Graeme Turner’s Television Books

National Television: Australian Television (1989)

Australian Television was the third title in the series Australian Cultural Studies, edited by John Tulloch under the imprint of leading Australian publisher Allen & Unwin (established in 1976 as a subsidiary of British firm George Allen & Unwin, becoming independent in 1990). ¹ What makes Australian Television so interesting to the assessment of Turner’s work is that it encapsulates this distinctively generative matrix of television studies. The collection is strongly engaged with the state of the art of television studies internationally, at a rich moment of its definition. At the same time, the distinctively Australian thinking through of television “texts produced for and transmitted through Australian television” is precisely the point as “British or American readers which employ unfamiliar examples of television programs and inappropriate models of cultural relations” (Tulloch and Turner 1989, xi, “Preface”). In doing so, the editors see a “range of theoretical traditions” being an important, as well as comprehensive, approach—and one that eschews the dominant ways of seeing television as both “trivial and powerful” (Tulloch and Turner 1989, xii).

A measure of the significance of the Australian Television volume can be found in how it brings together an impressive group of scholars who were influential in the formation of cultural and media studies internationally and in distinctively Australian cultural studies. Lead editor Tulloch was one of a remarkable number of influential British scholars living and working in Australia at this time. Nowhere was this dual Australian/international coupling more apparent in cultural studies than in the area of television. The received golden age myth of this time involves the fact that a significant number of these were based in the Perth, Western Australia, tertiary institutions: John Fiske, John Hartley, Graeme Turner, and then Toby Miller, also. By the end of the 1980s, Turner was settled in Brisbane, Queensland, first at Queensland University of Technology, then at the University of Queensland. These expatriate contributors were truly matched by the Australian scholars, including Tom O’Regan, Stuart Cunningham, and the unsung pioneer of Australian cinema and television studies Albert Moran.

Against this dense crisscrossing of scholars and their joint ventures, Turner’s chapter is pivotal to the conception of the Australian Television volume and gives us a clear glimpse of his preoccupations as well as sketching the trajectories of his subsequent television research. Titled “Transgressive TV: From In Melbourne Tonight to Perfect Match,” it aims to parley pleasure and risk into the scene of television scholarship—against the backdrop of the “dominant point of view within academic discussions of the media” (Turner 1989, 26) that sees TV as “entirely hegemonic, inevitably reproducing dominant views and attitudes to and for its audiences” (Turner 1989, 28).

Turner’s interest lies in television’s interplay between predictability, formula, and ritual, on one hand, and the “break with the normal and the transgression of conventions” (Turner 1989, 27), on the other. He sees this productive tension occurring in programs such as The Young Ones, Soap, Moonlighting, and the Australian classic Hey Hey It’s Saturday (a variety show, which I grew up on). Picking up on Australian film critic and scholar Adrian Martin’s idea of “stretch TV” (Martin 1985), Turner argues that these programs involve a dynamic where

. . . a complicated relationship is set up between a formula that is, on the one hand, familiar, predictable and largely observed and, on the other hand, that formula’s deliberate subversion, the suggestion of a “real multiplication of possibilities.” (Turner 1989, 27)

Graeme sees this phenomena as a “kind of performance—a spectacle of pure TV” (Turner 1989). He suggests that the “distinctiveness of these transgressive, ambiguous, television texts lies in the degree to which they transgress their own conventions and thus invite a range of possibly contradictory response from their audiences” (Turner 1989, 29 ). In making this argument, he is aiming to effect a strategic break in extant television studies from its default tendency to seek out and valorize the aesthetic, reflective moments: “transgressive television works to minimize television’s reflectiveness, its produced, static and unified aspects (its textuality, even), and its affinities with aesthetic forms like literature or film” (Turner 1989, 30 ). He also wishes to be precise in how he accounts for television’s richness and potential for resistant readings, explicitly against the positions of Hartley and Fiske. He is interested in the “specific pleasures” TV provides, which might offer “resistance to ideological control” or “facilitate social change” (Turner 1989, 35–36). Accordingly, Turner concludes,

We need to differentiate between various modes of popular television . . . the ratings achieved by transgressive programs have been telling us for years that TV does not have to be simple or unified in order to be popular. (Turner 1989, 36)

