Andrew Olle Media Lecture 2005

The 702 ABC Sydney 10th annual Andrew Olle Media Lecture was delivered last night by John Doyle.

Parts of the transcript follows:

“Cross media laws are to change. It will be possible in the near future for the
major players to be able to own radio stations, newspapers and television
networks in the one market. This is going to lead to greater diversity of opinion
apparently.

“I come to this forum as a consumer of media and as someone who’s been
fortunate enough to sit a little on the inside and observe aspects of how it
appears to work. At my first real job at the Small Arms Factory in Lithgow I
bought the Daily Mirror every afternoon on my way home. I used to savour the
football and cricket think pieces from the likes of Phil Tressider and Ian Heads
and Geoff Prenter and they brought me up to speed with the notion of cliché. At
the time I had no idea that this would be my career-making preparation allowing
me to express moments of life in terms of a traditional softening-up period,
forwards stamping their authority on the match, players having either good hands
or quick hands or both, being able to sell a dummy or sell a dump or both, being
able to bundle people into touch with either a grass cutter or ball and all tackle
while second rowers hunted in packs or made busts up the middle or the hard
yards before creating something out of nothing and being able to score from
anywhere on the paddock while you could throw a blanket over the defence.
Players could have the ball on a string in a moment of individual brilliance or
weave their magic in a desperate bid requiring courage and commitment in the
trenches in a game played in two halves where both teams were a credit to
themselves with one player being an ornament to humanity in a match where the
game was the ultimate winner. In thirty five years about the only new
contributions are American ones: this rookie stepping up to the plate, could end
up a hall of famer at this level. Yet despite the tightly spin doctored homogenized
responses of sports stars and commentators there is still the odd surprise. Ray
Warren suggesting at one stage that the ball popped up like a plume of molten lava or Benny Elias on SBS saying it’s like comparing apples and apples, you
just can’t do it.

“I’ve always loved radio. Mornings was Gary O’Callaghan and Sammy Sparrow
until pop meant the 2SM Good Guys introduced the songs that would become
the diary of adolescence. Many years later, what’s changed? Talkback. That’s all.
Commercial radio now: AM. Bandwagon talkback, water cooler drivel as talkback
thought starters, competitions, finance and weather, quizzes, traffic, more
talkback, then an inflammatory lunatic with talkback. FM. Whacky clubs or
Crews, old music or a balance of old music with unthreatening new,
competitions, requests, racy talkback with swearing and repetition. All programs
are substantially written by the daily newspapers. Breakfast and Mornings used
to have a deal – Breakfast got the stories on the odd pages and Mornings got the
ones on the even pages. The quirky stories are good for the Crews – often they
are survey – based stories. Four out of every ten Swedes prefer briefs to boxers.
‘Come on guys, what do you prefer? Give us a call.’ ‘G’day Brian, love your
show. I wear briefs, mate.’ The Crew might ask blokes who freebag to phone in.
One of the Crew will have an insight. ‘I always freebag in my trackies’. ‘You’re
wearing your trackies now’. ‘Bloody hell!’ – much hilarity and that becomes a
promo sound bite for the next month. And don’t be scared to use the Melbourne
chuckle. That’s when everything is so funny you can hardly speak for laughter.
Sadly I’ve only consciously heard John Burgess on radio once: the grab I heard
was ‘and we’re coming up to the bottom of the hour, so let’s just ease our way
through with a little Anne Murray.’ Perfect.

“For some reason or other I wrote down the word Symmetry as an immediate
response when first approached to speak at this occasion. This is the tenth
Andrew Olle lecture. Like many I can remember where I was and what I was up
to when the shockingly sad news arrived. I last saw him in the canteen at Gore
Hill at lunchtime on a Thursday. We chatted in the sandwich queue. Not long
before he’d worked on a Four Corners special entitled ‘What’s wrong with the
Liberal Party?’, a program that ended with Andrew angrily railing at the panel of
John Howard, Robert Hill and John Moore for being in denial, as the credits
rolled. I talked about work, his work, and he wanted to talk about anything but
work. He looked and was exhausted. He was doing mornings on 702 and ‘The
7:30 Report’ at night. He had every reason to be exhausted.

