Moths to the flickering screen.(Australian television)

EVERYONE HAS BEEN talking about commercial television, but in fairly predictable ways. This clamour of opinions, analyses and predictions is probably caused by the changes to the media laws, and the recent celebration of fifty years of Australian television.

As Bert Newton said, it was also the celebration of fifty years of American television in Australia. Watching the replays of the earlier golden years has, for me, been an uncomfortable experience. Commercial television, and most commercial radio, was always mediocre to bad, which is why the ABC was for long such a beacon of hope and genuine culture, and new comprehensible ideas. In those years, it had all our allegiance, and gratitude.

Whereas the painfully derivative and repetitive character of Australian commercial electronic productions gives few reasons for nostalgia, or optimism. It's rather like Creme de la Phlegm, Angela Bennie's recent collection of "unforgettable Australian reviews", dating from 1950 onwards. I think her point was that some very worthwhile things had been written, acted, expressed musically, over those fifty years, and that the reviewers had concealed the fact. I'm afraid I found a rather different outcome: most of the reviews were very well written, many of them amusing, and some quite devastating. From memory, there was a lot of tripe, of serial mediocrity, in all the areas surveyed. Eminently forgettable. There has been no Golden Age. We are still awaiting it.

I had a friend who was involved in the very early days of commercial television--almost by accident. He was a sensitive and talented Jewish boy, who hated his school, because the louts used to wait for him and chase him home, calling him a "bloody Jew". Once there, his father would beat up this short, pudgy son for not standing up to them. Eventually, an older Australian boy--who became a champion boxer--taught my friend how to defend himself. Thereafter the louts left him alone. (Alas, this very nice Australian was to die, tragically, almost by accident, in the ring.) But the Jewish boy, let me call him Morris, had had enough. So, he raised his age from sixteen to eighteen, joined the AIF, and went to the Middle East.

Come war's end, he cast around for a job, and turned his fascination with cameras into a career as a photographer--and a very good one. But, hungry for life and like-minded souls, he took up amateur theatricals, doing all the various things, except acting. For all I know he might have tried that as well.

One evening, as he and his friends were rehearsing, some strangers in winter overcoats seated themselves in the empty stalls, and watched silently. At the end, they came up and introduced themselves. The strangers were helping to start up a television network, to operate from Melbourne. They were looking for skills and talent of every kind for this new, exciting venture. Would the chaps like to put down their names, so they could then drop in to talk it all over? And so, Morris went into commercial television.

It was, he said, a fantastic experience, in which you learned on the job, picked up new skills all the time, in fact, lived off adrenalin from start to finish. A very different story from the tempo of life at the ABC--as I knew it. Let alone the, in retrospect, inexcusably sheltered life enjoyed by my peers and me in academia. But the question here was that of limits. Were there any limits to the demands made by management upon the workers in the field?