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Culture Brew turns to a mediocre soup!
The Australian Broadcasting Commission has
for many
years, virtually, been the only TV channel
that offers
any Australian contemporary cultural content, albeit most are ala the U.K. channel 4. So when I received the news that the well known French program “Bouillon de Culture” have made and broadcast an episode fully dedicated to the Australian contemporary culture, I was really excited about the prospect of the French looking at us and hopefully providing a fresh perspective. That program went to the world as well via satellite before it was shown on the ABC on Sunday the 19th of
March. With heaps of fanfare the program has
been
advertised on the TV, the web and by e-mail to the members of the “ABC space” mailing list, I was pretty set to have an enriching Sunday afternoon! Boy, wasn’t I wrong. Firstly, all the guests, bar one, were selected to be French speaking Australians, as this program is a French TV program, and the ABC edition was subtitled in English, I felt that this was a deciding factor in the selecting of the panel and has narrowed the focus of the program considerably, frankly it wouldn't have mattered at all if none of the panel members were French speaking and the subtitles were the other way around, perhaps that would have allowed for a totally different mix of people with a lot more to offer. The “show“ was fast paced with the usual mishmash of the stereotypical view of a huge island come small continent, big desert, rugby, kangaroos, the opera house, not failing of course, to point out it was actually designed by a Dane, throw in a bit of propaganda for the Aussie Republic with a bit of “indigenous verses white” politics with a touch of aboriginal art in the form of a flipped pages of a book and voila you got it all in a nutshell !! It was quite insulting to me and to many viewers, I am sure, to hear one of the esteemed guests point out to the world, as a matter of fact, that Europe considers the Australian culture as very inferior and the best idea that the world have of us is a romantic view of men on the land in the middle of nowhere. You don’t know how disappointed I was after waiting and waiting for some
meaningful presentation of the Australian
culture on
the program, and the nearest I got to any cultural content was reading few titles of some Australian books translated into French! After almost one & a half hours of dross, the program ends inviting us to join a web chat online to continue the discussion.... I didn’t bother. A valuable chance have been missed, yet again, to present a meaningful view of the Australian culture, with some depth, to the world. A big anticlimax.....sigh! |