Academic literature on the topic 'Australian idol (Television program)'

McIntyre, Joanna. "Transgender idol: Queer subjectivities and Australian reality TV." European Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (July 24, 2016): 87–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549416640535.

Jensen, Pia Majbrit. "Danish and Australian Television: The Impact of Format Adaptation." Media International Australia 124, no. 1 (August 2007): 119–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x0712400112.

McKee, Alan. "IS Doctor Who Australian?" Media International Australia 132, no. 1 (August 2009): 54–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x0913200107.

Schibeci, R. A., J. M. Webb, J. Robinson, and R. Thorn. "Science on Australian Television: Beyond 2000 and Quantum." Media Information Australia 42, no. 1 (November 1986): 50–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x8604200114.

Potter, Anna. "You've Been Pranked: Reality Tv, National Identity and the Privileged Status of Australian Children's Drama." Media International Australia 146, no. 1 (February 2013): 25–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x1314600106.

Turner, Graeme. "‘Popularising Politics’: This Day Tonight and Australian Television Current Affairs." Media International Australia 106, no. 1 (February 2003): 137–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x0310600114.

Bonner, Frances. "The Mediated Asian-Australian Food Identity: From Charmaine Solomon to Masterchef Australia." Media International Australia 157, no. 1 (November 2015): 103–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x1515700113.

Harrison, Kate. "RCTS: A Review of the Policy Process." Media Information Australia 38, no. 1 (November 1985): 24–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x8503800109.

McIver, Damian. "Representing Australianness: Our National Identity Brought to You by Today Tonight." Media International Australia 131, no. 1 (May 2009): 46–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x0913100106.

Moran, Albert. "Reg Grundy: A Review Essay." Media International Australia 138, no. 1 (February 2011): 149–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x1113800116.

Ding, Yunxue. "A critical comparison of American idol and Super girl a cross-cultural communication analysis of American and Chinese cultures /." Muncie, Ind. : Ball State University, 2008. http://cardinalscholar.bsu.edu/377.

Guy Sebastian: Angels brought me here : the official biography. South Oakleigh, Vic: Funtastic, 2004.

Murray, Josh. American Idol. Des Moines, Iowa: Meredith Books, 2007.

Kowalski, Emma. American Idol. Philadelphia: Mason Crest Publishers, 2011.

Kowalski, Emma. American Idol. Philadelphia: Mason Crest Publishers, 2011.

American idol judges. Philadelphia: Mason Crest Publishers, 2008.

Tieck, Sarah. American idol host & judges. Edina, Minn: ABDO Pub. Company, 2010.

American idol host & judges. Edina, Minn: ABDO Pub., 2010.

American idol: Season 9 yearbook. [Altona, Man., Canada]: Friesens, 2010.

Lee, Jungmin. American idol: Evidence of same-race preferences? Bonn, Germany: IZA, 2006.

Bednar, Chuck. Insights into American idol. Broomall, Pa: Mason Crest, 2010.

"Does Race Matter to Generation Y? The Politics of Identity in Australian Idol." In Adapting Idols: Authenticity, Identity and Performance in a Global Television Format, 125–36. Routledge, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315565620-18.

"How Media System Rather Than Culture Determines National Variation: Danish Idols and Australian Idol Compared." In Adapting Idols: Authenticity, Identity and Performance in a Global Television Format, 41–54. Routledge, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315565620-11.

"Are You a Musician? The Rock Ideology and the Construction of Authenticity on Australian Idol." In Adapting Idols: Authenticity, Identity and Performance in a Global Television Format, 183–94. Routledge, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315565620-23.

Hobbs, Renee, and Jonelle Rowe. "Creative Remixing and Digital Learning." In Digital Literacy, 230–40. IGI Global, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/978-1-59904-798-0.ch013.

Hobbs, Renee, and Jonelle Rowe. "Creative Remixing and Digital Learning." In Handbook of Research on Effective Electronic Gaming in Education, 1440–48. IGI Global, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/978-1-59904-808-6.ch083.

