Today, some rare local TV production features over Easter, poll questions that aren’t useful to anyone and News Corp’s anti-competitive instincts.
Local TV highlights over bleak long weekend
The usual Easter offering of terrible free-to-air TV is leavened a little this year by some rare local television production.
Channel Seven is offering an ultra-local piece of work – a 90-minute documentary detailing the inside story of the redevelopment of Adelaide Oval.
Adelaide Oval – The Untold Story has been put together by Today Tonight veteran Graham Archer and promises revelations about the project’s origins and development including “the secret deals, arguments and political fallout”. Archer has interviewed many of the key players including former AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou, his successor Gillon McLachlan and former Treasurer Kevin Foley.
It will screen at 9pm on Sunday, immediately after Port Adelaide’s season opening game against Fremantle.
On Monday, Channel Nine will air the biggest live television effort in South Australia for many years.
Starting at 10.30am – and continuing for six-and-a-half hours – the network’s North Adelaide studios will revive the old Easter appeal format, pitching for donations to aid the Women’s and Children’s Hospital.
A stack of local and national network personalities will be on hand and entertainment will be provided by Justice Crew, Eddie Perfect, Rhonda Burchmore, Anthony Callea and plenty more. Local TV veteran Anne Wills – who has seen a few telethons in her day – will also make an appearance.
Sure it’s old-fashioned and potentially very daggy, but it’s for an excellent cause and has given some much-needed work to local TV production talent after the ABC’s short-sighted Collinswood budget cuts.
Get around it.
Cabaret cinematography
Local production company Cul-de-Sac has produced a series of short ads for this year’s Cabaret Festival, featuring director Barry Humphries.
The short pieces are amusing – and also beautifully lit.
So Media Week wasn’t surprised to see that the credited cinematographer is Randy Larcombe – one of South Australia’s best portrait photographers, who has also made the jump into the moving image.
See one of the Humphries’ ads below. Go here to view Larcombe’s lovely short tourism film featuring the Yorke Peninsula.
News Corp can’t say the word
While many people believe that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is marked by a political agenda, it seems to Media Week that the more profound defining characteristic of the empire is its deep aversion to competition.
As we have reported before, Domain, the Fairfax competitor to News Corp’s Real Estate Group, is making a big push in South Australia and Western Australia.
Here Domain sponsors the Crows, leading Murdoch’s Advertiser into a frenzy of cropping and creative angles to avoid any clear shots of the distinctive green logo on the team’s shorts.
Domain has also become the naming rights sponsor of the Western Australian home of football – formerly known as Patersons Stadium and, before that, Subiaco Oval.
Sure enough, unlike its treatment of every other AFL stadium that’s sold its naming rights, the Tiser’s sports writers are refusing to use the title Domain Stadium, bowling up Subiaco and even Patersons this week.
Naughty corner
The Advertiser’s veteran reporter Nigel Hunt published a good story this week about the potential for SA to have its first female deputy police commissioner.
For those interested in the advancement of women in the forces, the joy at the piece would have been dulled somewhat by the poll some bright spark added at the bottom (see below).
For the record, at our last look more than a third of the Tiser’s readers oppose having a woman as Police 2IC.
Bizarre.
Top of the class
An excellent piece of TV journalism ended on the ABC this week, with the final episode of reporter George Megalogenis’s Making Australia Great: Inside Our Longest Boom.
The three-part series tracks the origins of Australia’s modern economic sunshine, and features interviews with Australia’s modern Prime Ministers and treasurers – Hawke, Keating, Howard, Fraser, Rudd, Swan and Gillard. Considering the show is essentially about global economics, it’s an engaging piece of work.
Even more striking – to this viewer at least – is it’s political even-handedness.
In an era of ceaseless political combat, Megalogenis allows the viewer some rare perspective – that our modern political leaders have, by and large, been pretty good and worthy of at least a modicum of respect and dignity.
Watch it on iView here.
Media Week is usually published on Fridays.
