September 16, 1956: Channel Nine begins transmission with station manager Bruce Gyngell (long before his pretty in pink days) uttering that profound line:

Hello, and welcome to television.

Well it seems that it was actually Janet Gaynor who was the first face on Australian television, during laboratory tests in the 1934. The Ipswich City Council website documents it in detail, but of course we know never to let the facts get in the way of a good anniversary.

But there can be no better way to celebrate the half-century of commercial TV in Australia than that concocted by the people behind Naomi Robson. Summed up succinctly on the editorial page of today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Naomi Robson, a glamorous and determined reporter, is on her way to save Wa-Wa, a boy marked, perhaps, for consumption by his cannibal tribe. She falls into an elaborate trap set by a fiendishly cunning Indonesian immigration official: she is asked for her visa. Not having a valid one, she and her crew are entombed alive in a three-star hotel. Using only their corporate credit cards, they cut their way to freedom and ratings success.

It’s still 48 hours away from the next episode of Media Watch, but until then we can follow the reportage from the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph and the ABC. (Where is Boris Johnson when you need him?)

Special 72-and-a-bit-years of Australian television celebratory link: the best of Naomi Robson on Youtube.

Chris Masters’ long-awaited unauthorised biography of infamous Sydney squawkmeister Belford Parrott has been shelved. The book, tentatively titled “Jonestown”, was intended as a follow-up to Masters’ Four Corners report on Mr Parrott in 2002.

The ABC issued a press release this afternoon, possibly the first press release I can ever recall announcing the non-publication of a book. The decision, according to ABC Enterprises director Robyn Watts, was made for “purely commercial reasons”.

Ms Watts went on to say:

“ABC Enterprises has a clear responsibility to deliver a commercial return to the ABC. To proceed with publication will almost certainly result in a commercial loss which would be irresponsible.”

While I get back to reading “Simply Stuffed” by HG Nelson, feel free to take a browse through the ABC Shop’s book section at all those titles responsibly published by ABC Enterprises to deliver a commercial return.

My enjoyment of Melbourne 2006 peaked early. The sheer joy of explaining an opening ceremony to your three year-old daughter is something that cannot adequately be put into words. To Adara, it all made sense: the flying tram, the absurdly colourful clothes of some of the nations, the big red dragon on the Welsh flag (”I want to see the dragon again, Daddy” was to be heard frequently on Wednesday night), Ron Barassi walking on water, Dame Kiri singing Happy Birthday to the Queen. (”When’s the Queen going to sing, Daddy?” “She doesn’t sing, Adara, she’s a Queen.”) At least she distracted me from having to listen to the inanities of Ray Martin and co.

There’s some great coverage of the opening ceremony on ausculture.com here and here, so I’ll just stick to a few highlights, lowlights and other observations:

The Queen looked utterly, totally bored.

Someone should have told Prince Philip to shut up and sit still.

Where was the Governor-General, and why was the Prime Miniature usurping his position (silly question, sorry)?

It was great to hear one of the finest Australian songs ever written - “Under The Milky Way” by the Church - but why was it accompanied by a ballet of kids on BMX bikes? If Nicole Kidman was on deck it would have been understandable…

Ron Barassi walking on water with the baton was infinitely more whimsical than all the Leunigisms on display all evening.

That kid who grovelled to HM before introducing Ms Te Kanawa’s rendition of the Hill sisters’ famous ditty was the nadir of the evening for me.

The Australian uniforms were appalling. Not for the first time, of course.

The last three carriers of the baton were the Mayor of the Gold Coast, the Governor of South Australia and the Governor of Victoria. I’m not sure how to put a punchline to that observation.

And did I hear the aforementioned Ray Martin describe one of the flag-bearers as a “skoot sheeter”?

Proof copies are now online for today’s Hansard of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council. I haven’t read the whole lot, and probably won’t bother, but there was a lot of political football being played in the lower house debate, despite the bill having bipartisan support. In the upper house, where there are more minor parties represented, the debate seemed to show more literacy, with questions being raised by the Greens and Democrats as to whether, considering the police crackdown since Monday, the amending legislation is necessary at all.

And then, alas, there is David Oldfield, MLC, the former mentor of Pauline Hanson who sits in the upper house as an independent, having been elected in 1999 before the deregistration of One Nation as a political party. His speech, well, to quote the President of the Legislative Council in response to a point of order:

“…the comments of the Hon. David Oldfield about Lebanese people are racist and bordering on unparliamentary.”

Oldfield comes up for re-election in March 2007.