"television programme, Lost in Space (Channel 2), screened on September 2, 1992, cites a British emigrant relocated, and unemployed, in an outer Brisbane suburb, blaming Neighbours for having misled him to Australia. The third difference pits Australian egalitarianism against British class hierarchies. The myth of Australia as egalitarian circulates widely in the UK as well as in Australia. It readily enables an elision of any working-class or unemployed populations. That elision was literally as well as metaphorically bought by Barry Brown, BBC Head of Purchased Programmes: “There isn’t a class system in Australia – or, if you like, everyone in Australia is middle class” (quoted by Tyrer 1987). In this way, Neighbours can focus British viewers’ notions that there is a safe, middle-class/classless suburban heaven down under. Wholesome neighborliness is highly pertinent here. Peter Pinne, executive producer of Neighbours, is quoted as ascribing its success to the fact that “it provides a vision of something that is lacking in the personal lives of many people in Britain today, particularly a sense of personal commitment and caring in the community” (Solomon 1989). The fourth difference concerns Australian accent and idiom, and their differences from British English. Acceptability of these differences has been facilitated not only by the steady succession of Australian television and film product screened in the UK since the early 1970s, but also within UK television production by the growing recognition of regional and ethnic accents since the early 1960s first moves away from plummy upper-class enunciation. Thus when “bludger” is noted in a Daily Telegraph (February 2, 1988) review as not being understood, it is not a matter of criticism or condescension, as in some reviews of Crocodile Dundee (see Crofts 1992: 210–220). The opening of the review indicates a ready acceptance of difference: “‘I was just goin’ to put the nosebag on. Fancy a bit of tucker yourself?’ This is the essential tone of Neighbours, BBC-1’s usually [sic] successful bought-in Australia soap. It is just quaintly foreign enough to please without confusing” (Marrin 1988). Of these four differences, then, between Australia and Britain, three (concerning the weather, suburbia, and egalitarianism) are virtually dissolved in that they enable the projection of British fantasies on to Neighbours. The last difference functions as a marker of cultural difference so familiar as to present no problems of assimilation. In sum, Neighbours’s huge success in the UK can therefore be traced in the three general categories of explanation set out above. Its ratings suggest beyond doubt that all of the general textual “success factors” of Neighbours apply in the UK; indeed, almost all have been commented on by British reviewers anxious to make sense of the “Neighbours phenomenon.” It is worth noting, second, that the institutional and cultural facilitators of Neighbours’s UK success are both very powerful, and also often historically fortuitous. Recall the opening up of daytime television on BBC1 and the expansion of tabloid coverage of television in 1986. Factors such as these are likely to escape the most assiduous attentions of program producers and buyers, as well as of governmental cultural and trade agencies concerned with promoting." In To Be Continued..., 116. Routledge, 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203131855-18.

"far, far cry from the broad swathe beaten to the British market by soaps ranging from The Sullivans to Flying Doctors and from Prisoner: Cell Block H to Country Practice which preceded the Neighbours phenomenon there. “The accents” were constantly cited as a crucial point of resistance. KCOP: “People couldn’t understand the Australian accent” (Inouye 1992). WWOR: “We received some complaints about accents, but maybe that’s not the real issue” (Darby 1992). KCOP: “The actors are unknown, and it takes place in a country that few people know about” (Inouye 1992). WWOR: “One problem with anything from out of this country is making the transition from one country to the next. We’re all chauvinists, I guess. We want to see American actors in American stuff” (Leibert 1992). The tenor of these reflections in fact gainsays the New York Daily News’s own report five days prior to Neighbours’s first New York transmission: The program was test-marketed in both cities, and viewers were asked whether they prefer [sic] the original Australian version or the same plots with American actors. “All of them chose the Australian program over the US version,” Pinne said. It won’t hurt, he added, that a program from Australia will be perceived as “a little bit of exotica” without subtitles. (Alexander 1991: 23) The station’s verdict within three months was clearly less sanguine. Australian material did not stay the course, even as exotica. Two additional factors militated against Neighbours’s US success: scheduling, and the length of run required to build up a soap audience. Scheduling was a key factor of the US “mediascape” which contributed to the foundering of Neighbours. Schedule competition tends to squeeze the untried and unknown into the 9–5 time slots. Whatever its British track-record, the Australian soap had no chance of a network sale in the face of the American soaps already locked in mortal combat over the ratings. The best time for Neighbours on US television, between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., could be met no better by the independent stations. For the 6:00–8:00 p.m. period, when the networks run news, are the independents’ most competitive time slots, representing their best opportunity to attract viewers away from the networks – principally by rerunning network sitcoms such as The Cosby Show and Cheers. An untried foreign show, Neighbours simply would not, in executives’ views, have pleased advertisers enough; it was too great a risk. Even the 5:00–6:00 p.m. hour, which well suited Neighbours’s youth audience, was denied it in Los Angeles after its first month, with its ratings dropping from 4 per cent to 1 per cent as a consequence. Cristal lamented most the fourth factor contributing to Neighbours’s demise: the stations’ lack of perseverance with it, giving it only three-month runs either side of the States. This is the crucial respect in which public service broadcasting might have benefited it, by probably giving it a longer run. Until the late 1980s, when networks put on a daytime soap, they would." In To Be Continued..., 121. Routledge, 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203131855-23.

