Susan Bye

Television Comedy and Light Entertainment

This issue of MIA provides an opportunity to consider the various ways in which light entertainment and comedy intersect with the national, social and broadcast contexts in which they are produced.

Introduction: Television and the National

Free-to-air television, programmed for local and national audiences, continues to be an important part of the media landscape despite the multiple modes of delivery and consumption which define the post-broadcast era. While television has long been characterized by the transnational flow of programs and formats, there is an argument to be made that ‘the national’ remains vital not only to television studies but to networks, producers, regulators and consumers. In addition, the national specificity of broadcast television—as ‘a forum for working through social pressures as well as sharing social pleasures’ (Ellis 2000, 176)—is evident to any viewer trying to stay in touch with the minutiae behind the ‘news from home’ while travelling or working abroad. A recent case in point might be the ousting of Australian Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull by Tony Abbott at the end of 2009: while the ‘budgie’ in the pair of Speedos was circulated by the media as a national joke at Abbott’s expense, the pleasurable sharing of the joke depended upon familiarity with Australian popular culture as well as Australian politics. It is precisely such incongruities—between ephemeral and consequential instances of the national in the same media story—that informs much of the writing in this issue on Television and the National. This collection of articles had its origins in the conference on Television and the National convened by La Trobe University in Melbourne in 2008. One of the themes of the conference was the variety of ways in which television continues to be bound up with the national (more so, perhaps, than cinema or new media) in terms of policy, programming, audiences, ratings, critical reception, popular memory, public broadcasting and regulation of national content. Another conference theme was the proposition that certain, universal television genres—such as comedy, variety, sport and talk—are indebted to everyday versions of the national, understood as a loose set of spatial, temporal and cultural parameters that can be invoked in diverse ways for transient purposes, from civic education to domestic entertainment. The selection of papers published here addresses television and the national in three main ways: firstly, in terms of geographical space and its occupation, colonization and representation by metropolitan broadcasting hubs, and by public service documentary; secondly, in terms of historical time and commercial television’s rendering of the nation’s past as dramatic conflict, as well as the return of television’s own history as popular memory; and thirdly, as a set of permeable borders to be explored, negotiated and secured by television’s amiable hosts, bronzed lifeguards, border guards, glamorous spies and peoplemeters. Television’s mediation of national space is the focus of three articles that begin with the early years of broadcasting in Australia. Albert Moran proposes that a geographical history of the television industry in Sydney, together with a mapping of Sydney suburban and harbourside locations in television programs, demonstrate the ways in which a broadcasting hub plays a crucial role in colonising larger media environments such as

Sydney Tonight versus In Melbourne Tonight: Television, Taste and Identity

In this discussion, I focus on the varying fortunes of Sydney Tonight and In Melbourne Tonight (IMT) in order to explore the very local nature of television in Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s. As part of this process, I document the way that the success of IMT and the perceived failure of Sydney Tonight became the basis for a sustained discussion in both the Sydney and Melbourne print media about the respective discernment of each citys viewers. Buttressed by continuing public anxieties about the sophistication of the developing Australian television culture, the rejection of inferior locally produced programs became understood as a marker of discrimination and maturity.