Network Insight Institute

Bob Donoghue

Bob Donoghue, CEO, Premium Movie Partnership

… while I was at the ABC I was offered a job by those 'greedy', 'avaricious' Hollywood studios to run a pay television movie channel that would be available on Foxtel. I'm sure that most people would be surprised to hear that my first instruction from the four Hollywood studios that own it was to 'Australianize' the service. The fact was that when I went there, the two movie channels, Showtime and Encore, were programmed in Denver and delivered directly to Australian consumers out of Los Angeles. Needless to say, they were not good. Hollywood studios do more research than just about any other entity on the planet, and they realised that if these channels were to be successful, they would have to look 'Australian' and feature Australian content. They even picked up the legislative imposition to spend 10 per cent of their programming costs on Australian productions, which legislatively is the requirement of the delivery systems.

This led us to the decision that, as we were a movie service, we should invest as much money as possible in a wide range of Australian theatrical features; hopefully to give them a kick-start to get them going. I am happy to say that through pre-licensing and investments, working closely with government funding bodies, we have been able to assist in the production of 54 Australian movies. At Encore, which is a library service that features older Australian movies, we have screened 174 Australian movies since we started on air. These include movies that many people would have thought had been lost in time. We have assisted in reconstructing some of these films, which were just about to fall off their sprocket holes before we got hold of them, making available wonderful little time capsules of the way Australians used to live over a long, long period of time. I take no credit at all for the selection of those films or the movies that we helped fund, but I like to think that I helped to create an atmosphere where this kind of endeavour would be encouraged.

This is one small 'cheer' for the market place, which I think can be self-corrective in many areas. The area I don't include is children's television, which I must confess I do not, and probably never will, understand. I realise that there has to be regulation in place so that people will continue to make suitable programs for children. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the 'suitable programs' tend to be made by adults who think that they know what children want, and therefore we get a lot of programs with adults acting like children and children acting like adults. And unfortunately, the ratings continue to show that while many of these programs are beautifully made, children continue to watch Neighbour and Home and Away and The Simpsons and Rugrats, because they have pooh and fart jokes in them and kids behave badly in them. Somewhere, someone will know that there is a middle ground between the two, and we can produce high quality programs for children that children will want to watch.

I emphasise the point that Australian cultural identity is enormously resilient. Yes, we will have regulation; and yes, we probably must have regulation; but we should never underestimate the power of the market.

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