TV Format Mogul , livre ebook

Intellect Books - Albert Moran

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

196 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Since the late 1990s, when broadcasters began adapting such television shows as Big Brother, Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? for markets around the world, the global television industry has been struggling to get to grips with the prevalence of programme franchising across international borders. In TV Format Mogul, Albert Moran traces the history of this phenomenon through the lens of Australian producer Reg Grundy’s transnational career. Beginning in the late 1950s, Grundy brought non-Australian shows to Australian audiences, becoming the first person to take local productions to an overseas market. By following Grundy’s career, Moran shows how adaptation and remaking became the billion-dollar business it is today.

Sujets

Energie & environnement

Media

Télévision

General

Engineering

Technology

Television

General officer

English as a foreign or second language

Sciences et techniques

Power Resources

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	06 janvier 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783200788
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-8415-0623-4
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-078-8
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-077-1
eISBN: 978-1-78320-078-8
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

For Noela
With warm gratitude for her great love and support
Contents
Foreword by Toby Miller
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Chapter 1:The TV Format Mogul
Chapter 2:Early Years: 1923–47
Chapter 3:Apprenticeship I: Learning About Broadcasting, 1947–53
Chapter 4:Apprenticeship II: Quiz-show Schooling, 1953–59
Chapter 5:Apprenticeship III: Mastering Television Formats, 1959–64
Chapter 6:Domestic Consolidation, 1964–70
Chapter 7:Transnational Ambitions I: First Moves, 1969–74
Chapter 8:Transnational Ambitions II: Retooling for Domestic and Offshore, 1974–79
Chapter 9:Transnational Ambitions III: Australia, the United States and South-East Asia, 1979–85
Chapter 10:Transnational Ambitions IV: Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, 1985–89
Chapter 11:Transnational Ambitions V: Worldwide, 1989–95
Chapter 12:Buyout and Beyond: Since 1995
Chapter 13:A TV Format Mogul Among TV Format Moguls
Appendix: Grundy’s Television and Film Output
References
Index
Foreword
Reg Grundy went from being a man behind a microphone to being the man behind the men and women behind the microphones. He built a national and international company, for all the world like some Joseph Schumpeter fantasy figure. He did not want bricks and mortar to mark his stature, preferring transitory forms and spaces as the market dictated. He seems to have been as much an entrepreneur as a mogul, and his media successes were not part of a wider play for power over everyday life. He made money from entertainment; he sailed then sold his yacht; he snapped pictures of animals and shared them (Reg Grundy Wildlife website). Bermuda International Airport has a permanent exhibit of Dr Grundy’s work. May we all see it some day.
In Albert Moran, Reg Grundy has the best imaginable chronicler and analyst. Long Australia’s foremost ethnographer and historian of television, Albert has wanted to write this book since before I met him a quarter of a century ago, when he taught me what little I know as we lectured together.
When I visited Grundy’s official web page, I was enchanted to see that ‘About Reg Grundy’ was essentially empty, devoid of information. It was a blank, dark slate, as if awaiting the picture that Albert has painted of this game show host and owner. But eventually it loaded, revealing the great man in a safari jacket, his face obscured by his camera, and describing him as ‘one of the media’s most respected statesmen’.
That description made me wonder about the idea of the media statesman, so hard to disinter from its gendered privilege and so rarely associated with media owners. The term barely exists in online usage. Can it be applied to Beaverbrook? Sulzberger? Newhouse? Black? Hearst? Lebedev? Maxwell/Ludwig Hoch? To Grundy’s fellow nationals, the thankfully now pitiful Murdoch and his simple male progeny? Tycoons or moguls, perhaps, albeit often with interests in public policy: how to evade it, how to shape it, how to denounce it, how to applaud it. But are they statesmen?
Many things set Grundy apart from these personalities, not least that he focused principally on one genre: the game show – humble, apolitical, uncontroversial, fleeting, popular, entertaining, fun. Not at all like news and current affairs. So what is he talking about when presenting himself as a media statesman? Let’s be a little inventive.
I think a statesman transcends his or her time, providing a flexible vision rather than being captive to the present. Statesmen have the capacity to look beyond immediate interests to see what can and should be of lasting significance.
In many ways, Reg Grundy’s staple of the game show is very partial indeed. It is popular television’s exemplar of a minor literature, very minor. But think again, please. Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 16) define the concept of a minor literature as follows:
A minor literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature a minority makes in a major language. But the primary characteristic of a minor literature involves all the ways in which the language is affected by a strong coefficient of deterritorialization.
Australian television had a talent for remaking and remodelling genres from elsewhere, as numerous critics of Albert Moran’s generation pointed out in their recuperation of the national screen from charges of banal mimesis.
In Grundy’s case, this process went a step further. He both domesticated foreign material and repurposed it for export elsewhere, and in the process transcended his beloved game shows to make drama as well.
Grundy deterritorialized television as he shifted genres, languages, executives, nations and formats. He took an evolving international trade in television and made it his own.
Today, as Albert Moran has shown in countless books and articles, format sales and co-productions are the name of the game. Grundy understood that in business terms before virtually anyone else, and Albert understood it in academic terms before virtually anyone else. As Albert explains in his preface, it took them decades to come together, but here they are, and we are all the better for it. Bravo! Statesmanlike indeed.

