Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2008 book by Gerald Stone about Australia’s formerly dominant TV network:

* The Golden Age of Australian television. You could say it began the first moment viewers spotted the rich yellow hue glinting in their TV screens. With the introduction of colour transmission in March, 1975, audiences blossomed and advertising skyrocketed, bringing the nation’s three commercial networks an unexpected windfall, more than enough to happily share around. Seven and Ten duly proceeded to maximise their soaring profits and minimise their expenditures, as properly run companies do. Kerry Packer, though, had not the slightest interest in sharing anything. His natural instincts told him to break free of the pack and set out to be first and best whatever the price. The profits might be a lot less to begin with, but if he could establish Nine as the industry’s undisputed leader, advertisers would flock to his door begging for air time, willing, even, to pay a handsome premium on top of the prevailing ad rates. Let us be the one. That was where the real riches lay. Kerry took charge of the network, then consisting of TCN 9 in Sydney and GTV 9 in Melbourne, upon the death of his father, Sir Frank, in May, 1974. He knew little about the visual medium – his older brother Clyde had run the TV side of the business while Kerry focused on magazines. Clyde, though, was gone from the scene, off to make his own fortune by the time Kerry took over. He struggled for a year or so to attune his instincts to the special magic of the small screen…

* This, then, was Kerry Packer’s unbeatable dream machine, dominating an era when 85 per cent of Australian living rooms were lit by the flickering glow of a TV set and sewer levels rose measurably with the end of the Sunday night movie.

* The visual medium…was more about feelings than facts: resistant to the kind of detailed explanation that might appear in a newspaper feature page. Television was at its powerful best as a visceral experience, strumming the emotional chords, stimulating the senses, encouraging those watching to come to their own instinctual conclusions about the right or wrong of any situation. The difference between viewers and readers could be summed up in five words. Don’t tell me. Show me.

* Exactly what could one expect from an ACA going ‘upmarket’, as the Park Street executive demanded? Would audiences who tuned in to see cellulite cures and quarrelling neighbours stick around for a fact-filled inquiry into foreign trade kickbacks? That was no mere theoretical question. The producers of both ACA and Today Tonight were able to analyse each evening’s ratings minute by minute, and the evidence was inescapable. Any segment involving a more cerebral type of journalism – a political interview or in-depth investigation – was met with an instant turn-off. Far from ‘dumbing down’, then, the two current affairs shows were being as smart as free-to-air television can get – keeping in close touch with the changing nature of the available audience, giving the great majority of viewers precisely what they wanted. With mums cooking dinner, the kids playing up, the father coming home grumpy after a tough day at work, the last thing they needed at 6.30 at night was a TV show that demanded extra concentration. In an increasingly complicated world, they sought information immediately relevant to their own lifestyles and they were perfectly happy to look at a program filled with useful shopping tips or stories about families very much like themselves embroiled in the same kinds of problems they were struggling to get through. Meakin, then, foresaw a ratings disaster if ACA began straying too far from its tabloid roots, surrendering more and more air time to ‘worthier’ topics that might suit an ABC viewer but threatened to send its traditional audience rushing to change channels.

* ‘I don’t know any other way to manage people than through fear, to scare the fucking shit out of them,’ [Kerry Packer] admitted.

* first-hand knowledge gained by putting together hundreds of newscaff programs and, within those programs, many thousands of different stories. Each effort leaves behind a precious grain of residual knowledge to draw upon in the unending quest for more effective coverage. Was the shot of the weeping woman held a second too long, should the camera have moved in for a tighter close-up; was the poignancy of the moment spoiled by a grab of commentary when silence would have delivered greater impact? Those are some of the fine points a production team might debate in preparing a report that attempts to convey a certain mood: for example, a community’s grief over a tragic car accident. The art of presenting hard facts to a general audience can be even more exacting, particularly when dealing with complex political or economic developments. How can we make this story relevant to the everyday experiences of the typical viewer? If there are statistics that must be mentioned, what’s the best way to enable people to visualise them?

Back in the 1990s Peter Meakin pushed for the introduction of a new lifestyle show, Money, that – in theory – seemed far too dry and cerebral for commercial TV. When sceptical program executives demanded to know who would care enough to watch, the newscaff chief had a ready answer for them. ‘More people have hip pockets than backyards,’ he pointed out, drawing a parallel with Don Burke’s popular series. The key to such a concept was in making every segment, whether about comparing credit card fees or obtaining bank loans, as easily digestible as possible.

