By Students for Students: A History of the Melbourne University Union

Abstract

meaningful insights from. Isolated examples, however, reveal audience members’ devotion to particular programs or personalities, even requesting dates with television stars. The fan mail received by satirical radio and television personalities Roy Slaven (John Doyle) and H. G. Nelson (Greig Pickhaver), for example, reveal a rich sense of community and audience involvement in the duo’s programs, commentary and humour. Like the record of complaints received by broadcasters, personalities and programs, the sheer volume of letter writing indicates Australians’ keen dedication to the form, and indeed a “proprietorial feeling” (86) listeners had for their local radio stations, if not for programs and personalities themselves. Complaints about unscripted banter on television reveal a preoccupation with morality and “good taste”, most famously in the case of Graham Kennedy’s 1975 “crow call”. These letters, Griffen-Foley argues, constitute the “voices of Australians... lonely, sad, angry, indignant and sometimes funny” as they “negotiated questions of cultural, power and value over a century” (96). A tantalising examination of ABC Television Viewers’ Committees from 1959 to 1965 reveals the operations of an early experiment in the ABC’s efforts at audience consultation. Its findings suggest the two-way interaction between broadcaster and audience was limited, however, amid a lack of interest in audience input on programming. The final chapter on matchmaking programs on radio and television explores a popular genre of entertainment from the 1930s to the 1980s, which paved the way for much reality television. Here, audience involvement in particular programs was more literal, especially on television, where participation by “ordinary” viewers in a show such as Perfect Match offered an inkling of celebrity. One wishes the book’s introduction and conclusion were slightly longer, and indeed the book itself had more stories to tell. As Griffen-Foley admits, its contents serve as an invitation for media historians to delve deeper into these areas, where unexamined files and private archives promise to reveal new findings on the operation of Australian media institutions and those Australians who consumed its programming over the last century.