Toby Miller
October 2011
Preface
This book has been a long time in the making, and it is worth recording its development. One might say that Reg Grundy and I were good television friends in the very early 1960s, although situated on different sides of the television screen. In apparently marathon Saturday-afternoon programme sessions on Sydney’s Channel 9, wedged in between Nock and Kirby’s Joe the Gadget Man and a serious-looking bespectacled Brian Henderson among rock ‘n’ rolling teenagers on Bandstand , Reg was there greeting contestants on Wheel of Fortune , asking the quiz questions and spinning the wheel. I played my part in the pact, sitting in my lounge room, alone or with family, watching the comings and goings on a black and white, seventeen-inch Admiral television set, bought on hire purchase and still being paid off.
This timing was entirely coincidental. Our family, newly arrived from Dublin, had settled in Sydney in 1959 and bought the television set just as Wheel of Fortune was making its transition from radio to television. Reg disappeared off our television screens about two years later, although I was glad to hear that he was a producer and not out of a job. Still, it was a bit disappointing to notice that the very familiar neatly moustached ‘Face That Helped Launch 1000 Spins of the Wheel of Fortune’ had retreated into the shadowlands of programme production. At a time when almost everyone else wanted to get their face on television, Reg Grundy had disconcertingly taken his off the screen.
Fast-forward nearly fifteen years to the end of 1974: I had almost completed an apprenticeship for an academic career in media studies. I was planning a brief return to Sydney when a La Trobe University colleague in Melbourne, Mick Counihan, suggested I conduct an interview with Reg Grundy. What a great idea! A telephone call to Grundy Enterprises evoked no response. In any case, I realized that I knew little about the Australian television business, and that I first needed to work up a background to avoid asking dumb questions of the quiz-show supremo. The result was much time spent poring over programme notes in back issues of TV Times , a lot of interviews and conversations with television professionals in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and several books on the subject of Australian television production. All the same, there had not been an interview with Reg Grundy. Indeed, the latter had become a kind of Howard Hughes of Australian television. He was rarely encountered even by his own employees in Grundy House on Sydney’s North Shore, never reported in newspaper gossip columns and had become a name but no longer a face for the public at large.
Fast-forward again: in 1992, I was fortunate enough to visit Grundy House with Professor Stuart Cunningham and Dr Marie Delofsky. Stuart and Marie were there to interview Ian Holmes, Grundy Worldwide’s president, as part of the research that would result in the magisterial book Australian Television and International Mediascapes (1996), written by Stuart Cunningham and Elizabeth Jacka. I had previously interviewed Ian Holmes as part of the work on Australian television, but had failed to keep up with the company’s international developments, first in the area of programme distribution and later in the area of format adaptation and remaking. Like others, I was conscious of the process of programme copycatting, whereby television programme ideas from elsewhere metamorphosed into Australian productions and vice versa. Reg Grundy had long been the butt of jokes in the Australian media about this practice. Nevertheless, I was surprised to learn in the interview with Ian Holmes that this kind of content exchange took place under regular business arrangements rather than by some kind of mysterious osmosis.
This realization rekindled the Grundy project. I resolved that if the company could transnation