Innovative Television Programs

IN MORE DETAIL

What new ideas would you like to see on TV?

1. Cartoons - animated drawings with animated Australian art back-grounds, or Constable, Turner, old Chinese, medieval, Persian . .. A redo of the 'Magic Pudding' which used a lot of what remained true to the original, but replaced t he trite American alternations with Lindsay's original version.
2. Children -   Time-line, Multicultural Australian Tales from the Multicultures now in our society, 'Really Good and Really Stupid', Playstory, Lullabies at 8 pm, A Hero a Day, The Influencers, on people who have influenced others, A Magic Wishing Game series -children solve real-life problems using imagination.
3. Comedy - Games people play (adapted into screen plays and with permission from Eric Berne) "Yes but, Minister". About honest people who are not also stupid in government, industry, commerce and police. This can still be great comedy and farce, because life's like that.
4. Current affairs - What you want to know.   (Viewers send in their requests about information relevant to current issues) · No background music to real-life reports or any narration, to handicap those in any way disabled in listening or concentration .
5. Documentaries - Aerial survey of Australia. series like Domesday Book - deserts, erosion, pollution, water limitations, climate variability on same scale as livable areas, so people can realise how much of the continent cannot be filled up by growing populations. Documentaries are getting close to this.
   
   • Everyday living - how people over the world manage what is overlooked because it is 'women's work' - what do they do about babies' nappies and sleeping, sanitation, washing, cooking . .
   • Multiculture -   Folksongs and dances of the world, legends, songs, heroes, history, mores, proverbs of peoples now living in Australia.
   • I would like to see an ABC video/book of say 30 songs and 30 dances from the various cultures in Australia, including English translations of the songs and out-of-copyright melody lines. I could help with turning translations into metre. This could be a very good beginners reading book for all ages in literacy programs.
   • SkillOlympics and It's Your Idea (Social Inventing) on TV.   What the ABC is currently doing is not that, with its emphasis on commercial possibilities - which can be a bit close to commercial advertising. But Australia has a record of Social Innovations and we need to keep it up .http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/skilolyp.htm

Society and Spelling

6. Drama - including comedy.

   • Alternative Endings for other shows. Viewers can enter their ideas.
   • Serial, OzRoyal Family (See http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/ozroyal.htm)

   • Drama in which people behave intelligently and the conflict is against the forces of fate and nature, not human infighting.  
   • Melodrama with exaggerated virtue and vice, unbelievable characters, clear plot, so comedy gets pro-social messages thru.  
   • Simulations: Opponents play out the consequences of their conflict in computer simulations (eg preliminary to wars, strikes, divorces, and deliberate self-destructions.)   Acted as melodrama.
7. Education and How-to-Do-it
   • Do-it-Yourself arts and everyday skills Open Primary School , Secondary School , Really Open Learning , evenings, weekends, especially that TV desert time, Saturday nights.  
   • Best Teachers demonstrate brilliant teaching.
   • Parental Guidance Requested. Demonstrates how to do this.
   • Teach Yourself to Read   on TV, using animated text and cartoons, with an overview of how to learn, and nature of English spelling.
   • Styles of child-rearing.   Most people are alarmingly ignorant. Includes Toddler-taming demonstrated with line-ups .
8. News
   • The news could always include a mention of some heroism, and of some construction, to balance against its menu of sorrows, disgraces and destruction. 
   • The ABC could avoid tedious political personal gossip, and instead inform us about the legislation being debated and passed, and profile all the Parliamentarians and candidates rather than Führerfying leaders as if we wanted Hitlers to lead us.    
   • Events would not be called stories and dramas as if they were fiction about fictional people. Especially important when reporting tragedies.
   • The Week's Legislation - a five-minute list of major bills coming up and legislation passed included in the news, even at the cost of taking out five minutes of Sport, such as hootle-racing in Santiago.
9. Public participation (including programs with audiences)
   • 'Choose your ending' ; and Invent another ending to drama shown on TV.
   • Competitions to design programs
   • Inventions Needed Panel Game;
   • It's your idea   - social inventions to improve quality of life and help to solve social problems. This idea nearly got up once - but so far programs on inventions and innovators have emphasised technology.
   • Singing Families,
   • Solve-a-Real-Problem Panel Game
   • Quizzes need not be old hat
   • Research Quizzes eg. to find out what people remember or understand about a show that's just been on.   Informal research suggests that many people cannot remember plots - if any - and only occasional impact moments. They are not fast processors as assumed - they just let it wash over them.   This is a loss of the human need to search for meaning.
   • Sudden Quizzes
   • Up for Grabs . A problem-setting program. Social problems are set, eg. for traffic congestion or making more jobs, or stopping teenage boredom.   Contestants have 3 minutes to think up one-sentence 'solutions', with other quizzes while they think. The judges' panel rates ideas with number-plates as in Olympics.   The audiences can also put up suggestions as problems, and the contestants can be asked to explain further their winning ideas.
   • Useful knowledge worth knowing, not ephemeral. (Serious Pursuits)
10. Presentation of TV shows
    • Contrasts within shows; and in consecutive shows - to learn about good and evil and the grey between
    • Subtitling in 'International English Spelling', to test out how cleaned up English spelling might help learners and poor readers and be more fit for the 21st century.
    • Alternative endings after a show has finished
    • Improvements in techniques so that the audience can maximally participate in the meaning.

