Guest Report

Strewth on the ABC

Stop Listening, This is Serious

Something funny happened at Radio National this year. No not really. They started playing comedy programs at half past five in the morning. Something to do with giving breakfast serial presenter Peter X Thompson an extra half hour in bed. It was either dead comedians or dead air. RN's idea of comedy is My Word, Hancock's Half Hour, Just a Minute and other geriatric jolts from the BBC vaults which don't cost a thing because no-one in them is still alive. Frank Muir and Denis Norden, Hancock, Hattie Jacques and Sid James all went to the great comedian in the sky long ago so there aren't any repeat fees to pay. The BBC generously donates its dead to volunteer community stations who don't have budgets or production facilities. How RN qualifies for such charity is not clear. They've got plenty of moolah and high tech equipment so what's really missing must be a sense of humour. As if you need me to tell you that.

RN doesn't spend money on its own comedy programs any more. Some time in the 1970s when it was still Radio 2 leftie baby boomers started their move on anything trivial and RN is now a place to crank the angst, a 24 hour service of earnest concern, with selected repeats. Even the music shows have to express cultural relevance.

Nothing, however, is more concerned with relevance than Life Matters. Every morning at 9 - twelve hours later in a cut down version - RN launches its daily flagship, or rather raises its audio distress signal. LM is communal hand wringing, psychic pus squeezing and relentless social worry-gutsing where the earnest 'issues' flow in streams of soupy lava and serious 'matters' are probed like throbbing boils. Heroin, child, wife and husband abuse, getting old, stress, loss, dysfuctionality, the future, the poor, getting old, heroin, staying relevant, the future, stress, identity, fear of unemployability, heroin, getting old, the terrible challenge of Coping with Change.

One can only hope some of it sinks into its listeners' own greying matter because the folks on the show don't seem to learn too much from all this exposure to relevance. Head nurse Geraldine Doogue shares the caring with radio's bedside doctor Norman Swan and even after thousands of hours hearing the woes of the world explained they still come up with 'what does it all mean?' or 'and what were your feelings at the time you lost your husband/leg/house?' or, my favourite 'oh really, is that right?'.

The rest of RN is less of more in different packages but if you want a quick refresher on any or all of it go to the Religion Report for yet another final world on Mabo or the GST, economic rationalism, downsizing and outsourcing. Religion on RNB has to be especially relevant.

Want something off-the-wall like a radio play with actors and laughs or a non topical docco with 'field' sound effects? Forget it. RN doesn't do art during the week. So, if you like actually listening for its own sake you won't want to be into anything outdoorsie or sporty because you'll have to be there by the wireless on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, the only place drama and doccos get scheduled on RN. God knows why but the schedulers assume the only people interested in this stuff want to hear hours of it back to back at the weekend.

If you want something arty during weekdays you'll need to work at it. Come to the wireless with a dictionary and lecture notes and be prepared to joust with the cultural cadres who think Melbourne is the intellectual capital of the Southern hemisphere. Yes, because after 'Life Matters' it's 'Arts Today' by which time I'm gone to the sublimely dopey Classic FM, the ABC station that broadcasts to we retired cardigans who have not a care in the world but the collection of opus numbers. The earnest task of being catalogue accurate for CD addicts who spout dead composers - and those who sound like they ought to be - is what Classic FM is really all about.

Our champion is Margaret Throsby the dumbed down Doogue. Every day she has a chat with a visiting nob. Whether it's a writer with no ideas, a painter with no taste or an adventurer with neither but a serious addiction to Sousa Margs likes to keep it cheery while she's digging deep: childhood traumas maybe, favourite recipes, ooh yes please! Another slice of Monteverdi? Nice warm cup of Brahms?

Every great interviewer has a trade mark. Margs has a classic catchphrase: 'I never knew that' she says. Love it. Margs finds it hard to listen to these people and their fascinating stories. Thankfully, she interrupts them just as they are getting to the point. Why? To remind them that her listeners are stupid, that's what. Unlike at RN audience research is taken very seriously at Classic FM, so she's probably got it right. Just like the opus numbers.

The Jays have the same respect for what they call Indie Bands. Underneath the breezy blah there's a very serious concern for giving garage guitars a national platform. The rest is mostly lairy and ladsy but a partial brain has regrown since the mass lobotomy of the early 1990s. Yes, an earnest succession of issues and serious stuff - sex, drugs and work for the dole - in lolly form is presented in true junior Doogue style. Kiddie club RN.

For real, dirty and down earnest dopiness you can't go past 2BL. Popular and cuddly manager Peter Wall has evolved a genuine mission for BL - to make the back page of The Sydney Morning Herald, by comparison, read like the Philosophers' Quarterly. Wall is a big boofy bloke who has done his ratings homework. There can be no other reason to explain his liking for the round-the-clock natter of bland and quacking nerds hosting celebrity forums, gourmet quiz shows, memorabilia moments and 'literary' lunches. Being heard to be thick is taken very earnestly at BL.

Which leaves us with my preferred ABC station: the Parliamentary News Network, or, as PNN's unfortunate weekend presenter Kel Richards let slip one overtired Sunday night, 'You're tuned to CNN'. Yes, PNN is the ABC's relay station. When parliament isn't running it relays Deutsche Welle, Radio Nederlands, BBC World Service and, amazingly, lots of meaningless 'grabs' lifted from Ted Turner's TV news outlet. PNN is radio without pictures, relevance, brains, beauty or anything, and nobody cares or notices. It certainly doesn't take itself seriously. How could it, there's nothing there. My kind of radio.

The Auditor

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  Issue 28 contents

»	Shock New Stats! Readers Desert Newspapers
»	Surfing the Wave
»	Vizard Smokescreen Clouds Computer Deal
»	Youth Wages: Is Bevis a Butthead?
»	Which Bank Harasses Sick Workers?
»	SOCOG Eyes Wide Shut on Games Gear
»	Scully Uses Reith First Wave Against Rail Workers
»	Reith Building Blitz Hits Bum Note
»	Entitlements Focus Shifts Back to Woodlawn
»	Fresh South Coast Ballot Called
»	"Big Drum Up" For East Timor
»	Eric Lee Public Forum

»	Guest Report
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Piers Watch

»	Vizard: Net Content Is Vital
»	No, No, No to MSN Model
»	The Vizard deal. Is it another great deal for you!!!!???

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