Guest writer:

After a career in the hurly burly of news-reporting and feature-writing as a staff and freelance journalist for Australia's major national media, Liz Johnston has gone to the beach. Her office now is a sunny room overlooking the Point Lookout Lighthouse reserve off Brisbane on North Stradbroke Island. She still writes for national media and is an occasional speechwriter for Queensland Premier Peter Beattie. Her screen-saver constantly reminds her which assignments she should accept. It says Only Fun Stuff.

Research team:

Professor Graeme Turner, Dr Frances Bonner

Funding:

Faculty of Arts ($120,000 pa for five years) Vice-Chancellor's Strategic Development Fund ($100,000 for five years) UQ Postdoctoral Research Fellowship ($60,000 for three years)

Email/Web link:

graeme.turner@mailbox.uq.edu.au f.bonner@mailbox.uq.edu.au www.arts.uq.edu.au/cccs/

Faculty of Arts

Watching endless episodes of television game shows and gardening shows might be regarded as a challenge by those who fancy themselves as being of lively intellect with highly developed critical faculties

To a casual viewer there is rarely anything new in globally-formatted television shows, regardless of where they are made and for what national audiences

Nevertheless, after a lot of viewing ("far more than I would wish") University of Queensland researcher Dr Frances Bonner has spotted some telling national differences along with the similarities.

"They are very revealing of national identity and the limitations of globalisation," she says.

"There is certainly more to them than meets the eye of the casual viewer."

For instance, the show called Who Wants to be a Millionaire? is seen in much the same format in the UK, Australia and the US. Yet there are differences in the hosts, who are always male, that reveal national idiosyncrasies.

In sports-mad Australia, host Eddie McGuire is from a sporting background, a very blokish kind of a bloke. In the UK, Chris Tarrant was a radio DJ. He's somewhat laddish and is also older than Australia's McGuire. In the US, Regis Philbin is more paternal.

"Looking at national variations in these sorts of shows helps tell us about the differences between cultures at a time when we're being told television is operating to eradicate the differences," Dr Bonner says.

Dr Bonner, a lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies in the Department of English, is the first visiting fellow at The University of Queensland's new Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (CCCS).

The Centre will focus on television research in its first year. Dr Bonner is writing a book called For Ordinary TV that will look at lifestyle shows.

The Centre's Director Professor Graeme Turner describes her field of study as "the stuff of everyday television".

Professor Turner says Dr Bonner's work will redress the past focus of television studies on news, current affairs and drama.

"She will do this by looking at the more everyday genres of television which nevertheless must play their part in our lives," he said.

"Understanding how this material interacts with our experience of everyday life is performing important basic research. This will be an important book published by a major international publisher by an excellent local researcher."

Professor Turner says television is "probably the major means through which contemporary societies develop their values, their identities and their cultures. With the introduction of new technologies to compete with television, and with the possibility that broadcast television is losing its commercial power, now is a good time to consider the place of television within contemporary western cultures."

The establishment of the CCCS has been a long-term project for Professor Turner and others at The University of Queensland.

But companies funding university studies want products not knowledge, something of an irony in the new knowledge economy.

"In a culture where business does not give back to the community, where it just sees its responsibility as being to shareholders, it's very hard to convince them to put money into something that's seen simply as academic," Professor Turner says.

"For example, media proprietors are not going to give money to people who will be among their fiercest critics. The last thing they want to do is to fund a new generation of people criticising what they do.

"So there's virtually no way you can get the level of funding that you need to mount a centre like this. You'd need an injection of capital and then to work off the interest. You're looking at a budget of $200,000 to $3 million and that's a lot of capital to make it work. It happens in America but they have a different philanthropic culture. The circuit-breaker for us was the Vice-Chancellor who agreed to help the Arts Faculty fund a research centre in the area of cultural studies. A research grant doesn't give operating funds and that's what I've got from the University."

The CCCS will second staff for short periods to research and complete projects.

"It was always my idea from years ago when we started to talk about it, that it would be a place where Faculty people could work," Professor Turner says.

"Similarly, people from overseas can be brought in from time to time. There's a visiting fellows program which has these two arms."

Professor Turner says overseas fellows will have to work very hard in a short space of time.

"Bringing people from overseas costs a fortune and keeping them here for a long time costs you even more," he says.

In the meantime, Dr Bonner has a lot of ordinary television to watch.

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