Readers, can you guess what nationally important creation is being talked about here in a 1965 ABC TV Four Corners item? The (black and white) reporter says that some think this creation is "like a giant octopus — and just as ugly - born out of expertly-administered artificial insemination rather than out of any genuine love of people"?
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Give up? Don't recognise the nasty brute being described? Alas, Four Corners reporter Frank Bennett is reporting what some think of the enigmatic Canberra (then with a population of just 82,000) that this edition of Four Corners is forensically probing and investigating. This heresy about our dear city leaps out, from one of many busy screens, at the visitor to the National Archives of Australia's new exhibition Tuning In: ABC TV 1964-1976.
Other (this time rather blush-making) items wait to leap out at you in this exhibition from a screen housed in a room behind a black curtain. A sign on the portal warns that you may be about to encounter nudity and other horrors. The quite chaste nudity occurs in the first ever episode of the controversial, wowser-prodding and therefore short-lived comedy romp Alvin Purple starring Graeme Blundell. His co-star is a mere slip of a fresh-faced damsel, Jackie Weaver.
Other potential eyebrow-raisers in this little theatre include some contents of the one and only episode ever made of Basically Black, an all-Aboriginal comedy sketch show. Some of the comedy is (no inappropriate pun intended), very black comedy. Some will writhe a little at the sketch in which a white man unbeknowingly urinates over a black man hiding in the long grass, making the black man's white face-paint run.
"I suppose I should be used to this by now," the dripping First Australian victim muses to the camera.
"So for Tuning In," the exhibition's curator Dr Sara King explains "we've taken a particular slice of the ABC history, beginning in 1964 because in that year there was a big administrative change after new ABC general manager Talbot Duckmanton came in. One of the first things he did was to create a department of television. There starts a burgeoning industry in Australia of creating Australian TV shows."
As she spoke behind her on a big screen up popped a still, from Phoenix Five an attempt at an Australian Star Trek or Dr Who. In the image two heroes hurtle through the air in a cheap-looking, unconvincing little 'space ship' that looks as if it might be cobbled together from three or four steel rubbish bins. Dr King says that, yes, the deadly-earnest sc-fi show did attract some criticism for not being in the Star Trek class. Moments later on the screen the Phoenix Five still was replaced by a still from the long-enduring drama series Bellbird, set in a small rural town eerily like Braidwood, albeit (for Bellbird was an anaesthetising entertainment) without Braidwood's relatively pulsating ambience.
"This was also," King continues, "a time of social change, of social upheaval, so it's an interesting period to look at in terms of the contents. Then, technology allowed for regional TV, and then satellites brought the world in to the living room and so there's this big domestic change taking place as this great big beast [the TV set] turns up in the lounge room and all of the chairs and all of the eyes start to turn towards it, in its direction. We're not looking at each other any more."
The exhibition features early pictures of the great, big, new-fangled beast dominating living rooms. In these images (what politically incorrect decorations, Aboriginal motifs and ornaments, we sometimes had in those days!) you notice how we used to be able to use the broad, boxy tops of those TV sets like mantelpieces. We used to put flower vases and ornaments on them. Today's TV sets' wafer-thinness has long since put an end to that dear old tradition
Dr King hopes that patrons of Tuning In, patrons of a certain age, will remember with joy the olden days when as children they'd curl up in their PJs in front of the great big beast and watch the ABC's classics.
Tuning In: ABC TV 1964-1976 continues at the National Archives in Canberra until 15 May.
Gary the goat, figurehead and spiritual leader of the proposed Gary The Goat Party (GTG) probably won't be allowed into Tuning In because of the likelihood that he would eat its exhibits.
Thursday's item about Gary, about attempts by his spin doctor Jimbo Bazoobi to collect enough signatures to register the GTG with the Australian Electoral Commission didn't give you the best online place to go to help this essential cause. It is www.facebook.com/jimboandgary http://www.facebook.com/jimboandgary
Gary really does eat everything (the goat gourmet took a bite out of my reporter's notebook) and Bazoobi advises that when Gary stands for election one of his catchy slogan/promises will be "Gary will eat red tape!"
