ISSN: 1329-878X

New Television Formats No 100 August 2001 Order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

Jane Roscoe: Real Entertainment: New Factual Hybrid Television
Popular factual entertainment has changed the face of broadcasting in Australia. Where once dramas, long-running serials and current affairs programs filled prime-time scehdules, we now have docu-soaps such as Popstars, and reality gameshows like Big Brother. While some have expressed concern about this shift to light entertainment in factual programming, it can be argued that such programs have brought a new audience to non-fiction and revitalised debates concerning the real. This paper examines some of the current trends in popular factual entertainment programming, considers their innovations and explores why they are so compelling.

Gareth Palmer: Judge TV: Documentary Form and Governance
This paper looks at the rise of judge TV as indicative of the changing use and status of the discourses of sobriety. After an introductory session on television and governance, it discusses how the role of moral authority in Judge TV compares with that of the talk-show. The final section establishes how judge TV can usefully be linked to other systems of justice which, although uncoordinated, also engage in the work of governance.

Sue Turnbull and Felicity Collins: Old Dogs, New Tricks: Beyond Simpson Le Mesurier, Crime-Comedy and the Telemovie Series
Roger Simpson and Roger Le Mesurier are veterans of commercial television drama production (from Division 4 to Stingers). In the post-Skase/Bond era of deficit funding, their innovative telemovie series (Halifax f.p., Dogwoman) and crime-comedy series (Good Guys Bad Guys) have tested the boundaries of Australian television's staple drama format, the crime series. Taking actors (Rebecca Gibney, Marcus Graham, Magda Szubanski) as hooks for the networks, the joint venture company Beyond Simpson Le Mesurier has brought elements of sketch comedy and a high-concept film aesthetic to the crime series format. Drawing on private investment and public money (FFC, FilmVic, CTPF), Beyond Simpson Le Mesurier exemplifies the current convergence between the film and television industries. Paradoxically, the local success of Simpson Le Mesurier's series (particularly with a post-Fordist, 18-39-year-old demographic) highlights a crisis in the drama production industry—a crisis precipitated by a dramatic drop in international sales, forcing a return to licence fee productions.

Joshua Green: More Than TV: Channel Ten and Diversity in Free-To-Air Broadcasting
Free-to-air broadcasting is currently facing some tough challenges. Amidst declining viewing figures, the rise of competing technologies and the infiltration of pay TV, free-to-air broadcasters have watched their audience fragment and their revenue base become shaky. This paper examines the way the Ten Network has reconfigured itself in response to some of these challenges, recasting itself as a free-to-air broadcaster narrowcaster, appealing specifically to the youth market as a way of making itself economically viable. In doing so, Ten has introduced to the Australian television environment a new way of conceiving a television network—as an entity that transcends the broadcasting medium and configures itself as a desired cultural space.

This paper examines Ten’s shift from the position of a broadcaster to a narrowcaster through the introduction of niche marketing and determined counter-programming strategies. Hand in hand with this, Ten’s branding strategies and expanded media interests have sought to establish the network as a youth cultural mecca rather than simply a youth-focused broadcaster. This paper will look at the way the reconfigured Ten exists as a portal for youth viewers to gain access to a youth-specific public sphere, a commercial space where they can engage in semiotic self-determination and utilise transnational products enabling a process of DIY citizenship (Hartley, 1999: 162).

Morgan Richards: Digitising Dinosaurs
This article reflects on the intersection of science, art and technology in the construction of the televisual dinosaur. In particular, it is concerned with the class of digital dinosaurs hatched in Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World (1997), powered by the latest digital technologies for the reinscription of the filmic and televisual image, and recently grafted to that most domestic of media genres, the animal documentary. Focusing on the BBC television series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999), the digital dinosaur is proposed as an object of mimetic desire in which narratives of intimacy and otherness, resurrection and loss, anthropomorphism and monstrosity are played out. In analysing exactly how the mimetic is achieved, an alternative balance between science and art is proposed, one that foregrounds the complexities and paradoxes of a television program that offers realistic depictions of things we know don't exist in the familiar guise of an animal documentary.