Central to his argument is an analysis of the ways in which Australian television has been characterized by the appropriation and adaptation—as we would now probably term it—of imported program models. Thus, the very popular Australian romantic game show Perfect Match (the two key presenters pictured on the book’s cover) is a leading example of shows that

occupy positions of influence and produce affectionate memories as key moments in the development of locally produced Australian television. It is probably significant that the programs which excite particular affection are those which were based on, and outrageously transformed, more benign foreign models: Perfect Match and the innocuous American show, Blind Date, or In Melbourne Tonight and The Steve Allen Show. (Turner 1989, 34)

In a turn of phrase that recurs as a motif in his later work, Graeme suggests, “We need to know more about the ideological and social functions of this kind of television” (Turner 1989, 34).

It is this careful analysis that Graeme uses to address and situate the issue of “political objectives” (Turner 1989) of the kind abroad in much cultural studies work at the time—but also in relation to the pressing yet complex issue with which he begins his chapter, and which frames the volume and his entire work. What does the national, and the local, amount to? And where does it fit into the international and global? Turner responds that Australia is a postcolonial culture, and as such, the national is still in dialogue with generic structures and readers’ expectations from long ago and far away. This becomes an agenda for a television studies that addresses not only its own “specific industrial structures, sets of production practices, and repertoires of productions” but also “the complex processes of appropriation and transformation of foreign models that we can hear as the ‘accent’ of Australian television” (Turner 1989, 25). In subtly different yet consistent terms, this is a governing idea that Graeme richly develops in the next phase of his work.

Qualifying Television Studies: The Australian TV Book (2000)

Eleven years after Australian Television, there appeared a second edited volume titled The Australian TV Book (Turner and Cunningham 2000). This is the second book through which we can decipher Turner’s impact on a second moment in the field of television studies and its instruction. The Australian TV Book was an effort to provide a dedicated textbook for school and university courses on television, in particular.

This volume includes authors represented in its 1989 predecessor, notably O’Regan and Hartley, and Cunningham, who Turner had established a strong editorial collaboration with by this time. In the 1990s, Cunningham had established himself as a mover-and-shaker, not least with his espousal of cultural policy as a key dimension of cultural studies (Cunningham 1992). In addition, newcomers who subsequently made their mark on national and international television studies included Liz Jacka, Jock Given, Terry Flew, and Alan McKee.

In the opening chapter, Turner argues why a national mapping of television remains vital:

Australian television programming remains one of the key means through which we can imagine ourselves belonging to a nation of common interests and experiences. (Turner 2000, 3)

Against this backdrop, Turner gives a thumbnail sketch of the development of television studies, especially the pivotal moments represented by Fiske and Hartley’s (1978) Reading Television and the development of audience studies. From these two trajectories, Turner signals his agreement with Charlotte Brunsdon’s judgment that television studies remains “textualized” (Brunsdon 1998), but he also draws a crucial distinction that the field must attend to the specificity of the location of consumption. Referring to the issues of regulation, ownership, and control that emerge from cultural policy studies, Turner writes that the inhabiting of a place is constitutive and reframes one’s orientation toward, and conception of, the field:

Significantly, while Brunsdon might feel entitled to talk about “television” without any qualifying indicator of national location, Australian writers are much more likely to talk about “Australian television.” Australian television studies has been fundamentally defined by consideration of the specific local or national contexts within which Australian television is produced and consumed. (Turner 2000, 9)

This is a very interesting and significant passage in a fairly short chapter. It is clear how its implications unfold in the Australian TV Book, at least in the structure and roster of the volume—though the actual essays spill over in various directions. I think, though, it is in the current moment that the germ of the idea is fully worked out. For the present, it is worth saying a little about the turn-of-the-century context for television studies, the Australian TV Book, and Turner’s research.

