Albert Moran

Television's new engines.

Internationalization is a key to the success of television formats. To understand format trade it is necessary to draw out distinctions between formats and genre. Engines— innovations in programming engineered by format devisors—allow formats to regenerate and hybridize across genres. The core principle of formats, however, is the practice of franchising. Causal relations can be established between formats, engines, and the tradability of television culture. The article shows how formats have impacted platforms, markets, labor, audiences, and distribution of TV content.

Global franchising, local customizing: The cultural economy of TV program formats

Contemporary international television offers a rich site for the investigation of matters concerning cultural adaptation. Over the past 20 years, a formalized, organized system has developed whereby program production knowledge can be borrowed from place to place for the re-creation of a television program in another territory. The TV program format is a kind of template or recipe whereby particular industry knowledges are packaged to facilitate this process of remaking. This article provides a trade background to the development of the TV format industry. It links the TV formats emergence to the practice of franchising, with its attendant cultural need to customize the format to suit local audience taste and outlook in a particular territory. This process of localization is examined on three levels using a model derived from translation theory. The article finds that the localization which occurs in such processes primarily involves the development of content that is nationally unexceptional through which audiences in a national territory can be addressed as a collective ‘we’. Even beyond this detail, format adaptation raises crucial issues concerning globalization and nationalization, and these are addressed in the final part of the analysis.

Makeover on the move: Global television and programme formats

In 2006 Freehand TV produced the local version of the BBC lifestyle programme Honey We’re Killing the Kids for Network Ten in a format deal with BBC Worldwide Australasia. In 2004 the Seven Network had already previously made an Australian version of the BBC’s personal makeover series What Not to Wear which was unsuccessful with local audiences and ended up being relegated to the lifestyle channel of cable television. Of course, there has been a long history of the Australian broadcasting and reworking of British programmes derived both from the BBC and from the other UK network broadcasters. Once the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC was inevitably involved in adapting BBC programmes for local audiences. What makes the recent revamping arrangements significant is the fact that the BBC now finds a ready market with the Australian advertiser-supported networks such as Channels Seven and Nine. By dint of its joint involvement in producing or overseeing local versions of its formats, BBC Worldwide derives a production as well as a licence fee from the Australian commissioning that is returned to corporate funds. This case, where the BBC bypasses its traditional sister organization in Australia in favour of a more commercial marketplace and is now actively involved in the Australian television production sector, is by no means unique. BBC Worldwide has fixed on a plan to expand its television format programme business across the globe. As part of this move, it will initially focus on four television markets: Australia, Canada, India, and the United States. It has identified these as format adaptation target-territories where it will be involved in various joint-venture arrangements in the production and marketing of programmes first devised for broadcast by BBC Television in the UK market (ABC 2007). As such an example suggests, contemporary international television is involved in the complex task of transformation, not only at the level of the makeover genre discussed in these pages and elsewhere (Heller 2006, 2007) but also at other levels. Hence the remarkable international success of the Columbian telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea (Ugly Betty) (Schmitt, Bisson, and Fey 2005). Yo soy Betty does not belong to the domain of factual infotainment television – as doWhatNot toWear and Honey We’re Killing the Kids – where the genre of makeover has mostly appeared to reside. The show is scripted, with on-screen roles played by professional actors. After the astonishing worldwide popular success of reality television programme formats over much of the past decade – especially Survivor and Big Brother – Yo soy Betty is a breakthrough programme that challenges conventional television forms of fiction and drama. It is not makeover television in a generic sense, although in part its plot contains a reworking of one of the most famous of makeover fairy stories, that of Cinderella. Yo soy Betty’s success presents the possibility of an international transformation of the form of scripted drama in the mode of the Latin American telenovela (LaPastina 2004).

Cultural Power in International TV Format Markets

A recent volume on international television is instructive in pinpointing the strengths and shortcomings of research on the matter of globalization and media (Elasmar, 2003). Announcing a paradigm shift, the editor sees the collection of essays breaking with an older model of cultural imperialism in favour of a more diverse understanding of the influence and effects of TV programmes imported from elsewhere, most especially the United States (Elasmer, 2003, pp. 1–16). Hence, instead of a totalizing perception of the impact of TV programming, as had been implicitly advanced in a series of studies beginning with the famous UNESCO-sponsored international TV programme traffic study (Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974), the book is concerned to suggest that a more nuanced reading of a global situation is necessary. Audience studies at the level of the nation-state are an important addition in the new paradigm shift (cf. Gage, 1996; Held et al., 1999; Degnbol-Martinussen, 2002). However, this is by no means any kind of dramatic reconfiguration of the field. After all, Tomlinson’s 1991 critique of the cultural imperialism approach had already suggested that that route to the study of international TV was a dead end (Tomlinson, 1998). In any case, even in 1983, Nordenstreng and Varis had advised of the need for important qualifications to the apparent picture of a one-way flow of TV programming (Nordenstreng & Varis, 1983, pp. 115–132). Likewise, in 1996, Sinclair, Jacka and Cunningham had also stressed the need for a more nuanced understanding of the impact of international TV programming exports by scrutinizing the interplay of these with home-grown industries in terms of different regions and territories across the globe (Sinclair et al., 1996). Given these precedents, it is difficult to imagine what the new paradigm is that is being advanced in the volume

