TV Cultures – Blog Post #1: Live Television
FOR SUBMISSION
Since the mid-20th century, television has been a significant fixture of the Australian home – a centrepiece of the Aussie lounge room as families gather ‘round to view some of our greatest televised moments. To name but a few, broadcast television has brought into our homes the first moon-landing, Cathy Freeman’s gold medal win at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and an unforgettable 80’s soap wedding with more bleach jobs and tulle than you can poke a stick at…
Just beeeewdiful!
But it’s not just the remarkable spectacles that have made the Australian television landscape what it is today. The everyday and weekly programming on broadcast TV have not only refined a fundamentally ‘Australian’ market, but have served to bolster and influence our overall sense of national identity through these shared experiences.
Sunrise conforms to Weiten & Pantti’s model of a breakfast show “obsessed with identifying itself with the daily world of the television viewer” (2005). Broadcast live from 6am across Australia’s eastern states and delayed for the nation’s other time zones, it links together a nation-wide audience and unites them through a collective viewing experience. Sunrise’s hosts, live elements and content are specifically catered to a broad but nuanced market of Australian viewers.
Firstly, we have the male/female hosts who represent the nuclear family and fit our Australian tastes for friendly, funny, wholesome parental archetypes.
Male host David “Kochie” Koch is the business analyst and “daggy dad” of the show, known for cracking cheesy jokes and translating the economic reports into layman’s terms for the viewers. Samantha Armytage has recently taken over the chair that was occupied by Melissa Doyle throughout most of the show’s time on air. Blonde, sweet-natured, aged 35-45 and with a tendency to giggle at Kochie’s dorky jokes – they both fit the bill of the stable “motherly” figure.
From chatting about current affairs, to cracking jokes between segments, the hosts are conversational and serve as familiar, upbeat mediators who put a light-hearted spin on the “newsroom” setup. Opening with news headlines, transitioning into a conversational and quotidian welcome from the hosts, taking a turn into a ‘meta’ shot of the new cameramen then switching back to formality by panning across to the weather reporter – Sunrise shifts in and out of formal and laidback styles to strike the right balance between informative news and more personalised entertainment.
The show’s structure and segments are designed such that it becomes a one-stop-shop for viewers as they prepare for their day ahead. It incorporates sports, news, economics, human interest stories and weather and presents them live – a crucial factor for establishing strong relationships with morning audiences (Weiten & Pantti 2005) as it adds to the notion of a “shared experience”.
The show’s use of live graphics also reinforces itself as part of their viewers’ morning routines, in what Ellis calls “a relationship of co-present intimacy” (1992). The banner fixed to the bottom of the screen provides a constant stream of headlines that instantly updates the viewer no matter what time they tune in. It also features weather information and a clock which add to the show’s functionality as a fixture of the everyday Australian’s routine.
Conforming to Benedict Anderson’s theories of imagined communities (1983), the Sunrise audience is united through individual viewing experiences of the same media product despite not having personally met one another. In fact, Kochie’s address to the viewers as “Sunrisers” reinforces the audience as a unified whole and part of the Sunrise “community”.
Ultimately, Sunrise is not a spectacle of nationalism, as with events like the Olympic Games, but rather a subtle, everyday representation and commodification of Australian identity and ideals. The Australianisms adopted by the hosts, their casual mode of address and the nature of the show’s broadcast across the nation each morning define it as a key fixture of our broadcast TV industry – one that represents and unites the nation’s audience as an imagined community.
Ellis, J 1992, ‘Visible Fictions: cinema television, video’ 2nd ed., Routledge, London
Anderson, B 1983, ‘Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism’, Verso, London, p. 1-9
Weiten, J & Pantti M, 2005 ‘Obsessed with the audience: breakfast television revisited’, Media, Culture & Society, 27 (1), p, 21-39