11. Serials and Series Ideas for -

    • Historical reconstructions and drama.  
    • Best of the Old = understand old cultures
    • Ceremonies for the day . from round the world and its rites.  
    • Games People Play
    • In place of cooking shows.   Ideas such as Alternative Housekeeping .   Most people today know few tricks of housekeeping and are consequently wasteful, uninterested and loathe it.   Yet this unavoidable aspect of most people's lives could be vastly improved and add entertainment, thinking, science, environmental pride and money-saving to it all.
    • Koori   Dreamtime . What our culture can learn from kooris, including philosophies, tracking, bush tucker, survival.
    • Media students 5-minute projects.   (Some of these are excellent).
    • New endings for old shows.  
    • People they laughed at
    • Real Men through the ages, Real Women, even Real Children
    • Soul and spirit    Presenting the actual teaching of the various religions, not just discussions of them, or ecclesiastical politics or congregational services. ·   Religious services, not just christianity, for the watcher to join in, not to watch other congregations, which distances it. They may be subtitled all the time so channel surfers realise what they've turned into.   · Varieties of religious experience.   
    • Sweetness and Light -   as beautiful and blatantly Pollyanna as possible.
    • Telling old legends with animation based on famous paintings.   This could be put up as a competition for media artists, and I think media students might like to try these as projects too.  
    • The Tragic Flaws   - how handicaps can be made assets, and assets can be made disastrous.   Many of the episodes can be real-life stories.
    • Time-Line
    • Yourtopia   - a series of   future scenarios that avoid doomsday, and about possible ways to avoid it.  
12. Trailers and promotions - these can be vastly better
    • Many trailers are slash-and-burn exerpts of shows, giving no real idea of what it is about - apart from wildlife documentaries where it is hard to go wrong. They put people off more than they attract, and they too commonly just show the violence or bitchiness. This is not good for young viewers particularly since the context is meaningless and does not justify it. . Even a series of stills could be better, with a voice-over saying in two sentences what the show is actually going to be about (eg. the all-over-the-place promo for the Wives of Henry 8 could just have been pictures of the six wives in sequence, each with intriguing background, followed by the menacing portrait of Henry. )
13. Non-commissioned programs
    • The cost of Australian-made programs is given as a major reason for imports.   Funding for a high proportion of Australian-made programs must be continued for many reasons, and part of the remaining gap can be filled by repeats of former excellent Australian programs.   10% of programming could also be filled with non-commissioned Australian programs. Now that technology has become so much more inexpensive, available and sophisticated, home videos are often shown on TV for comic events or news without professional photographers.   Non-commissioned Australian programs could be like talent quests - anyone could enter programs for selection, or ideas for development.   A regular payment could be agreed, between the cost of commissioned programs and imported ones.   We would have 10% more Australian content, plus finding talent that otherwise would never have a chance.   These could be on any topic, and so encourage innovation beyond drama.   Preference could be given to television that can extend children and adults beyond scatty/meaningless watching, and develop constructive interests and be a sort of therapy for unhappy adults and psychologically deprived children.
14. Problems to solve
    • Research.   There needs to be more public research about the long-term effects on intellectual functioning of epileptogenic flashing, fast collages, and sequences edited to eliminate sequential comprehension, and of constant drum-beats in music.    It may be regarded as criminal in the future that we never did this, when the 'experimentation' is on such mass audiences.
    • Television itself - the constraints of the nature of the medium itself, and its inability to represent much of real reality in a non-boring way, unless producers and directors are first class.
    • The producers and reviewers of TV, can be more influenced by TV's stereotypes and values than any other group   because they are immersed in it - and so repeat them and   in order to avoid their own boredom, and to make up for mediocrity, may can simply try to increase impact - which may mean more violence, mean-ness and smartarse - rather than use their imagination to improve the quality.
    • Life mirrors art.   (There could even be a program series on how often his has happened - even with September 11 scenarios.)
    • TV is watched by vulnerable viewers at any time, so no programs are watched only by 'mature adults'.
      •  i.   Children are learners, and it is a blind claim that television is the one thing they do not learn from.   Much of Australian culture today comes directly from the TV screen.  
      • ii. Adolescents are the most vulnerable to influence, because they are both learners and actors, able to copy what they see, as children still mostly cannot.
      • iii. One potentially psychotic adult can be triggered off to multiple murder, at tremendous social cost - for what gain? Obviously tempting programs may be more dangerous than the apparently innocuous.
      • iv. Many adults are not 'mature' in the usual sense of the word, meaning caring, responsible and with wide interests.
      • iv. Ask why people want to produce and to see antisocial entertainment and be voyeurs of suffering. This may not be healthy 'outlets'   but rather, develop psychologically unhealthy appetites.