A link is here. From 3 Feb 1973.
Interview with John Cameron. Talks about the difficulties of Delta. The fact Dynasty was the first ABC show to inspire a commercial TV rip off (Catwalk) since Stormy Petrel (Jonah).
The ABC drama department is the biggest make-believe factory in the country. Its facilities and equipment are the envy of just about every film and television producer here. It puts a greater diversity of fictional Australians on television screens than anybody else, and its methods, policies and philosophies have become almost a hobby to some of the people in the industry who have had the years and the traumas in which to study them. In the past 16 years, it has produced stories about Australian colonisers, Australian customs agents, Australian scientists, Australian soldiers, Austra lian newspaper and television proprietors almost anyone except Australian cops, because the commercials give their all to those, and the ABC’s brief is what someone long ago labelled “interpersonal relation ships.” Yet for all their variety of setting and character, these productions have found the cult audience to be as scarce as high ratings. When, in the early days of television, the ABC began its colonial drama cycle with the problems of Governor Bligh in “Stormy Petrel,” it was commanding 25 percent of the viewing audience. These days, for what it terms serious drama, doing well means getting an eight. And although “The Forsyte Saga” didn’t do much better (averaging a nine on the first showing), it got people to talk about it and the ABC which is partly what the business is about. And unlike ABC current affairs, local ABC drama has never managed what is called “step flow,” the process by which the commercials, using the ABC’s innovations as a yardstick, develop them for a wider audience. Apart from the colonial boom which followed “Stormy Petrel,” only Tony Morphett’s “Dynasty” has inspired the commercials to imitation. In the wake of that, Seven produced the spin-off, “Catwalk,” about a women’s magazine, for a while.
It talks about how David Goddard set up a film crew for Delta. John Cameron used it for co productions.
Article - DRAMA The biggest make-believe factory identifier
http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1628114640
P 39 3 Feb 1973
DRAMA The biggest make-believe factory By SANDRA HALL SOMEWHERE out on Sydney’s drowsing Lane Cove River aboard the old ferry Lady Hopetoun is Leonard Teale, late of Homicide, in an Edwardian military uniform and a detachable moustache. With him are a camera crew, three of Seven Little Australians and a director, Ron Way, piloting them through the last pages of Ethel Turner’s chapter four. Waiting for them on the bushbound jetty of Riverview College are an in-period shelter shed built that morning and decorated with bare-knuckle fighters and Springheeled Terror of Stepney Green handbills, some sweating actors in greasepaint, woollen trousers and bits of tissue stuck in their collars, and the Lamaro catering service.
The ABC is filming on location, and the ABC, like the most reliable of boarding houses, serves lunch on time. Crumbed cutlets, grilled tomatoes, beans, chips and corn niblets, a menu which worries the tactful, harassed unit manager, Mike Baynham into peering into his folder of memoes and movement blocks. Yes, he’d thought he had. There in the sheaf of foolscap, nestles a line about no fried food on hot days.
The ABC drama department is the biggest make-believe factory in the country. Its facilities and equipment are the envy of just about every film and television producer here. It puts a greater diversity of fictional Australians on television screens than anybody else, and its methods, policies and philosophies have become almost a hobby to some of the people in the industry who have had the years and the traumas in which to study them. In the past 16 years, it has produced stories about Australian colonisers, Australian customs agents, Australian scientists, Australian soldiers, Austra- lian newspaper and television proprietors almost anyone except Australian cops, because the commercials give their all to those, and the ABC’s brief is what someone long ago labelled “interpersonal relation- ships.” Yet for all their variety of setting and character, these productions have found the cult audience to be as scarce as high ratings. When, in the early days of television, the ABC began its colonial drama cycle with the problems of Governor Bligh in “Stormy Petrel,” it was commanding 25 percent of the viewing audience. These days, for what it terms serious drama, doing well means getting an eight. And although “The Forsyte Saga” didn’t do much better (averaging a nine on the first showing), it got people to talk about it and the ABC which is partly what the business is about. And unlike ABC current affairs, local ABC drama has never managed what is called “step flow,” the process by which the commercials, using the ABC’s innovations as a yardstick, develop them for a wider audience. Apart from the colonial boom which followed “Stormy Petrel,” only Tony Part of the cast of the ABC’s Seven Little Australians. Left to right: Tania Falla, Jennifer Ciuff, Mark Shields-Brown, Anna Hruby, Barbara Llewellyn and Mark Clark Morphett’s “Dynasty” has inspired the commercials to imitation. In the wake of that, Seven produced the spin-off, “Catwalk,” about a women’s magazine, for a while. So the ABC still imports its drama cults “Callan,” “Steptoe and Son.” It hasn’t yet been able to grow its own as the Cash and Harmon production company has with the instant sins of “Number 96.” But in February, the ABC resumes the fight with Tony Morphett and three other writers including David Williamson on feminism (“Certain Women”), and a production schedule which ranges from a supernatural series (“Things That Go Bump in The Night”) to a Troubleshooters of the Ansett-TNT world, to a classical allegory