Papers presented by Holly Swenson since 2019
2024 Providence, Rhode Island
"A Funny Problem: The Business of Comedy Television in Australia in the Postimperial Moment"
Holly Swenson, Northwestern University
Abstract:
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.
2022 Mexico City
"British Tabloid Journalism in Australia, 1925-1945"
Holly Swenson, Northwestern University
Abstract:
By 1935, Australian tabloid entrepreneurs and bitter rivals Frank Packer and Keith Murdoch were on the edge of a crisis totally distinct from the brewing war in Europe. They were operating some of the largest tabloid consortiums in Australia, based out of Sydney and Melbourne respectively, and they were running out of newsprint – the physical processed paper on which news media is printed. This paper explores the intertwined export to Australia of British tabloid style – inspired by Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mirror, among other papers – and British newsprint. It argues that, though British tabloid journalism flourished in Australia, it was constrained for decades by structural problems including the physical paper tabloids were published on, and continued to remain reliant on Britain. Packer and Murdoch had each been highly inspired by British tabloid style, characterized by sensational stories, prizes and giveaways, illustrations, and content that was targeted at the less educated. Their firms engaged in an arms race in the interwar period to publish ever more tabloids with ever more content, including free novels and supplementals of color-printed cartoons. This escalation resulted in crisis; all of Australia’s newsprint was imported from Britain, the United States, Canada, or Scandinavia, and the process of importation took weeks. In a moment of timely resonance, there were supply chain issues. The crisis was only heightened by federal restrictions on the purchase of newsprint during the war to save pounds sterling. Mutual suspicion, then wartime exigency, made these ideas impossible, and the crisis of newsprint was not significantly dealt with until the late 1950s when import rules eased and domestic production began in earnest. This paper analyzes the way in which British and Australian newspaper entrepreneurs jockeyed with each other for advantage and profit during the crisis, as well as the ways in which British newsprint manufacturers fought with their American competitors to remain Australia’s lifeline.