of media studies, communications studies and cultural studies began to develop to the point where areas of specialisation became possible, so too did the concentration on television as a medium to be studied in its own right.

STUDYING TELEVISION

Of course, the history of television studies goes back further than this. Research into the persuasive effects of all media forms took on a high profile during the Cold War in the 1950s, and was reinforced by American military interest in the processes of brainwashing which emerged from the Korean War. As a result of such interests, there are research traditions within the social sciences which have taken television seriously for more than forty years. From the 1960s on, US research into mass communication (not television, per se, but often dealing with television as the exemplary process) focused on issues of media influence—so-called ‘media effects’ research—through the investigation of behavioural or attitudinal change. The objective for much of this work was to describe the means through which media messages, themselves regarded as unproblematically decipherable, could influence viewers’ conceptions of the world and their consequent behaviour within it.

Accompanying, and to some extent complementing, this tradition was an anti-populist critique of television which represented the medium as the nadir of popular culture’s textual forms: the epitome of a trashy culture which was sweeping more valuable forms before it. Adding weight to this critique were the warnings carried by political economies of the media industries. These questioned the effects upon the access to, and supply of, information likely to result from the increasing consolidation of the commercial and political power invested in the large international media organisations. It is in this tradition that we see intellectual trade across the Atlantic, with the media research of Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1973), for instance, being influenced by American mass communications traditions. Unlike the more psychologistic tradition which had examined media effects in individuals, the political economies tended to mount principled political critiques of the broad social distortions produced by the concentration of media power and influence.

The American mass communication tradition (cf. McQuail 1972), with its emphases on political economy and behaviourist approaches, dominated media research until the 1970s, when it was challenged by arguments from a new quarter: the neo-Marxist critiques developing in what was to become British cultural studies. The approach taken by Raymond Williams’ Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) is sympomatic in its exploration of two critical directions. First, it was critical of what it regarded as an ahistorical view of the relation between new technologies and the uses made of them by the culture (‘technological determinism’). Second, it insisted that we should attempt to understand more about the specificity of television as a textual regime (television genres as ‘cultural form’). Ultimately, what we now think of as the fields of media and cultural studies displaced much of the American mass communications tradition within the United Kingdom. In its place developed a more textual, more interpretatively critical and more political account of television as the contingent production of a dominant culture. Within this tradition we find the bases for what we now think of as conventional approaches to the study of television in Australia.

A key text in this development was John Fiske and John Hartley’s Reading Television (1978). The title of this book perfectly encapsulates the shift in approaches to television that had taken place over the previous decade. Fiske and Hartley’s project was to change the way in which television viewing was understood and evaluated. For them, the consumption of television was active and interpretive—reading, not watching. Furthermore, in a precursor to Fiske’s later discussion of ‘the cultural economy’ in his Television Culture (1987) and Hartley’s outlining of the ‘postmodern public sphere’ in his Popular Reality (1996), television was placed at the centre of contemporary culture: it stood in place of ‘the bard’ as the culture’s storyteller, oral historian and entertainer.

The process of ‘reading’ outlined in Reading Television employed the methodology of semiotics. Semiotics offered two great advantages to television studies. First, it provided a means of describing the relationship between the visual image and the culture, thus enabling the analysis of the complex mixture of visual, aural and contextual information that comprises the television message. Second, semiotics enabled television studies to break with analytic methods which had derived primarily from literary studies, and were thus tied to evaluative strategies aimed at aesthetic judgments. Television studies could now distance itself from the aesthetic criticisms that led to dismissal of the medium, and focus instead on the medium’s social and cultural function. Consequently, in the semiotic textual analyses which followed, the emphasis fell upon the cultural production of meaning—a direction entirely in accord with Fiske and Hartley’s proposition of the ‘bardic function’ of the television message.

For about a decade, the elaboration of the semiotic analysis of the television text overwhelmed all else. The mid-1970s to the mid-1980s saw an eruption of textual analysis of television programs, formats and genres in the United Kingdom, the United States, and in Australia and Canada. The dominance was not complete, however, nor was it aimed solely at producing clever textual analysis (although certainly some of it did). The work of Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley (1978), for instance, which started out as textual analysis of the construction of social meanings within the British evening magazine television program, Nationwide, ended up as an inquiry into the ideological positioning of the audience by the codes and conventions of the genre before leading on to a major program of research into the consumption of television within the home (Morley 1986, 1992), which is still providing insights today.

At some point, though, the question always asked of the textual critics had to be answered: how do you know that audiences will read the text in the way you suggest? A group of highly influential inquiries into audience readings of mainstream popular texts, commencing with Dorothy Hobson’s (1980) participant observation studies of the producers and audiences of the British soap, Crossroads, and achieving international prominence with Ien Ang’s (1985) study of the audience of an American prime-time soap, Watching Dallas, turned the attention of television studies away from the text and towards the audience. From the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s, audience studies were the engine room of television studies worldwide, fracturing some of the critical assurance which had marked the semiotic textual analyses and undermining the elitism implicit in the growth of the academic textual critic of television. They also opened up a space for a rapprochement between American social science approaches and the British interpretative approaches to television. New political interventions became possible too, specifically around issues of gender, ethnicity and race, as audience studies helped us understand the differing uses to which the television text would be put by different sections of the community. Much of the most important work in audience studies over this period, for instance, dealt with the female consumer of the television message, while much of the importance of the continuing tradition of audience studies has focused on the consumption practices of particular ethnicities or minority communities.

A product of semiotics’ disinterest in aesthetic values and the recognition of the importance of the high degree of contingency and specificity with which television plays its part in the culture has been a reversal of the critical habit of routinely disparaging the medium of television. A key factor in the development of television studies from the mid-1980s to the present has been the more positive assessment of the cultural role played by television as a medium, and of the ways in which it is consumed by its audiences (cf Fiske 1987; Jenkins 1992; Hartley 1999). While some saw the late 1980s as a period when the democratic potential of television was probably overplayed—there have been many accounts of the role of cultural populism in, usually, the work of John Fiske (cf McGuigan 1992)—it is clear that a strongly celebratory strain of television studies was established over this period. It has maintained its relevance to discussions of television, particularly since the elaboration of theories of postmodernity which have precisely suited the nature of the television message and its customary modes of consumption. Certainly, these days, television studies is inhabited by people who seem to enjoy a lot of what they watch on television for a variety of reasons.

The analysis of television has become a familiar part of media studies, communications and cultural studies degree programs, and as these programs have established themselves within schools and universities, they have accommodated more pluralistic and varied bodies of approaches than was the case when it was just beginning. Nevertheless, in her contribution to Geraghty and Lusted’s The Television Studies Book (1998), Charlotte Brunsdon makes the point that, compared with the television studied in the social sciences and mass communications traditions, the television studied by what she describes as ‘television studies’ (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) remains ‘textualised’:

The concentration was on programmes and genres rather than industry and economy. This was not, in general, a television discussed in relation to issues of working practices, labour relations, exports and national and international legislation. In contrast to the emphases of literary an...