about two squatting families who play out their own version of the Trojan War. There will also be several all-film co-productions where “Seven Little Australians” fits in. After some three years of trying, the ABC finally found a partner for a 10-part series of half-hour episodes, which will go to air later this year. The ABC is contributing its staff and facilities, and a minor part of the above-the-line costs (a much-used and much suspect phrase, which for a start, takes in actors’ salaries, materials for sets and costumes and film stock and laboratory costs). In other words, it is spending what it would normally spend on a black-and-white electronic production, while the extra money needed to make the series in color film has been found by its financial partners in the venture, Ethel Turner Productions. This, is a name for the Ethel Turner estate, represented by the novelist’s son, Sir Adrian Curlewis. It was granted the money by the Commonwealth Film Development Corporation. The third partner is Global Television, the ABC’s foreign distribution agency, which is also providing a small cash investment. The arrangement is typical of the kind in which ABC drama has been engaged since John Cameron took over as department head three years ago. Cameron is tall, grey-haired, urbane and earnest about the pressures and shortcomings of his department. Opening his desk drawer and grabbing his lunch (four Ry-Vita biscuits in
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greaseproof paper), he settles into a chair and talks feelingly about the old ABC conundrum how to innovate while keeping an audience. One of his answers is continuity of production. He has evolved the co-production system as a way of using the film crew which was set up by his predecessor, David Goddard to make “Delta,” the all-film series about a highly-romanticised team of scientists with CSIRO connotations. The arguments about “Delta” involve more than its quality. Among some of those who worked on it, it’s valued for having imparted expertise and experience in film. Among other people, it’s cursed for the programs it curtailed with the size of its budget and for what it did to the morale of the stymied. Under Cameron’s administration, there have been and will be no “Deltas.” He has set up three production streams. Two work only in black and white according to the cheaper method of integrating videotape with a limited amount of film. The third works in film and in color, but only to make co-productions like “Seven Little Australians.” While co-productions come in a variety of financial equations, the ideal in Cameron’s words, are “programs we make on other people’s money.” In the ABC’s terms, it’s doing the practical thing being conservative with public money. Some independent film-makers are not so sanguine about the scheme. One, Michael Thornhill, sees the deal as a bad one. “Okay, we can use ABC staff and facilities, but in return for these, we give away Australian rights, which means we don’t get any money back until the film’s sold overseas. As well, you have to work to the ABC’s cost structure its eight-hour day. for one thing, which means plenty of overtime. “You say that doesn’t matter because the ABC pays the salaries. But any ABC crew is bound to include contract workers and you’re up for those, as well as lab costs, which on any production, comes to about one-quarter the budget.” Film-makers also see the ABC as a competitor for the funds of the Film Development Corporation, one of whose board members is the ABC’s general manager, Talbot Duckmanton. It’s true that the ABC itself doesn’t lobby for grants, but its co-producers do. And in the case of “Seven Little Australians,” corporation money is being used to finance a venture initiated and creatively controlled by the ABC. None of this might matter to anyone but other film-makers. But since the ABC drama department has not exactly established itself as a consistent hit-maker in its 16 years of operation, there is an argument for making co-productions more attractive to outside talent. One ex-ABC producer who moved on after making one of the department’s best-remembered series, thinks it could use some. For a while, he considered putting his name to this opinion, them changed his mind, People who have worked for the ABC never discount entirely the possibility that they may return or at least collaborate again. Its promise is always more tantalising than its reality, which he found to be shadowed with puritanism. “It’s almost as if Calvin is looking over their shoulder saying that’s not nice. People don’t do that - or if they do. they shouldn’t do it on television. There is also a great belief in the ABC Leonard Teale and Elizabeth Alexander as husband and wife in Seven Little Australians about the sentimentalism in the Australian character a sentimentalism that I think is actually quite marginal. “Finally, everything is geared to the conventional play form. And a lot of the most talented young film-makers around want to try other things, so they’re not interested in the ABC.” Sentimentalism was certainly the motive behind the conception of the World War II series, “Over There,” which was seen last year. Classified in ratings tactics as a “volume weekly program” a piece of insurance against the effects of anything more esoteric it was meant to attract RSL viewers “at a time,” John Cameron elaborates casually, “when current affairs was cutting them down to size. We wanted to do a nice sentimental look, but not an unkind look at the ordinary people who fought the war.” But the strategy didn’t altogether come off. The digger vote went untapped. In survey language, the series wasn’t sufficiently exposed to its target audience, which means they didn’t give it a chance. This experience alone would seem to question the wisdom of trying to second-guess sectional tastes. But the ABC doesn’t give up so easily. Plan B sends “Over There” back into production shortly with less ambiguous plotlines and “a more sympathetic” central character. The irascible, idiosyncratic Cyril Kirby, brilliantly played by John Meillon, will get a better temper, three stripes and a transfer from kitchen to quartermaster’s store. When in doubt, go respectable, The same sense of artistic contradiction shows up in “Certain Anna Hruby in the role of Nell