* Nine’s finance editor, Michael Pascoe, was well known to viewers of Business Sunday for his droll comments on the foibles of various leaders of the business community. Unfortunately, egg on the face is not a good look for a CBD mover and shaker in his pin-striped Zegna suit. Some of the victims of Pascoe’s distinctive brand of ego-puncturing satire began to complain directly to their contacts in the Park Street hierarchy. Suggestions of censorship are notoriously hard to pin down. No one at Nine was ever ordered in so many words: Tell Pascoe to pull in his claws. However, a familiar phrase began to be heard within PBL’s inner circle with ominous repetition. ‘He’s not taken seriously around the town.’ That evaluation might have been laughable if it hadn’t had such dire implications. If Pascoe had any credibility problem at all, it was in being taken far too seriously by the corporate heavyweights he poked fun at from time to time. The heads of Woolworths, Westfield and Macquarie Bank all felt his barbs but in Pascoe’s own estimation, he probably stretched his luck a bridge too far by taking on Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd, at that particular point in time enjoying a particularly cosy relationship with the Packers. Wherever the critical spark might have come from, the fuse was well and truly lit by late August 2002. Crikey, a gossipy e-mail newsletter avidly read by journalists, carried the first whisper. ‘Pascoe is having his turf stomped all over,’ wrote an arch-rival, Mark Westfield, economics commentator for the ABC’s 7.30 Report, as well as columnist for the Australian. ‘He can’t get a scoop anymore and it’s starting to show in the lack of coverage he’s getting in the Monday newspapers.’ That acerbic observation was clearly a payback for Pascoe’s trenchant criticism of some aspects of business coverage on the ABC. Westfield, however, soon moved on to the nitty-gritty. ‘The other interesting factor in Pascoe’s anger of late is the fact his position is uncertain. His job is being offered around. I was offered the job a few months ago. Nine no longer wants him, so he’s lashing out at his rivals. Grow up, Michael. You’re on the skids.’

* Broadcasting is not a mass medium in my view. It’s about finding ways to appeal to a myriad of minorities that come together in a mass – minorities which are constantly appearing and disappearing and reclustering, as it were. As a broadcaster you are licensed to serve the environment of a particular area and you have a responsibility to all those people in it. If you are going to be a successful broadcaster, then everybody in your potential area must be looking at you some time or another.

* The free-to-air audience may be in a constant state of flux, with web surfers and cable TV samplers drifting in and out of the picture, but it is still possible to find ways to bring viewers together en masse.

* Sunrise had been around in one form or another since the mid-1990s but its direct confrontation with Nine’s long-running and highly successful Today in the 6 am to 9 am slot began in earnest in October, 2002. It was then that a 27-year-old dynamo named Adam Boland put his distinctive stamp on what had previously been an almost totally news-oriented format. Boland comes across as Seven’s version of Julian Cress and David Barbour rolled into one, a creative hotshot with more steam coming out his ears than Old Faithful. As a producer he had something going for him only a second-place network like Seven could provide – virtually no resources whatsoever. Almost every change he was to introduce into the program’s weary old news-and-views format had to be manufactured out of sheer imagination. In that he was helped immensely by his early beginnings in radio, starting as a journalist at 4BC in Brisbane and moving on to 3AW in Melbourne.

Television is often thought of as an ‘intimate’ medium, with the audience able to see a presenter’s face; but the truth is, radio, at its best, relates to its listeners in a way TV is rarely capable of matching. ‘Radio taught me a sense of immediacy,’ Boland says, ‘but most of all, it taught me how to interact with the audience, because whether it’s AM or FM, they are all driven now by listening to their audience. I never understood why TV couldn’t get that. Well, we do get that now, and that’s what Sunrise does. It has very much the same focus as radio, our agenda firmly driven by what we think our viewers will like, not what the Canberra gallery perceives as exciting.’

