When it leaked that new ABC chair Kim Williams had knocked a few heads around about the news choices on ABC online, I was like that one guy in that meme, you know suddenly looking interested, before getting buggy-eyed then going red — yes you do know it, Marjorie, for godssake I sent it to you oh now you’ve missed the turnoff to Benalla great going.
When Williams said that Radio National would remain a keystone of the ABC my eyes went buggy, and when he mentioned BBC Radio Four they all went red, and then my brain started sending out light rays I KNOW IT’S A DIFFERENT MEME WOULD YOU CHECK THE MAP!?
Could it really be that someone is going to kick some heads in the bowels of Aunty, as it were? Please please let it be so, and not just more words. Our beloved Aunty really needs this. She’s in as bad a state as ever.
The organisation has long had a leftish tinge since an influx of boomers in the 1960s, and the organisational efforts of (one-time Arena editor) Allan Ashbolt to create a group of broadcasters with something to say.
But that group was part of such a small social group — lefties, trendies etc — that it knew it had to run a middle course between how it saw the world and how the vast bulk of the population saw the world.
Now, well, you’ve heard this story. In an information/knowledge-centred society, a new social group/class develops to run it. Its values and world orientation are shaped by the work its members do and the education they got to do it. So they are cosmopolitan, inquiring, reflexive to a degree, transgressive, borderless etc. Their unchanging and unquestioning values are change and questioning (to a degree).
That group is now about 25-30% of the population. The core of that “knowledge class/formation” is the “cultural producer elite”, about 10%, whose version of that set of values is radical and militant. The wider knowledge class group is now of sufficient size to give the appearance of being a stable mass audience.
So across the media, the cultural producer elite are largely making content for the knowledge group/class. This has created a puritan sense of mission in many of those whose job it is to produce commentary and entertainment. Every series or program becomes a chance to proselytise diversity — often, in the comedy and drama programs, by historically inaccurate or one-dimensional heroic, sort of diversity Stalinist, narratives.
The process has been a big “fuck off” to the other 70% who form an audience catchment area. You can feel that the new, young producers actively do not want this audience. The earlier generation of politically-minded ABCers reached out to the middle- and working-class they had emerged from, to get these rare jobs.
The cultural producer elite are so surrounded by the wider knowledge class/formation — literally, in terms of living in inner cities, now wholly knowledge class-transformed — that they lose any sense that their values are an extreme version within a minority section of the populace.
This has resulted in the situation we have now, and not just at the ABC. A huge amount of programming and curating in many outlets now amounts to collective career suicide notes in instalments. Young producers and editors are actually destroying their own jobs by disdaining the largest pool of potential audience members.
This seems to be a mix of fatalism and arrogance, on top of the disdain. Producing or editing for a wider audience won’t make much difference, and protection for cutting-edge/diverse etc programming is assumed to be safe. It’s a sort of late Juche Whitlamism, the curse of our intellectual life. Since the state essentially created such in Australia, as any sort of mass form, many of these people simply assume it will always be there for them.
That is not the case. In the UK, even with the globalisation of media feeds, it still seems unlikely that any future right-wing government could privatise or abolish the BBC, which has very deep roots in British social life. Thatcher didn’t think, even for five seconds, about trying it.
But the BBC has vast amounts of money, and outlets, with three tiers of radio — sorry, “Sounds” — local, highbrow and the nationwide mainstream popular outlets (Radio 1, Radio 2, and specialist Black and Asian music and culture channels — a judicious use of diversity, in this case). It has the money to make drama series’ that are just better than anything else around. And this being Britain, it has the snooker, the finals of which — that now seem to happen fortnightly — can garner up to 16 million viewers.
The ABC has a fraction of the funding, and in the past 10 years or so, has come to seem utterly irrelevant to the populace (going into the Logies once, I passed through the crowd of people waiting to see the stars at the foot of the Crown Casino elevators. A man was there with his small son. “Probably from the ABC,” he said of me, to which my response would have been “Yeah I am, and I’m going in there and you’re out here” but I refrained; it was a pure Karamazov moment, when Dmitri humiliates his sycophantic servant Snegiryov in front of Snegiryov’s son — by common agreement the worst thing Dmitri does in 1,000 pages. The man had driven a long way for his son to see God knows who, his daddy was a hero… Also, I didn’t think of the line until I was halfway up the automatic escalier).
People with a real sense of the ABC’s provisional status in a world where mass culture now comes in tsunamis know that it must win, ugh, social license. It’s got to be trying, and seen to be trying, to be something for as many people as possible. It doesn’t need to get the wall-to-wall figures the commercials need. But it does need higher weekly, monthly and annual figures of audience contact.
What’s concerning are reports that a number of these recently-entered producers have not merely a disregard, but an active contempt, for gaining a wider audience — and especially for keeping a core of the ABC which is, like it or not, going to be Anglo-ish, or European Australian, and middle class. That core has to be built on. But an audience is an audience, they’re hard to get, and you need to keep them before you build outwards.
