I hear
you’re looking for a new head of the ABC. I would like to apply for the job.
Let me say right from the outset, that in managing the ABC, the first
requirement is understanding what the ABC could be and should be, which at
present it is not. Here’s a brief historical overview:
When radio
was invented it was immediately heralded, as so many new inventions are, as a
potential boon to the dissemination of knowledge and ideas. It was also
recognised that the medium could deliver entertainment. Thus, when the BBC was
set up as a monopoly in Britain there was a “high-brow” station which broadcast
lectures and discussions on history, art, politics, science, and classical
music and a “low-brow” station that broadcast drama serials, comedy, quiz shows
and popular and dance music. At first Australia followed the US practice of
issuing commercial licences but when concerns arose that no one was
broadcasting high-brow material, the ABC was formed. Since there were multiple
commercial stations the ABC did not have to cater to popular tastes but deliver
programs that raised or at least maintained standards of knowledge, culture
and education in the community. In other words, like BBC 1, the ABC was a
cultural and educational facility not unlike public libraries, art galleries,
botanic gardens, herbariums, observatories, zoos and concert halls.
When it came
to reporting the news, both the BBC and the ABC maintained a strict policy of
objectivity. The principle was to reports the facts as accurately as possible
but not to offer opinions, commentary or analysis except by invited guests such
as university professors.
When
television arrived, as with the radio arrangement, Australian capital cities
had two commercial channels and one ABC channel. Throughout the Fifties and
Sixties, Channel 2 remained a rather stuffy channel committed to intellectual
matters and the arts. Amongst its activities, it ran the state symphony
orchestras.
With the
arrival of colour television there was revolution in public broadcasting in
Britain. Realising that colour could bring things like art, history and science
to life as never before, the first controller of the BBC’s colour channel –
David Attenborough – commissioned series such as Sir Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, a history of art, and Abraham Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, a history of
science. He built a studio that could stage and record operas and at one point even
financed an archaeological dig to be broadcast live. He then went back into the field to produce the
Life on Earth documentaries which are
not only an invaluable record of natural history but probably the biggest money
makers the BBC has ever had. Attenborough conclusively demonstrated that the public
broadcasting could be and should be part of the knowledge industry and that
high-brow topics could be immensely popular with the general population.
The ABC
never took this route.
In the early
Seventies, the heady days of Vietnam, Whitlam and Watergate, the ABC found itself
moving in a different direction towards “investigative journalism”. Woodward
and Bernstein had become heroes in the journalistic profession by nailing a
president. The key to journalist fame was no longer just experience and an ability to write well:
you had to break stories, get exclusives, get someone sent to jail.
Journalists were no longer just reporters: they were interrogators, inquisitors
and even prosecutors. The ABC series This Day
Tonight incubated an entire generation of sideburns and flairs-wearing
journalists who confronted, ambushed and door-stopped politicians and conducted
interviews with informants whose faces were dramatically blacked out. They
became the new stars of television as borne out by their huge salaries.
(In the
Sixties, the highest paid people on Australian TV were variety hosts like
Graham Kennedy. In the Seventies the highest paid were journalists like Mike
Willisee, Michael Carleton and Peter Couchman.)
The old way of
interviewing where you asked a question and then moved on to the next was
replaced by what became known as the “But surely… “ technique, where every statement
made by the interviewee was challenged with a contradiction: "But surely you'd have to admit..." "But surely that is not what you said last week..."
This type of
aggressive interrogating, particularly of government ministers prompted some to
wonder if the ABC saw its function as being a
kind of permanent political opposition. In fact the ABC did come to see
that as its principal function, an idea now so entrenched that we cannot see
the ABC as really anything else. The original charter of the ABC – to Educate,
Entertain and Inform – was essentially replaced by – Interrogate, Cross-examine
and Expose.
Today on
ABC-TV, programs about the arts, music, literature are rare but current affairs
in the form of The 7:30 Report, Q&A, Lateline and The Drum are permanent fixtures. Even
on radio, discussions about art seem to be confined to art that is radical and
confronting. In fact, the very notion of the high-brow – art, politics, or
science discussed at a highly informed level - is now pretty much regarded as a relic
of conservative, white, male, capitalistic, patriarchal culture. Thus a
comedian like Hannah Gadsby can do a program on Australian art where she
wanders through a gallery disparaging Australian art of the 19th
century for its colonialist limitations. The only art that matters
to the ABC is art that “questions assumptions.” It no longer runs symphony
orchestras, presumably because no one has found a way to make orchestral music
challenge assumptions. And there is just one ABC-TV program a month on literature,
unashamedly called The First Tuesday Book Club.
It’s not
that television does not offer opportunities to watch programs about nature,
history, geography, music and so on. It’s just that we have to subscribe to pay
TV to watch them on the History Channel, National Geographic and Ovation. This conflicts violently with the original belief that high quality informative and educational
programs should be available to everyone in the community regardless of their
income.
In short,
the ABC has abandoned the whole idea of being some sort of electronic public library
or university of the air and has evolved into something else. The problem is working out what that something else is. It is clear it does not
see itself as primarily a provider of general knowledge, or even specialised knowledge, as it screens
very few documentary programs.
(I spent much
of my time as a Development Officer with the ABC rejecting a lot of very good
proposals for documentaries because the ABC had no slots in which to place
them.)
This is odd, because it’s not as
though the ABC doesn’t have room in the schedule for documentaries. It
has five digital channels which are currently cluttered with confused programming
and many repeats. The parent station (ABC 1) is dominated by current
affairs, British travel docos, light-weight comedy programs like The Weekly and Mad As Hell, British whodunnits, and Australian imitations of British
whodunnits; the confusingly named ABC 2 which you might expect to be an
documentary/educational channel, seems to be just repeats from ABC 1. ABC 3 was
supposed to be a quality kids’ channel but many of its timeslots are filled with low grade Japanese
and comic book animation. ABC 4 doesn’t seem to exist at all.
The truth is that the ABC has
plenty of room to screen quality documentaries but it chooses not to, usually pleading lack of funds but it is really matter of priorities. It is also
worth noting that production of educational programs for schools has virtually
disappeared from the ABC.(My first job with the ABC was producing programs for schools, several of which were shown in classrooms for many years. There was an idea then that the classroom of the future would be an electronic classroom where kids could conjure up audio-visual material at the touch of a button. With the Internet, that world has now arrived but oddly the ABC, which was originally well placed to be a content provider for such a classroom, lost interest in education.)
In the end,
the problem with the ABC is not that is sees itself as an unelected political
Opposition or a self-appointed Ombudsman but that it is an organisation that
has produced little of lasting value in its past and has no vision for the
future. It has a vague idea that its future might lie on the Internet but its
current website demonstrates the same lack of clarity of purpose as its
television wing. Is it a news site or is it cross-promotional site for ABC
programs? If it is a news site, perhaps it should be updated hourly instead of
twice a day and be slightly comprehensive making the most of the ABC's news gathering potential. And if it wants to be taken
seriously as a primary source of news on the Internet, perhaps it
should drop the inane Green/Left opinion pieces which it presents under the sub-heading
of The Drum.
The ABC is
an organisation that does some good things well, and some good things badly. It
also does a lot of bad things badly. It’s greatest failing is its mediocrity,
the tragic reality that it has the power to do so much and actually does so
little. It desperately needs a modern day Attenborough who sees that radio and television can not only reflect or comment on culture but actually make a contribution to the scientific, artistic and the intellectual capacity of the nation.
I am
available for a job interview most days next week, but not too early please.
Yours
Ian McFadyen
No comments:
Post a Comment