"Max Ramsay is the cardboard cutout Ozzie clod who warns his son, Shane, against dating Daphne because she works as a stag-night stripper. His main fear seems to be the effect the newly arrived Daphne might have on the price of his property. (Smurthwaite 1986) As Grahame Griffin notes, “the closing credit sequence . . . is a series of static shots of suburban houses singled out for display in a manner reminiscent of real estate advertisements” (Griffin 1991: 175). Small business abounds in Neighbours: a bar, a boutique, an engineering company, with no corporate sector and no public servants or bureaucrats apart from a headmistress. 10 Writing skills must be acknowledged. It is very hard to make the mundane interesting, and indeed to score multiple short plot lines across a small number of characters (twelve to fifteen), as is appropriate to representing the local, the everyday, the suburban. As Moira Petty remarks, Neighbours is successful because “it’s very simple. The characters are two dimensional and the plots come thick and fast. The storylines don’t last long, so if you don’t like one, another will come along in a few days” (quoted by Harris 1988). These ten textual reasons doubtless contribute, differentially across different export markets, to Neighbours’s success in many countries of the world. Its wholesome neighborliness, its cosy everyday ethos would appear to be eminently exportable. However, lest it be imagined that Neighbours has universal popularity or even comprehensibility, there remain some 150 countries to which it has not been exported, and many in which its notions of kinship systems, gender relations, and cultural spaces would appear most odd. The non-universality of western kinship relations, for example, is clearly evidenced in Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes’s comparison of Israeli and Arab readings of Dallas (Katz and Leibes 1986). And, indeed, there are two familiar territories to be considered later – the USA and France – in which it has been screened and failed. Significantly, the countries screening Neighbours are mostly anglophone and well familiar with British, if not also with Australian soaps. But why does Neighbours appeal so forcibly in the UK? In the UK market, I suggest, five institutional and cultural preconditions enabled Neighbours’s phenomenal success. Some of these considerations are, of course, the sine qua non of Neighbours even being seen on UK television. The first precondition was its price, reportedly A$54,000 per show for two screenings; with EastEnders costing A$80,000 per episode, Neighbours was well worth a gamble (Kingsley 1989: 241). Scheduling, too, was vital to Neighbours’s success. This has two dimensions. Neighbours was the first program on UK television ever to be stripped over five weekdays (Patterson 1992). BBC Daytime Television, taking off under Roger Loughton in 1986, while Michael Grade was Programme Controller, was so bold in this as to incur the chagrin of commercial." In To Be Continued..., 112. Routledge, 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203131855-14.

