Home   >   Entertainment   >   TV & Radio   >   Article     

Television's mystery

May 10 2003
By Guy Rundle

Can we have a blue screen that's actually blue?" Gary, the studio director, is politely screaming from the control room, a Star Trek-style console with a bank of TV screens. Down below in Studio Nine, they're getting ready for the live studio audience taping of Comedy Inc, Nine's new sketch-comedy show. It's half-an-hour to go and the situation is one of standard, controlled panic. The bluescreen - the all-blue background that allows for back projection - is being hastily repainted, so that the scene, a crowded bar, won't have bits of wood surrealistically floating through it. But now there's another problem.

"I'm not doing that," says the actress, as David, the director, explains the sketch to her. It's a parody of the Cougar bourbon ads, in which a group of men persuade a comely bartendress to reach up to a high shelf, exposing her panties. Our parody version is, of course, a trenchant satire of sexism in advertising, although it doesn't appear that way to everyone.

"Um," says David "that is actually what you were hired for. Look at the script we sent you."

She reads for a second. "Well allright," she says walking towards her dressing room, "but in that case, I'm definitely going to put some underwear on."

The audience are beginning to be shown to their seats.

Live - well, live-to-tape - television; there is nothing like it for sheer adrenalin, for the feeling of being at the centre of something, for the rush of panic and exhilaration that fuels the fire. After we've filmed these dozen or so sketches, they'll be sliced, diced, mixed, sweetened, colour-graded and lathered with a laugh track, and a few days later it'll go out to more than a million people.

That's a standard audience figure for a successful Australian show, but it's still difficult to wrap your head around. It is 10 MCGs worth of people watching something you scribbled on the back of an envelope in a taxi a week earlier. It's one-sixth of the population of a major city doing the same thing at a given time. As a new writer on shows like Full Frontal, there was no greater thrill than hearing a sketch you'd written being recited the morning after by schoolkids on a tram.

For half a century, TV has had an occult social power that social scientists have struggled to explain. It is not difficult to understand why. If cinema has been the most powerful technology of the imagination yet devised - a process that wraps around your head and appears to dream your dreams before you do - and if radio has been the most powerful carrier of public life into the private sphere, then the fusion of the two was always going to have a profoundly transformative effect. Since vision is our primary, essential sense, and since it is the raw material of our fantasy life, a device that can supply this immediately and endlessly is not unlike the lab experiment in which a rat gets a whack of cocaine every time it pushes a button. Content on TV matters, of course; it wouldn't have the same hypnotic effect if output consisted entirely of Channel 31-style features of old men playing bouzoukis (which is great, don't get me wrong), but it doesn't matter as much as is often suggested. It is much harder for film/TV to be boring than it is for anything else. It seems to flow on independent of the viewer, and the sense that it is presenting existence itself back to you gives it a slightly mystical quality. Even the SBS weather map, which plays when the station is closed, appears on the ratings - in fact, some nights it outrates the actual shows on other channels.

TV alone did not deliver us the modern - or postmodern - world. The postwar combination of the cheap car and broadened home ownership were two other elements. Together they created a world so different from its predecessor - as far as social networks, connections, behaviours go - that we are yet to fully comprehend it. On the one hand it enhanced freedom, mobility, the ability to navigate a separate life path. On the other hand, it attenuated and atomised, and TV was one of the chief mechanisms for plugging the gap.

Take the sitcom - situation comedy, as it is now almost never called - for example. The one genre that is undeniably TV, its essential characteristic is that of an unchanging social state - an ensemble of lives that either don't change or change slowly over a course of years. It wouldn't work if you had to go to a cinema to see it every week; it only works because it appears to exist in parallel to your own life.

It is the life of the village, sweetened and sharpened with rapid-fire Yiddish humour, presented back to an audience that has long since moved to the city. And it is a source of deep pleasure, and new forms of humour and observation that wouldn't otherwise have arisen. Seinfeld is a reason to be cheerful about modernity. But there is something a little awry about a show labelled Friends, as if it were a generic product.

Now, for the first time in several decades, free-to-air TV audiences are falling. When digital fully replaces analogue in a few years, that process will continue - since the only thing that made "broad"casting was the limited number of channels on the analogue spectrum.

Eventually, as data transmission reaches new levels of speed and power, channels themselves will be surmounted by direct delivery of shows, movies etc, online, and "casting" - narrow or broad - will be largely superseded. That will be a loss as well as a gain, since the big-budget TV spectaculars of today may no longer be possible, unable to guarantee an audience sufficient for advertisers. Already, the sort of huge studio effort of a Comedy Inc live night - the phalanxes of lights, the Dalek-size cameras - has the feel of another era, echoing the ghosts whose smiling pictures line the wall. Don, Bert, Daryl, and Paul Hogan ... huge, toothy, forever glossy.

The only exception is Graham, Gra-gra, the king whose smile is tight-lipped, circumspect, as though he knew something the rest of us didn't.

Guy Rundle is a producer of Comedy Inc and a co-editor of Arena magazine.



- Logies: the smart money is on Georgie
- Television's mystery
- Night of nights ... or not
- Feature Shaun's new show
- Pushing driving skills to the limit - and beyond
- Radiowaves Singleton not interested?
-Full coverage

Also in Entertainment

Neckpieces are a girl's best friend

Hot pants and knicker flashers the look this year - if you dare

No Matrix 4 to be shot in OZ

School duo make their mark in footy fiction

Punk maestro

The trouble with being Macy

Green light for million-dollar Penn lawsuit

Fiction better than truth

Sticky Carpet

There's something about Liz

Critics jittery over Mel's Passion

The very private Portia

The AgeMost viewed articles
From midnight AEST

  1. Rose makes sure it counts