Currency House

Nick Herd introduces Networking: Commercial Television in Australia by outlining the ‘five fateful choices’ that constrained, or perhaps enabled, commercial television to assume its peculiarly Australian form during the past fifty years. These revolved around technical matters such as transmission standards (European or American?), whether commercial players should own ‘the spectrum’, the number of viable services given the problem of too many broadcasters chasing too little content, and localism in regional services. To these he might have added the decision to regulate local (Australian-produced) content.

In 1964 the Australian television show Bandstand set up an annual talent contest called Bandstand Starflight International. In its first year, one of the national finalists was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl called Robyn Smith, who later changed her surname to Archer. The following year, the contest was won by a 24-year-old professional singer called Helen Reddy.

The eighteenth-century French Academician Buffon gave the world the aphorism ‘Le style est l’homme même’. It makes a fine epitaph for H.G. Kippax. Harry Kippax was a distinguished journalist and, for more than thirty years, until his retirement in 1989, a theatre critic of singular authority and style. In the late 1950s, while employed by the Sydney Morning Herald, he began to write thoughtful freelance reviews under the pseudonym Brek in the fortnightly periodical Nation; in 1966 the SMH’s editor J.D. Pringle press-ganged him into the theatre critic’s chair.