"to less prosaic representations. That five of the commentaries are positive in their evaluation of Neighbours, two neutral, and only one negative suggests the broad potential acceptability of the program to the US market (only one publication, the Wall Street Journal, has the kind of highbrow readership which might encourage its television critics to sneer at popular material such as soaps). The two textual features of Neighbours which do draw comment – the everyday, and the domestic and suburban – point to a crucial first feature of the US “mediascape,” in particular its “soapscape,” namely the preference for the exceptional, the non-domestic, the non-suburban. In US soaps, it is well known, the pole of melodrama exercises greater attraction than the pole of realism (cf. Geraghty 1991: 25–38) – in contrast to Australian and British soaps. These two textual aspects of Neighbours are a central theme of the US commentaries, combining under the rubric of the non-exceptional, the “realistic.” All the commentaries bar the sole negative one (Kitman 1991: 23) refer positively to Neighbours’ “realism,” often in contradistinction to the perceived artificiality of US soaps. Peter Pinne, the program’s executive producer, is twice quoted to just this effect (Goodspeed 1991: 22; Mann 1991: 28), while USA Today (Roush 1991: 15) applauds “how close the residents of Ramsey Street seem to our own suburban counterparts,” and notes that “its casual gossip and unexceptional lifestyle [are] closer to the early days of Knots Landing than to any current soap.” The redoubtable Wall Street Journal does not sneer, but praises a television version of middle- and lower-class life that is at ease with itself and singularly lacking in . . . the self-consciousness and discomfort that attends American television’s efforts to portray uneducated white working-class types . . . . [Its] characters . . . ought to be more recognisable to Americans than the peculiar beings that inhabit the worlds of our home-grown TV dramas . . . . [They] actually converse with one another in the way that people do – without declaiming or the rat-a-tat of one-liners, or recitals of a position on the latest hot social theme. If the beat of their daily lives is unhysterical – quiet, in fact – it is also eventful. (Rabinowitz 1991: 17) The Wall Street Journal takes a refreshing distance from the infamous “Greed is good” dictum voiced in Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street! Given Neighbours’s atypicality in the realm of US soaps, its American reference points are either Knots Landing – which one British journalist described as “the nearest the Americans can bear to get to a soap about ordinary people” (Kingsley 1989: 226) – or US sitcoms (Kelleher 1991: 36; Rabinowitz 1991: 17). Buyer and seller agreed that its non-exceptional “realism” was one reason for Neighbours’s failure in the US “soapscape.” KCOP described it as “less raunchy than US soap operas, too wholesome” (Moran 1992). Its seller, Bob Cristal, added that." In To Be Continued..., 119. Routledge, 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203131855-21.

"In France, Neighbours, dubbed as Les voisins, was launched by Antenne 2 in August 1989. Screened twice daily at 11:30 and 5:45, it secured ratings of 24 per cent of the market, in fact Antenne 2’s average for that year. However, for reasons which Antenne 2 is unwilling to disclose, the evening screening was shifted after only ten editions to 6:30. This put it up against stronger competition from others of the then five channels, and its rating dropped to just below 16 percent of market share. A further scheduling change briefly preceded its demise after a total of only seven months’ screening. The 185 episodes purchased only just included the debut of Kylie Minogue at episode 169. According to its French agent, Rolande Cousin, Antenne 2 bought Neighbours exclusively on the basis of its colossal British success (Cousin 1992), a phenomenon mentioned by all six articles heralding Neighbours’s arrival on French screens; its Australian success was referred to by four articles (Baron 1989; Brugière 1989; Lepetit 1989; Pélégrin 1989; Thomann 1989; and A.W. 1989). The Minogue factor also appears significant. Her singing career peaked in 1988–1989, and among the six articles she rated one cover story (Télé 7 jours), an exclusive interview and a cover story with Jason Donovan (in Télé poche), and two other references (Brugière 1989; and Thomann 1989). Cousin identifies five other potential appeals in the program for French viewers: its sun, its “acceptable exoticism,” its lack of blacks (a sensitive topic in France, as witness the racist political career of Jean-Marie Le Pen), its lack of other disturbing social material, and its everyday issues (Cousin 1992). For all this potential appeal, Antenne 2 still delayed transmitting by three months, pushing its opening into August, when most of France goes on holiday, and opted instead for the American Top Models (Baron 1989: 25). This lack of confidence in its purchase instances what Cousin called a “Pavlovian reflex” against non-US serial fiction (Cousin 1992), and points to broader issues than the fame of two of the program’s principals. The French commentaries differ noticeably from the American in their assessment of the ten textual features of Neighbours singled out above. One feature – women as doers – is not mentioned at all. All other features are mentioned at least once. The two most often referred to are the everyday, and the domestic and suburban. But Neighbours’s non-exceptionality, its everyday realism, had a different status for French than for American reviewers. For most of the latter it offered a desirable antidote to the spectacular confections of home-grown soaps. For French reviewers it was treated in one of two ways. While some derogated the program’s perceived banality (Brugière 1989; Pélégrin 1989), others, whether high(er) brow or plugging the Minogue factor, remained curiously non-committal about its everyday realism. There was a similarly curious abstention from either positive or negative evaluation of the program. Commentators’ apparent unease with this centrally distinguishing feature of Neighbours, its everyday realism, suggests that it represented something of a conundrum in the mediascape, in particular the field of television serial fiction screened in France, and may well echo the unease evidently felt by its buyer. The reasons require some clarification." In To Be Continued..., 125. Routledge, 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203131855-27.