The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

In 1978 I remember reading an interview with (I assume) Richard Donner, director of Superman: The Movie, who pointed to the new superhero shows then popular on TV—things like The Six Million-Dollar Man—and said something like, “We can’t have Superman just picking up a car to save someone: Steve Austin does that every week.”

This was by way of justification for the film’s climax, in which Superman turns back time by spinning the Earth backwards on its axis—one of the most cringe-worthy pieces of anti-science cinema I’ve ever seen. The argument was that everything had to be bigger, better, and more spectacular than anything that had gone before. I think I preferred the end of Superman II, where the denouement was at a much more human level.

This interview dredged itself out of the depths of my memory last week when I watched the second part of “The End of Time,” the final Doctor Who episode for the tenth Doctor, David Tennant. Writer/producer Russell T Davies has a bad habit of wanting everything bigger and bolder than last time, and with the climax of season four involving whole planets teleporting across the galaxy (with bizarrely few negative consequences to the atmospheres or structures of the planets), I guess we all knew we were in for a challenge to our abilities to willingly suspend our disbelief.

The comments thread at Circulating Library live blog of the episode indicates the level of disapproval from even hard-core fans. I won’t rehearse the objections here, so go and have a look.

Such a pity for Tennant’s send-off, when he has been one of the most popular Doctors (I thought he was great, but Tom Baker will forever be my Doctor).

Anyway, we’ve got that young Matt Smith and scripts by Stephen Moffat to look forward to, so let’s hope the series regains a little sense.

A group of researchers I know are building a website to gather personal recollections of Australian television. The site is currently small, but growing, and they would like your input.

Access is free (register to contribute) and the entries so far are very interesting. Well worth a look…

http://tvlandaustralia.com

From the “About” page:

The project focuses on the popular experience of television and its role in forming national culture. As well as the usual academic sources, our research includes people’s memories and personal collections, and ‘ephemera’ like popular publications.

Australia – you’re looking at it

We’re using this site to build up an archive derived from interviews, oral histories, memorabilia, published materials, cultural institutions, fans and online sources. It represents Australian television from the point of view of those who have made and consume it. Once we’ve gathered sufficient materials, we want to use them to investigate questions around: the place of television in popular memory; and the versions produced by fan and ProAm memorialisations; the ‘insider’ perspective from people who have worked in the industry; and the collection of photos and stories about the significant television places, set design and TV-related objects; material that will help ‘map’ TV Australia. Last but not least how national icons and mythologies are produced (not least by audiences) through particular television programs and genres.

Abstract: The ABC television production, The Cook and the Chef explicitly embodies a dichotomy that operates around a series of binaries including cook/chef, domestic/professional, and local/global. While the privileging of the domestic, and the female, over the professional and the male is a common trope in television food programmes, what is less common is a privileging of the local over the global. In this article I will examine the way in which the domestic, local cook (Maggie Beer) is portrayed in a valorised position, over the professionally trained, cosmopolitan chef (Simon Byrant).

The show positions Beer in her own place, the Barossa Valley in South Australia, but in a way that evokes an imagined Italy. On the other hand, Bryant’s place—the impersonal, commercial kitchen of the Adelaide Hilton—is rarely shown, and the chef is depicted as an aloof cosmopolitan figure, drifting through the world, but not at home anywhere. Through recourse to theories of place-identity and cosmopolitanism, the paper will demonstrate the way in which these themes of the local and the cosmopolitan are mediated by discourses of the natural and of community, creating a sense of authenticity, which privileges the grounded figure of the cook, over the mobile cosmopolitanism of the chef.

OK, perhaps a bit wanky, but I promised I’d talk about it again. The article seems to publicly available here (although maybe you need to arrive from a university site: I’m not sure).

Now it is official: Hill-billy rockers have more sensitivity than Australian television executives.

