Australian television, popular memory and suburbia

Different archives of television material construct different versions of Australian national identity. There exists a Pro-Am archive of Australian television history materials consisting of many individual collections. This archive is not centrally located nor clearly bounded. The collections are not all linked to each other, nor are they aware of each other, and they do not claim to have a single common project. Pro-Am collections tend not to address Australian television as a whole, rather addressing particular genres, programs or production companies. Their vision of Australia is 'ordinary' and everyday. The boundaries of 'Australia' in the Pro-Am archive are porous, allowing non-Australians to contribute material, and also including non-Australian material and this causes little sense of anxiety.

Towards an understanding of Australian genre cinema and entertainment : beyond the limitations of ‘Ozploitation’ discourse

While Australian cinema has produced popular movie genres since the 1970s, including action/adventure, road movies, crime, and horror movies, genre cinema has occupied a precarious position within a subsidised national cinema and has been largely written out of film history. In recent years the documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) has brought Australia’s genre movie heritage from the 1970s and 1980s back to the attention of cinephiles, critics and cult audiences worldwide. Since its release, the term ‘Ozploitation’ has become synonymous with Australian genre movies. In the absence of discussion about genre cinema within film studies, Ozploitation (and ‘paracinema’ as a theoretical lens) has emerged as a critical framework to fill this void as a de facto approach to genre and a conceptual framework for understanding Australian genres movies. However, although the Ozploitation brand has been extremely successful in raising the awareness of local genre flicks, Ozploitation discourse poses problems for film studies, and its utility is limited for the study of Australian genre movies. This paper argues that Ozploitation limits analysis of genre movies to the narrow confines of exploitation or trash cinema and obscures more important discussion of how Australian cinema engages with popular movies genres, the idea of Australian filmmaking as entertainment, and the dynamics of commercial filmmaking practises more generally.

A History of Popular Indigenous Music

SINCE THE INVENTION OF recording technologies like the phonograph in the late 1800s, Indigenous music has been performed and recorded across Australia for a wide range of audiences. In the early twentieth century, for instance, music was recorded by anthropologists keen to capture the sounds of a culture that was believed to be in rapid decline (Thomas). Individual performers were not considered important in these recordings; their music was produced for scientific posterity rather than popular pleasure. And even though Aboriginal participation in local music festivals, touring vaudeville shows, and community gatherings was well documented throughout the twentieth century, it was not until the 1950s that Indigenous “pop stars” began to sell records for mass consumption(Dunbar-Hall and Gibson). Yet, with the persistence of recording artists like Jimmy Little over the past sixty years, Indigenous musicians have steadily gained prominence in Australia’s mainstream. This has been particularly true of the past twenty years, especially since the Sydney Olympics, where promotional strategies have brought about a new popular pride in musical achievements, based upon a celebrated history of diverse sounds and voices.

Popular Science

Review of The Anatomist by Bill Hayes (Scribe, 2008). Bill Hayes wanted to write about Henry Gray, the author of Gray's Anatomy (1858), which at least until the television series connoted a standard text for anatomy students. Perhaps even more seductive for the biographer than the book's enduring appeal was a sense that Gray himself had partly disappeared from the historical record. Here was a scientist with the sort of brilliant young mind that seemed a specialty of the Victorian Age, and yet one who had not benefited from that period's compulsive documenting of the men of the moment and their deeds. Surely in that mystery there lay a narrative...

Studying change in popular culture: A "middle-range" approach

"This chapter reviews the capacity of the discipline field to account for the velocity and quality of digitally-driven transformations, while making a case for a "middle range" approach that steers between unbridled optimism ("all-change") and determined scepticism ("Continuity") about the potential of such change. The chapter focuses on online screen distribution as a case study, considering the evidence for, and significance of, change in industry structure and the main payers, how content is produced and by whom, the nature of content, and the degree to which online screen distribution has reached thresholds of mainstream popularity."

The popular mechanicals

In Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, six workers aspire to present a play for the Royal Wedding. We see their efforts and their antics in the framework of the Royal Court and the supernatural fairy world. We love them for their simplicity, laugh at their homespun ways and forgive their stumbles as they perform their play in the royal presence. In the marvellous irreverence of The Popular Mechanicals, Keith Robinson and Tony Taylor have thrown Shakespeare to the mercy of Australian larrikin humour and placed the lowly workers centre stage. This is A Midsummer Night's Dream without the Royals. Shakespeare's mechanicals become the stars, the kings of their own world, where dreams can come true, if only for a moment. With the innocence of clowns they love life, feel joy, know fear, bear sadness. In the end it is we the audience who become the Royal presence, to judge them if we dare.