“Andrew was very generous to me when we were working at the same station. He
always offered story ideas, wry observations and encouragement. I did
afternoons and it was the only time of day apart from midnight to dawn when
nobody seemed to give a bugger about what you did. There was no minute by
minute scrutiny that Breakfast in particular has to endure. One of the traps with
radio is that it caresses the ego in the most dangerous manner imaginable. The
first skill to leave is the ability to listen – when someone else is speaking you are
automatically forming your next thought. The long-term affect must be a specific
type of narcissistic madness. The trade is in part about finding a performance
mask that can be slipped on and can evenly disguise days of euphoria or
despair. Andrew was helped on radio because we knew what he looked like. He
had an interesting mask that really exposed itself on television: he had a look of
almost permanent skepticism brought about by the asymmetry of his face.
Science tells us we are attracted to symmetry – symmetrical faces are essential
for any modeling work for example. Symmetry equals beauty equals biological
success so the argument goes. Yet there was Andrew, a sort of walking proof
that the exception can also be true. I’d see him annually at the NSW Tennis
Open at White City. Here he presented as a sort of ‘what ho’ Bertie Wooster type
with attractive slacks and lemon sweater casually thrown across the shoulder
with the picnic basket in the boot of the Audi parked on the lawn courtside. Yet in
the background was this tearaway kiddie from Queensland who’d terrorized
neighbourhoods and missed out on gaol by the skin of his teeth. His mask of
performance had obliterated this part of his life completely as nearly as I could
tell. But I never had a night on the tiles with Andrew and I suspect a few good
reds might have allowed a different spiritual genie out of the bottle. As is the case
with many journalists. Journalists like a drink. Often to excess – it’s an
occupational health hazzard. Robert Haupt became a regular commentator on
my show. He had tremendous style. And a mission to find truth. But there were
days when Haupty would have had a long lunch. And then it was different. A rosy
warm smile can make for difficult radio. Then he learnt Russian and went to
Russia as a correspondent because he thought that’s where it was going to
happen. And he was right. Many a time at awards do’s I’ve gaped in awe as
highly respected journo’s have slammed yet another one back and bayed at the
moon, or thrown a glass in anger, or picked a fight. At the Walkeleys, fistfights
are part of the card. I suspect drink in the journalist’s culture might have
something to do with massive overexposure to the darker side of the human
condition.

“I’ve always enjoyed reasoned commentators. I loved the sturdy assuredness of
Paul Murphy and now Mark Colvin. I lean forward when I hear Catherine
McGrath or Fran Kelly in attack mode. I love Kerry O’Brien getting angry. I pull up
a chair for any Chris Masters or Sally Neighbour ‘Four Corners’ special. I flick the
page to the Paul McGeogh article. It’s the mixture of gravitas and style. As a
family in the late fifties we used to sit around the lounge room at night letting Arch
McKirdy guide us through Benny Golson or Oscar Peterson or Charlie Parker. A
cigarette company sponsored him. It might have been Ardath. And with voice
alone fashioned the smokey atmosphere of a New York Jazz Club. His live
commercials for Ardath had him ignoring the copy and the ad would sometimes
be reduced to a pause, followed by the sound of a match being struck and an
ecstatic draw. And that was the ad. Arch always struck a warm yet authoritative
tone. He was a master of the medium having the easy confidence of one who
has made the time, the moment, his own and he knew his subject and somehow
gave the impression of having left the ego behind. John Cleary has a similarly
elegant style. Andrew also, despite his particular asymmetry, had reasoned
objective balance. Which leads us to Opinion. Suddenly the world is awash with
Opinion. Sadly more Arch Tambakis than Arch McKirdy. Newspapers too, are full
of it. Any half-baked dickhead who can string a few sentences together is given a
go, particularly if the opinion is inflammatory or somehow ratchets up the climate
of fear or loathing – simply and obviously because it sells more newspapers.
For years now, I’ve had an abiding interest in science, mainly because I know so
little about it and for a time when I had a regular radio show was constantly
astounded by the easy access to some of the great minds of our time. It seemed
to me that radio had such portability and potential that there was no excuse just
to throw the lines open. Being a presenter gives one the opportunity to speak
with extraordinary people. I had an American physicist called George Smoot on
once. He helped discover cosmic background radiation – the echo of the Big
Bang, the image of which was given the title ‘The face of god’. We pick it up as
snow on our television screens. And he was talking about String Theorists whose
Maths had rewound the tape of time to escape this universe and seriously
postulate that the Big Bang was caused by a collision of two other universes in a
cataclysmic event. He said the Maths was pretty good. I thought fair enough.
Certainly the idea of other universes seemed redolent with possibility.
Then I spoke with another American physicist, Robert Kirshner who shrugged
and said that in the end, a mathematical formula must have Elegance to have
truth and to his mind, String Theory still lacked elegance. And I’ve wondered in
wonder about Elegance in this context ever since. To me the doctrinally
unencumbered search for the big picture answers of where we came from, where
we’re going and how we might survive as a species are far more interesting,
intriguing and satisfying and more revealing of truth than Faith based
examinations that eschew proof and lessen us as humans. While the echoes of
the Big Bang provide the clues, the echoes of the Age Of Enlightenment remind
us that we are but the stuff of stars.