Craig Hight: Webcam Sites: The Documentary Genre Moves Online?
The broad focus of this article is the examination of the relationship between recent television documentary forms and online factual forms. This relationship is shaped by a wider acceptance of factual media as a cultural form, and is marked by negotiation and appropriation from both sides. Webcam sites are discussed as key online sites where there is an appropriation of documentary aesthetics as part of an apparent development of distinctive digital factual forms. These online factual forms are notable partly for their replication of early photographic discourse, but especially for an acknowledgment of various forms of pleasure and performance within their exploration of the interactive and participatory possibilities of hypertext narrative. This emphasis on pleasure, performance and participation is a continuation of the marked changes in audience engagement that characterise documentary hybrids such as docu-soap.

Gay Hawkins interviews Molly Reynolds: ABC TV Online, Digitally Yours
Molly Reynolds worked at the ABC as the TV Online Producer for 18 months. She now works for Beyond and is responsible for Beyond Online's foray into broadband Internet. In this interview, she discusses with Gay Hawkins the nature of her work and its implications for the future of television production and delivery.

Phillip Bell: Real New Formats of Television: Looking at Big Brother
Recent 'reality TV' formats, such as Channel Ten's Big Brother, exhibit many features of ethnography, and attend to 'real' aspects of human behaviour in ways reminiscent of experimental psychological simulations of institutional roles conducted in the 1960s. Reality TV integrates and re-mixes genres of observational cinema and of game shows and situation comedy, purporting to reveal the very nature of people stripped of their conventional social support and competing for biological or social rewards. Yet these formats construct tight, artificial recontextualisations of existing social practices (around sex, courtship, work). Controlled, scripted games are therefore played out which beg the question of how 'naturally' people do (or should) behave, both in 'reality' and on television.

General Articles

Jane Johnston: Court on Camera: Television Coverage of Australian Legal Proceedings
Despite widespread legal analysis and critical review over the past 20 years, television access into the Australian court system has been slow and piecemeal, with Australia falling behind Canadian and New Zealand initiatives in this area. A recent major report into camera access in the Federal Court has refocused attention on this area, but analysis continues to be primarily from a legal perspective rather than a media one. This paper considers the televised court coverage in Australia to this point, analyses change in the international environment and suggests possible futures for the televising of Australian courts, while also attempting to lay some foundations for discussion beyond the legal, and into the media, domain.

Deborah Stevenson and Georgia Paton: Representing Decline: The Role of the Arts in Framing Discourses of Deindustrialisation
Deindustrialising cities worldwide are facing considerable social and economic difficulties, which challenge local identity and the bases of community solidarity. Historically, the expressive arts have provided incisive commentaries on such change; however, deindustrialisation strategies are now being developed that include cultural programs as a way of minimising negative local reactions. There has been little academic analysis of this emerging arts/industry nexus or its relationship to local communities and arts agendas. In 1999, BHP closed its steelworks in the New South Wales city of Newcastle. Central to the process of closure was the Ribbons of Steel festival, funded in part by the Australia Council and held on the BHP site. This paper examines Ribbons of Steel to explore the role it played in framing discourses of closure and city reimaging. The paper also illuminates the power relations underpinning the event, providing insights into the shifting relationship between industry, creative expression and place identity.

Peter Friedlander, Robin Jeffrey and Sanjay Seth: 'Subliminal Charge': How Hindi-Language Newspaper Expansion Affects India
The expansion of newspapers in Indian languages over the past 20 years is unique in history. This paper seeks to examine the potential social and political consequences of that growth by focusing on two Hindi-language newspapers and their treatment of a few items of news and comment. Through such close analysis, the essay aims to show how McLuhan's 'subliminal charge' — the unconscious but overpowering effect of daily newspaper consumption — might work in practice. The essay illuminates the role of newspapers in shaping language, identity and a 'public sphere' in small-town and rural India — processes that have great consequences for India's political future.

Yong Zhong: The other Edge of Commercialisation: Enhancing CCTV's Propaganda
This article re-examines the political economics of current Chinese television through three case studies into the operation of China Central Television Station (CCTV). It precedes the case studies with a review of a number of perspectives of Chinese television regarding its relation to businesses and its function as a propaganda instrument. The first case study presents an example to demonstrate the nature of the relationship between CCTV and its business partners. The second case study shows that CCTV is becoming a huge official-profiteering monopoly. The third case study leads to the argument that counter-commercialisation enhances CCTV's ability to propagandise. On the basis of these case studies, I argue that commercialisation is not a one-way process and that it necessarily contains an equal and opposite reactive process that I identify as counter-commercialisation. I hope that the case studies will enhance knowledge about the complexity of Chinese television.