In The Vernacular: A Generation of Australian Culture and Controversy
Stuart Cunningham
Language: English
Pages: 300
ISBN: 0702236705
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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memory, it will soon survive only in the tales we tell our children. But what a time it was – a time of Empire . . . never before or since has any country embraced a craze the way that Britain embraced their Empire . . . To understand, you have to go back . . . 109 in the vernacular This is probably all the more significant as Edith is a ‘composite’ character, created specifically to perform this function. Cooper, the sports journalist who also performs a sort of delegated narratorial role in
released on DVD and are readily available.) But it must be said that the problematic positioning of Australian popular culture has not inhibited the growth, quality and success of academic cultural, media and communication studies in this country. Several surveys10 point to interrelated fields of inquiry which have emerged strongly over a generation and now occupy positions of consolidated popularity among students (Putnis’s and Molloy and Lennie’s surveys have shown since the 1970s the growth and
proportion of young viewers and leading to runaway popularity. By 1988 it had become the most popular children’s and young adults’ program on British television and it has remained in the ten most-watched programs in Britain for several years. In an effort to counter it, the ITV network from 1990 similarly stripscheduled Home and Away to immediately follow Neighbours in the early evening. By early 1989, no less than fifteen hours a week of Australian soap opera was scheduled on British television,
Neighbours were complemented by program scheduling. Both industry commentators13 and some journalists regard such factors as a necessary and even partially sufficient recipe for success. Kate Bowles14 argues against the ‘common mythology’ that ‘open plan housing, beautiful people and hot weather’ in Neighbours and Home and Away are the key ingredients. It was their placement in the schedules – the late afternoons as well as, with Neighbours, the early afternoons – that laid the basis for their
Australian Television: A Genealogy of Great Moments and Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, McKee seeks to establish canons of great moments and ‘bests’; this is the fan/telephile discourse at its strongest. In Australian Television, he attempts to construct a cultural heritage for Australian television where it barely exists. Turner periodises the history of local TV current affairs as one of (possibly terminal) decline from its high point in the 1960s and early 1970s. He defends this ‘decline