Before I finish tonight, a sidelight to Sunday’s displays of flag-waving nationalism of which John Winston Howard was so proud on national television the following night. Among the other Australian icons being paraded by the “We Grew Here You Flew Here” brigade was Blinky Bill. As I mentioned on Tuesday, John Huxley reported on this in that day’s SMH.

Now while the original adventures of Blinky Bill, written by Dorothy Wall, have passed into the public domain, the character himself has not. Blinky Bill is owned by Yoram Gross-EM TV, the respected and highly successful producers of films and TV programs for children whose studios are about two kilometres from here. Gross is a survivor of the Holocaust and it’s hard to imagine anything more incongruous (not to mention illegal) than using one of his properties for neo-fascist purposes.

(Acknowledgement to the anti-racist blog Fight dem back! for bringing this to my notice.)

Sad news of the passing of Dave Allen in England on Thursday at the age of 68. For many years through the 1970s, Friday nights at our place was defined by watching either The Two Ronnies or Dave Allen At Large on the ABC.

Dave Allen was a wonderful, laconic, Irish stand-up comic, except that he did all his TV shows sitting on a stool, and generally drawing on a fag at the same time (that’s in the toxicity sense, not the Public School sense). For more than one reason, his show would never cut it in prime-time TV these days.

I’ll leave the obituaries to others. I’m intrigued to learn that he toured on the same bill as The Beatles before any of them became famous:

• The Observer, obit by Sean O’Hagan, 13.3.05
• The Guardian, obit by Richard Jinman, 12.3.05
• BBC Online obit with a stack of links
• Sun-Herald (Sydney), obit 13.3.05

Unlike last year, the Golden Globe Awards are not being televised live in Australia today. Channel 10 is replaying them at 8.30 tonight, while E! (on Foxtel Digital, which I do not have) is doing hours of pre-game and post-game shows. Ugh. The awards show starts at midday Sydney time on NBC in the States.

The official web site of the Globes is www.hfpa.org, as in Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Having seen very few new movies over the past year, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is the only nominated film on which I can comment, and having seen it on DVD just last night I am still making up my mind about it. It’s typically Charlie Kaufman, but even more so. (Does that make sense? It’s not supposed to.)

www.thegoldenglobes.com is an unofficial website which carries what appears to be a complete database of nominees over the years. Wikipedia has an incomplete list of winners and it will be interesting to see if they have updates during today’s awards show.

Blog coverage? Try this Technorati search during the show.

Some useful links for an audiovisual celebration of the Advent and Christmas online:

BBC Online - surely the best English language information resource on the net - has areas in its Religion and Ethics section related to Advent and, in particular, Christmas. There are clips, both audio and video, of carols online.

From WBUR in Boston: “For its 50th anniversary, the early music group Boston Camerata teamed up with several Arabic musicians to recreate Christian music from the Middle Ages. They’ve used medieval texts and illustrations, and arranged music played by Christians, Muslims and Jews, exploring musical traditions that merged religions and cultures.” (Real Audio)

See also the ABC’s Religion and Ethics website, but they don’t seem to have anything particularly special for Christmas.

By sheer chance I happened to watch on BBC World last night the second part of a two-hour documentary produced for BBC Two’s “This World” program called “One Day of War“. It was a quite fascinating account of sixteen people in each of sixteen trouble spots around the world, all filmed on the same day, 22 March 2004.

It’s one of those programs that makes me feel angry about how little we are told by our media of the major conflicts around the world. It makes me angrier that we have a government that has little sincere interest in helping solve the world’s problems, but instead is more interested in making sure that the victims of conflict don’t enter Australia to seek a new life here.

The areas featured in the program are: (i) the Democratic Republic of the Congo, (ii) Iraq, (iii) Chechnya, (iv) Burma, (v) Mindanao, (vi) Nagorno-Karabakh, (vii) Georgia, (viii) Colombia, (ix) the Gaza Strip, (x) Sudan, (xi) Uganda, (xii) the Uraba region of Colombia, (xiii) Nepal, (xiv) Laos, (xv) Afghanistan, and (xvi) Somalia.

Muktar, the fourteen year-old “gun for hire” featured in the Somalian episode, died three days after the program was filmed. The “One Day of War” microsite has a four-minute clip of Muktar’s story, as well as a number of other excerpts from the program.

“One Day of War” first screened on BBC Two on 27 May 2004, and was shown on BBC World on the weekend of 18-19 December. I hope either the ABC or SBS pick it up.

Lord of the Rings. Are you shocked?