I just heard this on the radio, and can’t find independent evidence, so at the moment I’m taking it on faith. In an interview with which was aired on TripleJ this morning, Caleb and Jarrod of the Kings of Leon, the southern US rock outfit which donated their services to headline the Sound Relief concert last weekend, said that they had left their number one hit (and Hottest 100 winner) “Sex on Fire” off the playlist, because it seemed insensitive to play a song of that title at a fund-raiser for a bushfire appeal, and they didn’t want to offend anyone.

No so the cable channel V, which telecast the Melbourne event. According to TripleJ’s Lindsay McDougall, a film montage of the bushfire destruction shown in the lead up to the concert featured the song prominently.

I’m not a huge fan of Kings of Leon, but this morning’s interview showed a thoughtfulness that belies their hick image, and they went up a little bit in my estimation. My opinion of Channel V remains unchanged.

The obvious first thing to say is that the producers were unable to bring themselves to move away from the winning formula: the opening titles, the staging, the set, and the photography are not just reminiscent of the British version, they are exactly the same. Same camera angles, same segments, same jokes. Even the same Stig! The car-porn photography in the review segments owes very much to the original, although it has been suggested that the editing is pacier.

But it is the choice of presenter that is most revealing. It is easy to map the three stars onto Clarkson, Hammond, and May: the lead presenter is older and opinionated; the little guy is excitable; and the boring one has a terrible sense of direction and drives slowly. They even dress the same.

All this leads me to suspect that the producers don’t understand why the original show works. It’s not the cars, or the photography. It’s not even the silly challenges: it’s the interactions between the presenters. As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes the show gets it wrong, but overall it makes for highly enjoyable television, and I’m not even remotely interested in cars.

In time the three Australians might develop the same sort of presence as their British counterparts, but it’s a tough ask, and the early signs aren’t promising.

Much has been written about, and continues to be written about, Dexter, and it’s not my intention here to comment on the show’s premise or visual style: although I can’t resist pointing out that the former is as shockingly original as the latter is dull and clichéd. I should also admit that this opinion is based on my watching a total of two episodes. (Episode two, which screened in Australia last night progressed the narrative arc, and the character development, but in all other respects seemed pretty much a filler episode.)

Rather, I want to comment on a small, almost unnoticed, aspect of the show. As is familiar to us who live in TV land, if not the real world, Miami is as close to a multicultural city as the US can produce, with its significant Latino population and culture. As in other programmes such as CSI Miami (and possibly Miami Vice, although my memory doesn’t stretch back that far in any detail), the use of Spanish dialogue helps to convey this sense of difference. I recognise…

I’ve just discovered a thread over at Sarsparilla on one of my favourite television shows: The Cook and the Chef. I came to the discussion a bit late, unfortunately, but I found it interesting because I’ve just finished writing an article that explores many of the problematics that the blog posting raises. The post focuses on the relationship between Simon and Maggie in terms of the amateur/professional dichotomy set up by the show itself…

First a disclaimer: I absolutely adore BBC motoring show Top Gear. I’m not a petrol head, but the repartee between the three presenters is classic, and Jeremy Clarkson’s staunchly non-PC delivery is one of life’s guilty pleasures. Even the actual reviews—always of cars that cost more than I will earn in my lifetime (“Now we get quite a few complaints that we don’t feature enough affordable cars on the show, so we’re kicking off tonight with the cheapest Ferrari of them all”)—are beautifully, cinematically filmed: car-porn, even for the terminally disinterested.

Verity Lambert, one of the BBC’s earliest and youngest female television producers — and the pioneering first producer of Doctor Who — has died at the age of 71. Her influential career spanned such hits as Minder and Jonathan Creek.

I’ve been watching the reality-TV show on SBS called Eco House Challenge because it looked interesting from the previews, and I thought I might learn something about sustainability. Given that it airs on SBS and is made by Prospero Productions —a company responsible for a number of respected documentaries—I was quite optimistic about it. Oh dear, how wrong can you get!

It’s nothing more…