Stephen Fry, Wiki HERE inc bio details
IN A recently released policy statement the ABC’s managing director, Mark Scott, and his head of television, Kim Dalton, declared that the corporation would prioritise the “funding, presentation and programming of Australian programs.” Given the dominance of British programs on the network, the commitment was welcome news. If ABC1 is the corporation’s flagship then it frequently sails with the Union Jack at the top of its mast. Indeed, ABC television vies with the monarchy in perpetuating the colonial relationship with the old imperial heartland.
The dominance of British – and mainly BBC – productions was particularly pronounced over Christmas and the New Year period and overwhelmingly so during the three-hour peak viewing time between the end of 7.30 and the late news at 10.30. Over those six weeks Australian programs were on the screen only a little over 10 per cent of the available time. On twenty-nine of the forty-two nights in question there were no locally made programs at all. None! At one point, seven nights in a row passed without anything Australian on the screens during those hours. There was a second period of five nights without anything local to watch. Over the six weeks only twelve Australian-made programs were shown during peak time, several of them repeats. During four weeks in January, seventy-eight British programs were screened and only nine locally made ones.
By any measure this was an extraordinary situation – a complete failure to present Australia to the national audience during a holiday period when presumably people had more leisure time to watch television. It also raises the larger question of whether the ABC makes enough product to be able to represent and interpret Australia to the world.
It is interesting to speculate about how a visitor over the holiday period would have fared if she had sought to learn something of this country by watching the national broadcaster during the peak viewing period. Many evenings would have passed without her hearing an Australian accent. She would have concluded that the quintessential Englishman Stephen Fry was a pivotal figure in local cultural life: he headed up a weekly panel program, his travel adventures were screened on four nights and on one Saturday evening he was allowed to hog the screens for ninety minutes while being interviewed before an audience at the Sydney Opera House. Has any Australian public figure ever been so indulged by the ABC? Our hypothetical tourist would have left Australia with the impression that she had visited a county rather than a country.
The lack of Australian programs might be accentuated during the holiday period but it is symptomatic of a larger, more general problem.
