John Cameron on being ABC Director of Drama 1970

From here:

I  became Director of Television Drama early in 1970. When I had been servicing drama productions in my early career, I noticed that producers tended to select foreign scripts for production. In one way this made sense, as the producer could be sure that he was working on a proven product, but it limited the scope for local writers to deal with local themes. Moreover, we could buy productions of overseas scripts for a fraction of the cost of mounting our own production. I resolved that, from the moment I took over, any production mounted with our own money, would be by an Australian writer.

Thanks to David Goddard, who had preceeded me as Director of TV Drama, the ABC had the nucleus of a drama film unit, but some inescapable film problems and bad luck had resulted in cost overruns and there were strong moves to close it down and restrict TV drama to electronically taped shows with filmed inserts. Such productions were not subject to the vagaries of the weather, nor to the costs of routinely operating away from the studio base. If we wanted to retain the advantages of drama in actual locations and to avoid the limitations of live editing, we had to find ways of reducing the cost of filming to the ABC.

While increased efficiency might have a marginal effect, the only real solution was to find partners to bear some of the costs. The BBC was the obvious first choice as a source of funds for joint ventures, but the BBC rightly believed that it could do what it did better than anyone else, and, at that time, it too was starting to explore ways of raising money to keep its staff fully occupied.

While living in London, I got to know Ian Warren and Tom Donald, the co-directors of Global Television, who handled the ABC’s purchases and sales with European commercial organisations. As selling agents for our productions, it made sense for them to make their job easier by enhancing the product they were to sell.

Money for our productions could come in two ways. One way was for a purchaser to buy “off the plan”, getting a better deal than if he waited to buy the finished product. The other was to invest in the production and have a creative input in the production process. As the ABC was a substantial purchaser of productions from other television networks, Global had a useful lever to encourage reciprocal purchases of our productions. Global also had a production arm of their own in Portland Productions. Over the years we were to do a number of joint productions with Portland Productions. In these, as with the BBC, we had to surrender ultimate artistic control in the product.