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The State of Australian Television
Big Brother, The Shire, A Night with the
Stars – Kyle and Jackie O, The Renovators,
Biggest Loser, Young Talent Time,
Celebrity Apprentice, Beauty and the Geek ...
Is this the true state of Australian television
or just a series of failed experiments? recent
years have seen our Tv landscape become
more volatile than ever, with the networks
chopping and changing their schedule
constantly in an attempt to match the
flow of its channel-surfing viewers. And
the viewers are certainly voting with their
feet; kyle’s and Jackie O’s escapades into
television saw their show garner over 1.6
million viewers in the first few minutes of
its opening episode, only to finish the hour
with 250,000 remaining. The series was
immediately discontinued. However, the
question remains, are our shows a product of
our modern culture or is our culture created
by the Tv we watch?
Australia has a proud tradition in television,
with some of the longest running soap
operas, game shows and news programs
in the world. We are particularly famous for
our exports, with the stalwarts, Neighbours
and Playschool successful in the uk, while
Bondi Rescue and Packed to the Rafters have
been aired in places such as the middle
east and Asia more recently. The situation
at home, though, is far more dire. Channel
9 is currently showing Big Brother every day
of the week, bar Saturday, in prime time.
Channel 7 features X-Factor three days of the
week, interspersed by Border Security re-runs,
and we’ve recently arisen from a Channel
10 onslaught of the now-weary Masterchef
series. To rub salt into the wound, we are
faced with a barrage of junior, celebrity
and all-star Masterchef off-shoots while the
original program is in downtime. So why
is it that we have such little choice in an
era where the internet and social media
are meant to be expanding our horizons in
entertainment options? The answer may lie
in advertising.
With more and more Australians turning
to the box for a distraction from daily life,
competition between the three major
commercial channels is intensifying. In order
to continue turning profits, these networks
have had to turn to advertisers. And the
advertisers want three things; youth,
saturation and continuity. It is now clear that
advertisers have their crosshairs focused
on Gen Y, in an attempt to catch consumers
young, and potentially have the popularity
of their product spread on social media.
This has led to programming that directly
targets younger audiences at the expense
of more mature shows, so as to attract these
bigger advertisers. The second and third
requirements demand that the shows be
frequent and long-running and so a direct
link between the show and the product
can be formed. Think Masterchef and Coles.
While the advertisers and networks reap the
rewards, it may all be to the detriment of
Australian television as we know it.
Then there is the case of our news programs.
With our two current affairs shows, A
Current Affair and Today Tonight, wrought
with blatant advertising construed as
investigations, and an overall tendency
towards tacky and sensationalised
journalism, we may struggle to find
hard-nosed content with an intelligent,
impartial view. We may, though, simply
lack the appetite for this style of television,
as evidenced by the tanking of 6:30 with
George Negus earlier this year. It is quickly
coming to light that the sole reason our
two surviving current affairs shows remain
afloat is the level of marketing within them;
that while they may not gain huge ratings,
they continue to be financially lucrative for
the channels due to the revenue made on
the rap
WITH lIAm ApTer And jAmes ross
advertising. Seven’s new channel,
Television4me, is testament to the rise of
television advertising as big business; it
screens infomercials 24/7, a concept that has
inundated American television in the past
decade.
This may seem a dour prognosis for
Australian television, but it’s not all doom
and gloom. There has been a flocking back
to the ABC and SBS of late. This is due to
shows such as SBS’s Go back to Where you
came From, which followed the journey of
six Australians, with varying opinions about
the asylum seeker issue, on a boat trip across
the Timor Sea. Produced by two Cranbrook
parents as a part of the production
company Cordell Jigsaw, and presented by
a Cranbrook Old Boy, it recently won the
Best factual entertainment and Best of rose
2012 (best overall) at the internationally
renowned rose D’Or Awards in Switzerland.
So it seems our culture is still alive and well
in our television; it just isn’t found in the
places where it used to be. If the commercial
networks are to ensure their future
prosperity, they must learn a few lessons
from their overseas counterparts, several of
whom dealt themselves a slow, agonising
death due to poor prime-time programming.
If the warning signs are not heeded early,
our once beloved and treasured commercial
networks may suffer a similar fate.
Thursday 30 August 2012 9