Television studies was coming of age, in a certain way—at least, as indicated by the publication of a number of readers and guides to the field (Geraghty and Lusted 1998; Miller and Lockett 2002, then, a little later, Allen and Hill 2004; Wasko 2005). In 2000, Horace Newcomb’s long-running anthology, Television: The Critical View, went into its sixth edition (Newcomb 2000, the first edition), the first edition dating from 1975. Television itself had been reshaped by a range of overlapping developments through the 1980s and 1990s. The role of the nation was changing, requiring a shift of perspective. These transformations were the subject of important work by Australian-based scholars in the 1990s (Cunningham and Jacka 1996; Cunningham and Sinclair 2000; Sinclair 1999; Sinclair et al. 1996).

It was in 2000 that Graeme established his own research center at the University of Queensland—Brisbane’s CCCS (Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies). The first conference hosted by CCCS was a full-scale international affair, devoted to the state-of-the-art of television studies—the first such conference in Australia. Held in early December 2000, Television: Past, Present and Futures included leading figures in the field, such as Lynn Spigel, who continued on postconference in a marathon five-day Masterclass event. Among other things, the Television conference was memorable for John Fiske’s keynote, his swan song in the year he retired from academic life. In his keynote, he spoke of fundamental shifts in television’s social function, represented by TiVo. While introduced in Australia subsequently in 2008, TiVo has never functioned in the same way as it did in the United States (see Meese et al. 2013). Despite this, at the University of Queensland Television conference, Fiske’s nigh-prophetic account of postbroadcast television was compulsive viewing:

[W]hat TIVO does is it enables each person, each individual viewer, to construct their own TV channel, a TV channel that is precisely aligned to their interests and preferences . . . this idea of technologising cultural choice is one I think we’ve got to take very seriously indeed. (Fiske 2000)

I’m not sure that Fiske ever published a version of this paper. Before long, however, TiVo was a frequently discussed harbinger of the future of television and new media (for instance, Body 2004; Uricchio 2004; or John Hartley in the foreword to the twenty-five-year reissue of Reading Television, see Hartley 2003). It is this scene of television’s digital turn evoked by Fiske, and taken up by many others, which provides the spur for the current moment of Turner’s work.

Conclusion

In thirteen years to follow after the Australian TV Book and the Television conference, Turner’s work blossomed in expansive, new, and increasingly international directions. Inevitably, in this short assessment of Graeme Turner’s television research, I have only been able to scratch some surfaces—and have only gestured toward the importance of his most rich, recent, team-based work on postbroadcast television.

My way to indicate some of the dimensions, governing ideas, and dynamics of Turner on television has been to—doubtless with a degree of arbitrariness—choose three key books, which I have argued illustrate three prime moments, each responding to a particular conjuncture. Such a schema tends to have its limitations, as in the third moment (not elaborated here), when there turns out to be already two books (Pertierra and Turner 2013; Turner and Tay 2009b;) and a third on the way (Tay and Turner, forthcoming); in particular, Locating Television (Pertierra and Turner 2013), for many reasons, most obviously its conception as a full-length study, moves the field on quite a distance.

In all this, the Australian location of Turner’s work matters a great deal. As the Australian Television book reveals, there are some happy accidents at play in how television studies is conjoined in his part of the world in the 1980s. A commitment to, and constant reminder of, the specificity of Australian television predisposes him to work against the field of dominant conceptions of television, media, and cultural studies, most recently in his critique of the “digital orthodoxy” (Tay and Turner 2010). Such dissatisfaction and critique pushes him to find canny and powerful ways to leverage the constraints and resources of his institutional, geopolitical, and intellectual topography to generate new accounts adequate to the various formations, scales, and modes of television internationally.

Unusually for a thinker with such a distinctive voice, idiom, style, and cultural politics, Graeme Turner’s important television books are collaborative, including significant edited collections. There are many antecedents for the interplay of individual and collective in the forging of a powerful body of work or a single book, as well as Turner’s own integral and widely acknowledged, generative work in collaboration. I would suggest that these dynamics of collaboration are here in subtle and important ways in Turner’s work on television and how it threads into television studies generally.

While Turner’s books on television are legion, it may not be too much to ask for one more—a compilation of his articles and chapters scattered across various edited volumes and more or less obscure journals. The warrant for this is of a piece with the reason for reading him in the first place: to understand television’s histories, present, futures, and, now, also its diverse locations.