Women,” the latest series devised by Tony Morphett. A series of six 50-minute episodes, each focusing on one of the women in a contemporary, middle-class Australian family, it fleshes out the issues of feminism with stereotypes. Its situations are literal, its contrasts extreme. June Salter, who seems forever doomed to wear strange hats on television, plays a human shorthand symbol for Self-Sufficient Woman, which means a full business diary and a lover eager for marriage. The family scenes sound, as someone said at a preview, as if Gwen Meredith were creative consultant, and the two Morphett-written episodes I saw betrayed an unnerving lack of ease with detail. Jennifer Cluff as Judy BBC drama, on which the ABC is modelled in so many respects, excels at the management of the apparently inconsequential. Mannerisms and small talk are there only to reveal character. But “Certain Women” vibrates with bits of excess business. Yet “Certain Women” has a future with the ABC. It is to be expanded into a serial, and the hope is that it will become what last year’s migrant family serial, “Lane End,” was not a prime-time urban “Bellbird.” A look of true pain crosses John Cameron’s face when he mentions “Lane End.” “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says, then goes on to do so, telling a story of delays, tensions and misguided optimism, climaxing a week before scheduled airtime with a team of newly appointed scriptwriters working without storylines in a barely controlled frenzy to finish on time. “Lane End” was Cameron’s blackest experience since taking on his job, and he’s even more depressed by the fact that the series rated as well as anything done by his department in 1972. “It’s no use saying the’ people watching ‘Number 96’ aren’t our audience. They are,” is the conclusion he draws from that. About the Norman Lindsay Festival (a .series of dramatisation of Lindsay’s novels), he says, “We hoped to be evangelists in a way. We weren’t too worried about the size of the audience. But a 4 or a 5 or a 6 rating is the minimum of what drama should be prepared to tackle. It should be holding and building an audience, and we should be able to hit that target. “I didn’t like the Lindsay thing all the time. ‘Redheap’ got closest to what we wanted. But generally it worked pretty well. It was probably.our best this year. “ ‘Behind the Legend’, too. That’s been criticised quite a lot, but it succeeded on two counts. It promoted an awareness of our history turned up an amount of fascinating material, and secondly, it was conceived as an attempt to cope with the 8 pm problem. Because so much of our money is spent on drama, there is a feeling.we should have an 8 pm slot. But if we’d made it an hour-long series, it would have conflicted with the other channels in such a way we’d have been getting only people prepared to pass up every other piece of drama showing. So we snuck it in quietly and it did almost exactly what we wanted it to do held quite a good audience and was a good try-out for people who wanted to write scripts and had a story because the plotline was there for them,” The approach seems to smack slightly of piece-meal do-gooding, and I wonder how far a bit of actual but unclassifiable art would get if it turned up unexpectedly one day. Cameron says that he’s ready to consider anything with a reasonable chance of success, but that readable single plays aren’t submitted. Meanwhile, Thomas Keneally has plunged into the passions and politics of an isolated and finally abandoned colonial settlement at the. top of the Northern Territory. It has a disintegrating military regime, an oppressed minority and ultimate destruction, and it’s hoped that once Keneally has put that lot through its paces, the result will be an entry for this year’s Prix Italia. . For a writer, the ABC can be either a haven or a padded cell. It has an internal political history as complex as that of a Renaissance prince. It also has its historians and they all have their anecdotes. For an actor, it has all the comforts and frustrations of that boarding house. ABC’s Cameron: the ideal programs are ones made on other people’s money Everything is “found.” Only the interpretation is at times in danger of getting lost. For in the complicated network of pre-planning that goes into any ABC series, read-through time usually gets left out. Michael Boddy, who played “Redheap’s” Mr Bandparts, remembers that there was simply no time for rehearsals, and that when the series went to air, he was interested to see it contained four or five different acting styles. “I was doing one, Kate Fitzpatrick was doing another, a third person was doing something else. Everything from farce to naturalism, because there was no time, to get together.” Who is the ABC audience? The Commission’s research department did a door-to-door survey several years ago and came up with the information that they weren’t categorised by the possession of anything in particular, except perhaps maturity. They were inclined to fact rather than-fantasy, but knew the names Cf playwrights. With continued exposure to the foreign product, they have also developed television tastes so sophisticated that Australian program- mers are not consistently satisfying them. John Cameron believes the gap is closing. It would be nice to think so. For those who can’t live happily ever after at “Number 96,” the ABC is running the only “interpersonal relationships” show in town.
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