Abstract

"A Funny Problem: The Business of Comedy Television in Australia in the Postimperial Moment"

Holly Swenson, Northwestern University (hed5747@gmail.com)

Why was it that in the 1960s and 70s, as Australian culture was seemingly distancing itself from Britain, that there was so much British comedy on Australian television? This wasn’t a problem for Australian audiences—in fact, Australians writing into television magazines frequently expressed their appreciation for British comedies. The relatively high saturation of British comedy programmes on Australian television was, however, a symptom of a larger structural problem for Australian television producers, both public and private. This paper explores how Australian television producers found themselves dependent on British comedy television during Australia’s strong shift away from the empire in the 1960s and 1970s. The BBC and independent British commercial television stations (ITV) invested early and substantially in the production of comedy television programmes in the 1960s, and sold them prolifically to young Commonwealth television stations. Australian stations, reliant on relatively cheap and high-quality imported comedy, imported nearly all of their comedy programmes from Britain or the United States in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, investing in creating original drama rather than comedy. This early under-investment in Australian comedy resulted in a decade-long dynamic in which Australian comedy was seen as significantly more difficult than other types of television to produce, and stations continued to purchase British programmes. British television sellers, for their part, saw the Australian market as increasingly important over time as they began to lose market share elsewhere to American producers. Australia was a critical region for British television’s global prestige. The history of British television sales in Australia helps illustrate that Britain’s emphasis on its commercial ties to the Commonwealth and Britain’s contested cultural position in the Commonwealth were not separate phenomena but were the interconnected product of fights in the commercial culture industries.