Forty years of the box

October 2, 1996
Issue 

By Dave Riley

The O'Tooles were the first in our street to get television. It was 1956, the Melbourne Olympics were on and our biggest treat was to be invited to their lounge room to watch the magic.

Young Peter O'Toole, was forever going on about the programs he could watch, and then would try to adapt them to daily life. He called his dog Lassie, would insist on fighting with his fists like the cowboys in the TV westerns and almost crushed his sister when he jumped off the garage roof dressed as Superman. Up, up and away! said Peter — and little Bernadette didn't know what landed on her.

Even on Friday night — picture night — we would wait for the Roxy to open outside Hartley's Electrical, stuffing hot chips into our mouths and watching the television set on the other side of the shop window. Who cared what program it was?

I was seven years old and had until then been bought up on a diet of radio, listening to programs now long forgotten. That I could claim to do all the voices of the Goons — Neddie Seagoon, Captain Moriarty and the like — suddenly seemed quite passé.

Now, 40 years on, I still love TV. I have such fond memories of programs that have meant so much to me. Perhaps the BBC comedies of the '60s and early '70s stand out. I can still portray the routines off pat from the skit programs generated by Peter Cooke, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennet — of the original Beyond the Fringe team — with as much loyalty to delivery as folk younger than I can recite their way through Monty Python.

More than anything, television taught me to laugh. The ratty women of Absolutely Fabulous and Phil Silvers' Sergeant Bilko mean more to me than anything Charlie Chaplain's tramp ever did.

While radio too could be very funny, it could never match television's respect for the natural and indigenous world. In its own obtuse way, TV has greened us. There is nothing that can generate the same exciting immediacy and amazement as the video camera's achievement in exploring a world that is fast being lost from the planet. In a figure like David Attenborough, you get a feeling for the scale of the medium's range if you plot the camera's many journeys from his early Zoo Quest to the magnificent mini-series, Life On Earth.

Nonetheless, for my politics I still prefer to read between the lines. Everything Marshal McLuhan wrote about a "hot" medium — high in impact but low in information — applies especially to current affairs television. Despite the documentaries you need to hunt for on the public broadcasters, television cooks the news.

It has always been inane and image dominated, relying on the short grab for its effect. Every major event these 40 years has come to us as little segments squeezed between the most contrary of phenomena. It takes a bit of adjusting to respond to carnage somewhere, only to be confronted the next minute by the football scores or an advertisement for toothpaste. Later, when you talk about it, there is precious little to say because it was overwhelmingly an image flitting through the mind's eye. For information on the day to day, presented critically with a comprehensible logic, we still need the printed word.

So despite TV's awesome power to educate, we still need to do our homework. Ask any school kid, and they'll tell you that it's either TV or hitting the books — generally they don't mix. Even Sesame Street, the boldest and longest running experiment in TV teaching, scrubs up as a parent-friendly babysitter regardless of its preoccupation with instilling letters and numbers.

But TV's greatest success is its soaps. While it may be de rigueur to denigrate the soap dish as episodic shallowness, the modern day soap with its issue-based themes plays out the complexities of social life and helps us get a handle on how we should proceed with our own lives — displacing in the popular imagination both novels and cinema.

Indeed, soaps are the most "moral" item in TV programming, because in their way they workshop some of the challenges we all confront. While they reflect social mores, they can also experiment with progressive notions, and Australian television soap has prided itself on its liberality. Compared to the tabloid journalism usually associated with popular appeal — either on TV or in the press — soaps stand out as more considerate of human dignity and community respect. The problem is one of addiction: how many soaps can you allow into your life?

At a time when cable is being introduced, I celebrate TV's 40 years by limiting my viewing. Cable is all about watching more television. In its big package of many channels to surf, the best and worst of the last 40 years are replicated: there's nothing new about the programs you'll see.

TV's 40 years may lend themselves to a best 100 list of programs, but week to week there's more crap than we really need. All those hours I've spent watching it and wasting my time, I could have been reading War and Peace or catching up on the third volume of Capital.

Furthermore, consider what television has done to spectator sport or how the video clip has warped rock music. We simply don't get the programs we deserve. But that's not the point of network programming is it, Mr Packer?

But hell! Love it or loathe it, I just can't do without it. (By the way: what's on the box tonight?)

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