The whole ABC exercise was apparently a derivation of the BBC’s The Big Read from last year, even down to the style of last night’s program, which was very un-ABClike. Jennifer Byrne seemed unusually ill-at-ease in the compere’s role (where’s Indira Naidoo when you need her?), and Chris Taylor (The Chaser, CNNNN, radio’s Today Today) was a generally unfunny devil’s advocate. However, it was a fun format which I would like to see converted into a weekly book review program. The vox pops (even if they were mostly celebrities such as “Peter Garrett, politician”) were sharp and amusing.

The top ten, which was actually a top eleven, was:
10. “A Fortunate Life” - AB Facey (1981)
=9. “The Da Vinci Code” - Dan Brown (2003)
=9. “Catch-22″ - Joseph Heller (1961)
8. “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” - Douglas Adams (1979)
7. “Nineteen Eighty-Four” - George Orwell (1949)
6. “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” - JK Rowling (2003)
5. “Cloudstreet” - Tim Winton (1991)
4. “To Kill A Mockingbird” - Harper Lee (1960)
3. “The Bible” - various artists (various centuries)
2. “Pride and Prejudice” - Jane Austen (1813)
1. “The Lord of the Rings” - JRR Tolkien (1954-55)

The complete top 100 (actually a top 103) is now up on the ABC website. It makes an interesting comparison with the Big Read results as listed on the BBC website. (They, incidentally, have a top 200.) BBC viewers chose the same quinella as their ABC brethren, ie LOTR at 1 and P&P at 2, and both lists share five of the top ten.

On the ABC list I find it a little odd that the fifth Harry Potter book has made the top ten. The others come in at 93, 59, 15 and 36. That much better, or sold that much better because of the hype? I wonder if the Da Vinci Code benefited from being a current best seller, and whether Pride and Prejudice benefited from the oft-repeated 1995 BBC series.

Of the top five that I named yesterday, my top pick, “Frankenstein”, did not make the ABC 100 and came 171 on the BBC list. “Lord of the Rings” was my second choice. At third, I had “Animal Farm” (ABC 82, BBC 46), at fourth, “Dune” (ABC 24, BBC 39). As expected, Arthur Mailey’s “10 for 66 and all that” came nowhere…

The Bible (which didn’t appear on the BBC list at all) aside, top non-fiction last night was AB Facey’s “A Fortunate Life”. The most curious disparity between the ABC and BBC lists was the presence at number four with the BBC of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, which didn’t figure in Australia at all. Nor did the works of Jacqueline Wilson, which figured no less than fourteen times in the BBC top 200.

Of the ABC’s top ten (eleven), Pride and Prejudice is freely available on the web. Nineteen Eighty-Four is also readable on-line, but copyright laws are such that it is in the public domain in some areas (for example Australia and anywhere that copyright expires 50 years or less after the author’s death), and still under copyright in others (for example the USA and the European Union, where copyright on Orwell’s works will continue in force until 2021).

The Bible, of course, is available in heaps of websites, although some recent translations are under copyright. I was a little surprised that “The Koran” didn’t score a mention on anyone’s list.

Dateline, the SBS weekly international current affairs program, concluded its 2004 season last Wednesday, having celebrated its 20th anniversary in October. Dateline has proven time and again that it is the outstanding current affairs show on Australian television these days, with a focus on events (especially in the Asia-Pacific region) and perspective that commercial television can’t come within cooee of. Its practice of using one-person reporter/cameraperson (which, in part, is a budgetary enforcement) compares with the elephantine production values of the increasingly insipid “60 Minutes” on the Nine Network.

Dateline has been through a range of hosts over the years, from the legendary Paul Murphy to the over-rated Jana Wendt, but Mark Davis, who has anchored the program for the last two years, has shown that, despite a bland television presence, he is a sharp and intelligent reporter and interviewer.

With the help of a fine Dateline website, I am going to use this message to present a pastiche of highlights from Dateline’s 2004 season. (more coming)

January 21: A lively interview with US General Richard Myers, and an obituary of former Dateline reporter Mark Worth, who died in West Papua.
January 28: A report on plans to put the Khmer Rouge on trial in Cambodia, and an interview with former head of state and Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan.
February 11: Report from Burma, and an interview with Dr Samina Ahmed, author of an ICG report on Pakistan’s nuclear industry.
February 18: Before the overthrow of the Aristide government, Mark Davis talked to US Congressmember Maxine Waters about the USA’s role in destabilising Haiti.
February 25: Report on the struggle between China and Taiwan for the affections of Kiribati, and an interview on the subject with ANU academic Dr Ben Reilly.
Coming up: more of Dateline in 2004.