As an historic article, The Box has quite a lot to crow about. It was Crawford's first soap opera, having made their name from hit police procedurals like Matlock Police and Division 4. Along with the similarly racy soap opera Number 96, it featured a barely-suppressed sexuality, 'real' characters, and a very Australian feel. It also bridged the gap between TV eras, the first season being shot in black-and-white and the remaining in colour. It marked the start of the careers of many actors who were to become household names: Noni Hazelhurst, Graeme Blundell, Belinda Giblin, Tracy Mann and Delvene Delaney.
But most significantly, it was the first Australian example of a meta-drama - where the show commented on itself by portraying staff, actors and families involved in a fictional TV station, UCV-12. By satirising the backroom deals and questionable ethics of its own industry, The Box allowed an insider's view folks at home had never seen. Of course the title was meta itself, "the box" being a contemporary, usually derogatory term for the TV set, along with the tube, the telly, the idiot box, the baby-sitter, and my Mum's faintly discriminatory "idiot relative chattering away in the corner."
NFSA title: 373418-0004
Back then, when we only had two TV stations, and no VCR or DVD or Foxtel or streaming services, there was no opportunity to see anything again. There may be re-runs, but they were on late at night or during the day to avoid intruding on the ratings. Watching TV was an ephemeral experience: look away and you miss something you would no doubt never get to catch up on. Serious TV fans would take the telephone 'off-the-hook' or ask people not to call over at certain times. I'm pretty sure everyone reading this would have their own seminal television moment in their pop culture memory, the show that brings back a loungeroom moment, defines an age or even an era of their youth.
The stats aren't recent, but the answer is a surprising Yes, with a clause. Distributed TV consumption is in. TVs are being utilised as portals or monitors for other activities, principally gaming, internet searching, and watching online videos. An ABS study from 2009 found 38% of time spent watching TV between 10 and 19 hours per week was for TV/DVDs/videos, with 28% on games/internet. This was before a raft of recent changes: wider access to streaming, faster internet, the improvement in gaming consoles, the rise of tablets and smart phones. I'd like to see more recent Australian data.
But we can surmise a fair bit here. Do a straw poll on your friends, family and colleagues with kids, for one. Run some research on the use of your own TV screen over a week, especially in school holidays like now. What's incontrovertible is that TV as an "old media" has certainly been successful in engaging with "new media," arguably the most resilient of all the old media. There has been so much research into TV over the past 60+ years it's hard to piece through the evidence - the infographic on the left (apologies for the size but try the link) is just one of hundreds on the topic uncovered by a simple search. But for children aged 5–17 years, the current recommendations for both 5–12 year olds and 12–18 year olds are the same and include: - at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity every day - a maximum of two hours screen–based activity for entertainment/non-educational purposes a day. Another study found 1/3 of children across the world watch screens at least 3 hours per day.There are well-documented effects on health and education: - TV watching is a major contributor to child obesity - there's a direct link between watching hours per day and declining GCSE scores in the UK - children from lower socio-economic groups spend more time watching TV. But as always, there are ever-increasing influences on kids watching more screens, with streaming content as the biggest game-changer and suspicions it has begun to dictate Emmys results. Theorists like Steven Johnson have argued that developments in sophistication may even be making us all smarter. One anthropologist suggests Reality TV does just this. |