Grizzled radio veterans, the people that the (now, smallish) number of people are tuning in to hear, tell stories of young producers working through scripts with a furiously moving pencil: “I’m not comfortable with that… I’m not comfortable with that… I’m not comfortable with that” — the disastrous censoring of the moment, in which the tiny elite substitute their tastes and values for the audience they are meant to be serving and building.
In television, the lessons for audience-building are from things that have worked, and become national institutions, like Spicks and Specks. There is diversity within their talent selection, but the appeal is universal: everyone likes pop music, everyone has nostalgia for it, it joins us all together, and it’s made with meticulous televisual craftsmanship (disclaimer: by, er, my one-time TV co-writer and co-producer). The ABC has had many successes, and no shade on them. But it must also better connect with a wider public with the things that only do alright. It has to become more of a habit, with more of the mainstream.
To be fair, the ABC is making an effort in various sectors, getting out across the country, doing quirky little shows about communities. But watching them, I wonder what they’re rating, and whether they are winning people over. I can’t help but feel that these shows, where 87-year-old Myrtle from Numurkah shows her coronation spoon collection to a hipster with nine jobs, can’t remove the lightest of smirks from their presentation. In this case, I don’t think they’re doing it deliberately. They just can’t help it. Hard not to, if the increasingly widespread appellation for the country is “so-called Australia”.
So the ABC needs to do good stuff, but good in a certain way, capable of catching fire and gaining word of mouth, to get it beyond the 15%/30% knowledge ghetto and into the wider audience pools. That means finding creative ways to do things with smaller budgets, and relying more on the strength of the concept in drama and comedy than in spectacle.
With lower budgets, you can let a show run to give it a chance to find form, even if you need to change personnel. This is the BBC model, especially for non-drama comedy and entertainment. Establish a brand, give it three or four short seasons, change it entirely internally if necessary, but show some faith (that said, my own 2005 effort Vulture, a retro-cult hit of the future, was rightly knocked on the head after a season. Okay? Happy now?)
The second principle is to avoid “uncanny valley”, the mid-pitch of a show. Gold Diggers was an example of that, an attempt to comically portray the Gold Rush in a Blackadder-style fashion which allowed the actors to censor the script:
Before filming commenced, [actor Claire] Lovering asked for some of the language in the scripts to be toned down — “sluts” and “skanks”, words that are repurposed in an empowered way but that still made her wince — but the irreverence and energy of [creator Jack] Yabsley’s characters remains intact. He was the only white man in a writers’ room filled with First Nations and Chinese Australian talent who informed storylines that reflect how multicultural these camps were.
The Guardian loved it! My God, there is no metaphorical mine shaft deep enough for actors who censor their own scripts (or producers who let them) to remove any actual bite from the production. Gold Diggers was not only historical falsification — these were brutal areas of people who thought, as almost all did then, of the world in racialist terms — but it tried so hard to put the fun on the screen it never got funny. Like Mondays Experts — the sports show trying to get some of The Front Bar’s energy but which plays like an avant-garde theatre company doing a production of transcripts of The Front Bar in order to raise important questions about sport, nationality and gender — Gold Diggers felt like comedy put together by Martians who watched old sitcoms as they hit the red planet.
The obvious way to get actual diversity on screen is not to historically retroject. A comedy set in a call centre outside of Tarneit would have more chance of being funny, be a lot cheaper, and have a chance to really play out social conflict and attitudes. Then you give it three seasons, no matter how badly it goes, let its team (or a new team) revise their approach, introduce new characters and styles, etc. Then use the social license you get from that success — you’ll get one eventually — to make some big-budget stuff. Recent events — the oversupply of streaming — mean that public broadcasters now have the capital to make bigger stuff that the streamers are far less capable of doing than they once were. And besides that blockbuster stuff, you make a Gold Rush drama that is genuinely gritty, real, exciting, funny with the humour of life, raw, brutal and unsparing of national self-flattery and delusion.
Radio is part of this. Radio National is a whole other story, but one thing that can be said is that Radio National should be a testbed for comedy and drama concepts. BBC Radio 4 has done it for decades. Give a comedy team or a drama writer three hours (six or three episodes) and try something out. The cost is minuscule compared to visually recreating the GOLD RUSH on TELEVISION.
Myself and others have tried to get this process going, literally for decades now. We have been blocked at every turn by radio management, backed by the attitude of too many RN program creators that comedy is beneath the station. Individually, many RN programs are excellent, as good or better than many Radio 4 offerings. Collectively, the thing sounds like student radio 1979. The ABC has a whole radio network to pilot material at a very low cost, in genres that would attract a wider audience, and all it would take to synergise is a bit of selective and targeted cross-platform integration.
Would people be comfortable with that? Hahahaha, no. Throughout the organisation there will be resistance to any attempt to return the ABC to the centre of national life. But this time, there has to be some metaphorical blood on the carpet. This has to happen. The ABC has to rebuild a stronger relation to the mainstream and its many sub-sections, rural, suburban, etc. Otherwise, the opposition will take it apart, a national broadcaster lost on the way to the Benalla turnoff.
Does the ABC still represent you? Did it ever? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