Introduction: The global flow of creative ideas

In the era of late modernism, various pressures play a decisive role in shaping the texture and meaning of the world around us. Population, work, transportation, new technologies of information and communication, lifestyle cultures and other forces are increasingly mobile, and this in turn helps make for a new set of public and personal surroundings. Social life everywhere now appears to share more and more in an international (if not a global) order, even if inequality and stratification remain common inside territories and across territories. Still, the perception is that a particular cultural life is increasingly universal. More and more consumers come to share in its practices and products, with those products becoming more and more homogeneous. This standardization argument finds much support in the apparent internationalization of many elements of media, entertainment, leisure and lifestyle cultures, with cultural conglomerates determined to maximize their global market reach. Once upon a time, in order to understand the economic, political and cultural forces affecting citizens and society, it was mostly deemed sufficient to look within the boundaries of the nation-state. Over the past two decades, these same pressures of globalization have impacted on critical research, highlighting the methodological need to adopt an optic that is more cross-border and transcultural as a means of gaining greater understanding of cultural life.

The place of television programme formats

‘Formats are king!’ or so declares the trade publication TV Formats Weekly. Indeed there are solid grounds for such claims regarding the current place of this type of programming in television schedules around the world. Formats are perceived to be highly effective in mitigating commercial uncertainties brought about by multi-channelling, and the social uncertainties associated with cultural mobility and de-territorialization. However, their ubiquity also presents us with an interesting geo-cultural paradox. As an industrial commodity, formats have a highly mobile, readily transferable quality. However, as a social and cultural artefact, they can take on a form that is specific to the particular community for which they are adapted. In this article, we explore the characteristics of these multi-layered geographic interrelationships and consider the conceptual value (and limitations) of some of the key terms around which the role and function of formats have been understood.

Reflections on the Grundy Buy-out

The 1995 sale of Grundy Worldwide to the UK-based Pearson group raises some interesting questions around broadcast television both in Australia and elsewhere. Until the las1 decade, Australian television production companies were mostly immune co takeovers and buy-outs. Local program packagers were proprietary companies, invariably under-capitalised and owning little in the way of capital assets. The pattern for these companies was not sale or takeover more commonly the fate of television stations and networks but rather a cessation of operations when they could no longer sell new programs. One important exception to this rule was Crawford Productions. Between 1985 and 1989 Crawford Productions changed hands three cimes and none of the Crawford family are now associated with the company. At the time of the second sale of the company, to Ariadne Developments in 1987, there was a suggestion chat Ariadne intended to open a theme park on the Gold Coast that would feature various spin-offs from successful Crawford television series. This project gives a clue co some of the assets that changed hands in the Pearson buy-om. The Grundy sale was not only a private affair, involving a propriecary company whose sale was not subject to either review or regulation, but it was also a foreign affair, with the sale agreement and transfer occurring in ocher national territories. More imponantly, unlike the Crawford sales, the Grundy sale means that che company now belongs to a parenc group of companies that is not Australian. Since 1959 Grundy has been involved in producing Australian versions of US television game shows, since 1971 ir has been producing export-oriented films and television programs, since 1979 the

Television format traffic-public service style

Beginning in 1998, there has been an explosion in the flow of television programme formats worldwide witnessing to the advent of a global television system for programme production and distribution. In fact, this kind of programme adaptation and remaking had a long gestation that reaches back even before the beginnings of regular television broadcasting to the early 1940s. Media scholars were very slow over the subsequent half-century to register what was taking place, let alone inquire into its dynamics and critical significance. If programme remaking was noticed at all, it was understood in high culture terms as confirmation of crassness and materialism operating in commercial television. Critical research added a further charge of media imperialism to describe the supposed national and social outcomes of such a practice. However, since the 1990s, scholarly inquiry has affected a seachange in its engagement with the phenomenon of television programme remaking that was prompted not least by a realisation that its commercial and cultural operations and consequences are more interesting, intriguing, and multi-dimensional than was earlier thought. In this context, three programme format transfers that happened between the UK and Australia in the 1960s are examined. The three sets of programme transfer constitute a rich, engaging area of analysis for several reasons including the fact that they were ‘live’ programme formats whereas their exchange took place in a public service context, the latter being a sector that usually falls under the critical radar. Drawing connections of this kind across an imperial cultural space can make a significant contribution to transnational television history from a comparative Anglophone perspective.

Vocal hierarchies in early Australian quiz shows, 1948-71: Two case studies

This article examines the complexities involved in transferring content and genre from one media platform to another by emphasising the shifting, fragile yet stabilising part that sound can play in such a transformation. Early television is often labelled as a period of ‘radio with pictures’, and this intriguing designation directs our attention to this ‘moment’ of changeover. This analysis explores the parameters of sound in televisions displacement of radio as the primary broadcasting medium in Australia in the 1950s. We focus in particular on the role of the human voice (host, audience and contestants) in two early quiz shows – Wheel of Fortune and Pick-a-Box – that began on radio and were both successfully remade as television programs.

Introduction: Sound media, sound cultures

Sound is an ever-present, ever-changing component of communication and media. It has been a central part of the dramatic developments that have occurred in recording, screen exhibition, radio and television broadcasting and telecommunications technologies since the 1800s. Yet, in relation to audio-visual media forms in particular, sound is often seen as a secondary element – something that is subordinate to the visual immediacy and the assigned textual primacy of the image. The aim of this issue of MIA is to help redress this imbalance and reassert the place of sound within wider conceptualisations of media and culture. The articles engage with the significance of the aural from a wide range of perspectives, taking in its experiential and immersive characteristics in relation to screen media as well as the commercial contexts of sound and music and its role in identity-making and social organisation.