“If commercial radio is so slight because it is under resourced, so too is
Television. And if more channels are allowed then the resources will be even
further stretched. As it is the ABC has been cut to the marrow and can no longer
afford to do any Drama, and commercial networks have decided Drama is too
flakey and expensive. Meanwhile our very fine drama schools are pumping out
scores of new young actors each year and there is nothing for them to do. The
lucky ones might get to appear in a Holden advertisement or survive for a season
in the Bell Shakespeare Company. So our local content is reduced to game
shows, dancing shows, lifestyle shows and talent quests all creaking under the
weight of diminishing returns. Think of something mindless, rope in a couple of
celebrities and there’s your show.

“Big Brother is a waste of an opportunity. The housemates live in a state of
perpetual boredom, unless they’re pissed. Why not engage them. A house of
really smart gifted young people from various fields: scientists, engineers,
mathematicians, builders, a Latin scholar, a poet etc and they have a problem to
solve. With a shared incentive of a few million dollars they have to find a solution
to Australia’s water problems in ten weeks – there’s a show.
To get on my hobbyhorse for a moment. Because historically the ABC has been
the powerhouse for new ideas that are often taken up by the commercial
networks, perhaps the time has come for those networks to subsidize the ABC.
After all, the ABC has been the training and testing ground for the commercial
networks for fifty years – it’s about time the situation was redressed. What I would
propose is a tax deductible levy on pre-tax profit of around 25% to 30% that is
pooled exclusively for ABC Drama. In return, the networks get second viewing
rights and the right to franchise any series that is deemed commercially viable.
The fact is, it is only the ABC by virtue of being unencumbered by what is
popular, that is capable of taking risks. Why is there such a paucity of great
locally made drama? Because the ABC isn’t doing it. The Americans would hate
such a plan and see it as not being in the spirit of the Free Trade Agreement, but
so what? This isn’t cheese or rice we’re talking about. It is Culture. A fully funded
ABC Drama unit would be to the advantage of the commercial networks. The
ABC could become Australia’s HBO.

“So what has changed in the ten years since Andrew left us? A right wing Labor
government has been replaced by a right wing Coalition government, and the
organization he worked for, the ABC, has had to steer through some pretty
treacherous waters. ABC News and Current Affairs have somehow survived the
madness of the Shire era and the petty ideologically driven hounding by former
Minister for Communications Richard Alston. The ABC still provides the best
radio services certainly in the country and arguably services that could be
described as being among the best in the world – brilliant specialized programs
that encourage new writers and shed light on world affairs and social affairs.
Radio National is still impossibly excellent. ABC TV has too, somehow managed
to survive with its current affairs programs loathed by Labor and Coalition alike,
as it should be. And as it should be, it still strives to put forward an alternative
view. So that when the commercial media is dictated to by myopic intrusive
ownership and ill-informed populism, is forced through thoughtless need to make
irresponsible programs that lack both style and substance, caresses
inflammatory and cheap, nasty demagoguery that seeks to marginalize the already marginalized, that seeks to describe the world in simple terms, provide
simple solutions to complex problems and is purely a servant to fiscal outcomes,
then the ABC will always seem to aggravate, annoy and frustrate and it’s
precisely when the ABC is doing this that it is serving its charter. It’s preserving
its skeptical asymmetrical smirk.

“Andrew missed out on seeing the events of September Eleven, a blunt cleaver
that questioned Western certainty. One of the pilots of the first American Airlines
plane to smash into the World Trade Centre was Mohammed Atta. He spent his
last hours on this earth in Las Vegas roaming amongst the gambling dens and
strip clubs theoretically to further steel his resolve such was his loathing of the
excesses of the West. The quest for our media is to ask why it happened and to
understand the motivations of those who are willing to end their lives at a young
age on the altar of sectarian anger. To join the dots between that state of mind
and the mindset of those in the New Guinea highlands cutting down their pristine
forests to feed the generators that provide the power for the television to screen
‘Buffy’, or ‘The OC’ or ‘Backdoor Bonanza three’ or if they’re on line to power the
modem to any cyber freak show the mouse takes them. If the examination isn’t
exacting or truthful and without fear or favour, then this universe’s accidental
experiment with self-awareness and consciousness may well have been a total
waste of time.”

The Lecture will be broadcast on Sunday night at 10.35pm.