The prankster’s passion: Using theatrical terms to unpack players motivations in popular social performance

Amongst social players, the prank, as a social performance form, holds a lot of potential to impact on personal, relational and social status within a group or between one group and another group. More than simply showing off, a prank in the strictest definition of the term, is a social performance in which one player, a prankster, deploys mischief, trickery or deceit, to cause a moment of anxiety, fear or anger about a happening for another spectator-become-collaborating-player, a prankee – to enhance social bonds, entertain, or comment on a social, cultural or political phenomenon. During a prank, the prankster’s ability to be creative, clever or culturally astute, and the prankee’s ability to be duped, be a good sport, play along, or even play/pay the prankster back, both become fodder for other spectators and society to scrutinize. In Australia, pranking traditions are popular with many social groups, from the community-building pranks of footballers, bucks parties and ‘drop bear’ tales told to tourists, to the more controversial pranks of radio shock jocks, activists and artists. In this paper, I consider whether theatrical terms – theoretical terms from the stage such as actor, acting, objective, arc, performance, audience and emotion, such as those offered by Joseph Roach – are useful in understanding the passion some social players show for pranksterism. Are theatrical terms such as Roach’s as useful as analysts of social self-performance such as Erving Goffman suggest they are? Do they assist in understanding the personal actions, reactions and emotions of prankster and prankee? Do they assist in understanding the power relations between prankster and prankee? Do they assist in understanding the relation between the prank – be it an everyday prank amongst families, friends and coworkers, an entertainment program prank of the sort seen on Prank Patrol, Punked or Scare Tactics, or an activist pranks perpetrated by a guerrilla artist, ‘jammers’ or ‘hackers’ intent on turning dominant social systems back on themselves – the social players, and the public sphere in which the prank takes place? I reflect on how reading pranks as performances, by players, for highly participatory audiences, helps understand why they are so prevalent, and so recurrent across times, cultures and contexts, and also so controversial when not performed well enough – or when performed too well – prompting outrage from the prankster, prankee or society as passionate as any debate about a performance by players in a theatre.

Use of "entertainment" chimpanzees in commercials distorts public perception regarding their conservation status.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are often used in movies, commercials and print advertisements with the intention of eliciting a humorous response from audiences. The portrayal of chimpanzees in unnatural, human-like situations may have a negative effect on the public's understanding of their endangered status in the wild while making them appear as suitable pets. Alternatively, media content that elicits a positive emotional response toward chimpanzees may increase the public's commitment to chimpanzee conservation. To test these competing hypotheses, participants (n = 165) watched a series of commercials in an experiment framed as a marketing study. Imbedded within the same series of commercials was one of three chimpanzee videos. Participants either watched 1) a chimpanzee conservation commercial, 2) commercials containing "entertainment" chimpanzees or 3) control footage of the natural behavior of wild chimpanzees. Results from a post-viewing questionnaire reveal that participants who watched the conservation message understood that chimpanzees were endangered and unsuitable as pets at higher levels than those viewing the control footage. Meanwhile participants watching commercials with entertainment chimpanzees showed a decrease in understanding relative to those watching the control footage. In addition, when participants were given the opportunity to donate part of their earnings from the experiment to a conservation charity, donations were least frequent in the group watching commercials with entertainment chimpanzees. Control questions show that participants did not detect the purpose of the study. These results firmly support the hypothesis that use of entertainment chimpanzees in the popular media negatively distorts the public's perception and hinders chimpanzee conservation efforts.

Television and the popular: viewing from the British perspective

The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about television's supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. The article argues that a fundamental tension between descriptive and politically activist discourses has confused academic writing about ›the popular‹. Television study in Britain arose not to supply graduate professionals to the television industry, nor to perfect the instrumental techniques of allied sectors such as advertising and marketing, but to analyse and critique the medium's aesthetic forms and to evaluate its role in culture. Since television cannot be made by ›the people‹, the empowerment that discourses of television theory and analysis aimed for was focused on disseminating the tools for critique. Recent developments in factual entertainment television (in Britain and elsewhere) have greatly increased the visibility of ›the people‹ in programmes, notably in docusoaps, game shows and other participative formats. This has led to renewed debates about whether such ›popular‹ programmes appropriately represent ›the people‹ and how factual entertainment that is often despised relates to genres hitherto considered to be of high quality, such as scripted drama and socially-engaged documentary television. A further aspect of this problem of evaluation is how television globalisation has been addressed, and the example that the issue has crystallised around most is the reality TV contest Big Brother. Television theory has been largely based on studying the texts, institutions and audiences of television in the Anglophone world, and thus in specific geographical contexts. The transnational contexts of popular television have been addressed as spaces of contestation, for example between Americanisation and national or regional identities. Commentators have been ambivalent about whether the discipline's role is to celebrate or critique television, and whether to do so within a national, regional or global context. In the discourses of the television industry, ›popular television‹ is a quantitative and comparative measure, and because of the overlap between the programming with the largest audiences and the scheduling of established programme types at the times of day when the largest audiences are available, it has a strong relationship with genre. The measurement of audiences and the design of schedules are carried out in predominantly national contexts, but the article refers to programmes like Big Brother that have been broadcast transnationally, and programmes that have been extensively exported, to consider in what ways they too might be called popular. Strands of work in television studies have at different times attempted to diagnose what is at stake in the most popular programme types, such as reality TV, situation comedy and drama series. This has centred on questions of how aesthetic quality might be discriminated in television programmes, and how quality relates to popularity. The interaction of the designations ›popular‹ and ›quality‹ is exemplified in the ways that critical discourse has addressed US drama series that have been widely exported around the world, and the article shows how the two critical terms are both distinct and interrelated. In this context and in the article as a whole, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for ›the popular‹ inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis.

The complete entertainment discography, from the mid-1890s to 1942

Mode of access: Internet.

The house-keeper's pocket-book, and compleat family cook : containing above twelve hundred curious and uncommon receipts in cookery, pastry, preserving, pickling, candying, collaring, &c., with plain and easy instructions for preparing and dressing every thing suitable for an elegant entertainment, from two dishes to five or ten, &c., and directions for ranging them in their proper order . . . /

Mode of access: Internet.