With that unique perspective Boland decided on a format that would set its presenters free to discuss the talking points of the day with absolute spontaneity, very much like the all-in family banter around a breakfast table. The latest news would be read on the half-hour and might become a peg for discussion, but not necessarily – not if there were issues to debate of more relevance to an audience largely made up of switched-on, 40-something women, many of them juggling kids and jobs. In that kind of context, a news item on Brazilian inflation was more than likely to spark some good-natured jibing about the pros and cons of a Brazilian wax.

Boland encouraged his hosts to express whatever opinions popped into their heads and to inject as much of their personal life into the conversation as possible. One of the first and most important of his innovations was to encourage viewers to send in e-mails as well as letters to give his presenters some up-to-the-minute audience reaction to bounce off of. ‘Don’t think twice before you talk,’ was the simple sermon he preached to his on-camera team. Once they stopped to consider their remarks, they would begin to worry about whether some people might be offended – and that could only lead to self-censorship.

* During the mid-1970s, Channel 9 in Sydney bore the brunt of an embarrassing scandal exposing the way commercial TV managements misused their news departments to curry favour with important important advertisers. Until then, stations not only routinely banned coverage that might offend a sponsor but made sure there was always a pleasing little item to promote a department store fashion parade or opening of a shopping mall. The issue came to a head in August, 1974, over what should have been a big news story involving the inflated cost of laundry detergents, a major item on most grocery lists. A federal parliamentary inquiry accused leading soap manufacturers of cynically exploiting Australian housewives by bumping up their prices to pay for saturation TV ads that were both misleading and nonsensical – claims, for example, that ‘Rinso gets things whiter’ when it was made from the same basic formula as a competing product like ‘lemon charged’ Fab. Citing one reason or another, however, none of Sydney’s commercial TV stations saw fit to give air time to the parliamentary finding. A Channel 9 journalist, furious that the story he filed had been dropped after intervention by the sales director (who then happened to be Sam Chisholm), showed up on the ABC a few nights later to blow the whistle on the whole sordid affair. He was promptly sacked by an enraged Kerry Packer who had just taken charge of the network after his father’s death. In a subsequent investigation, the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal warned that TV stations could be stripped of their government-issued licences if found guilty of meddling in the editorial freedom of their news departments to further their own commercial interests.

* As Jamie became James [Packer], going through his late teens and into manhood, their obsessive competitiveness became a kind of bonding ritual, acted out in many different ways – sometimes including their good-natured vying for the favours of the same young woman.

* When it comes to the electronic media, however, the number of frequencies that can be used for radio or TV broadcasts is severely limited. Governments quite properly reserve the right to issue licences for use of the airwaves within their jurisdiction and in so doing, they set forth certain ‘community standards’ that the applicant for a licence must meet in order to maintain his right to broadcast. In the licence hearings that preceded the introduction of television in 1956, transcripts are filled with sanctimonious testimony as to how the applicants hoped to serve up a steady diet of religious, artistic and other uplifting programs fit for a nation of saints and scholars. No one took such pretensions seriously, of course, but the one pledge that remained open to enforcement – as verified by the Soap Powder Inquiry referred to earlier in this book – was the duty to keep viewers properly informed with news of genuine public interest, undistorted by self-serving biases. Television stations not only paid a sizeable fee for their licences, they had the added responsibility of guaranteeing impartial and accurate reporting of any issue or event that could be seen as having significant impact on the community as a whole. If the corporation that controlled the TV station happened to get into trouble with stock exchange regulators, that fact was to be reported as comprehensively and scrupulously as any other.

* Since its inception in 1981 Sunday had established itself as a welcome sanctuary within the commercial TV landscape – a place of leisurely contemplation and enlightenment far removed from the crassness and hype of most mass audience programming. Its two-hour format offered a stimulating potpourri of news, political interviews and commentary, expertly crafted feature stories, in-depth investigations, movie reviews and an occasional sampling of the performing arts. No other commercial network would have ever dared to attempt a program like it, considering the limited audience for such cerebral content; and the ABC could never have afforded the cost of such a quality production even in prime time, let alone at the unlikely hour of 9 am. The program was there only because Kerry ordained it to be so, perhaps encouraged by Bruce Gyngell’s dictum that broadcasting was all about appealing to ‘a myriad of minorities’, bringing together as many different segments of the audience as possible. The show went on to build a surprisingly large following for that time of the morning, and for much of its life even managed to rake in a modest profit from advertisers keen to reach an elite section of wealthier, better educated viewers.