The Sun-Herald

The Church of the Second Chance

by David Dale.
One door closes, another opens. Or, money is never lost -- it simply moves from one pocket to another. So if Australians are going out to the flicks less often these days, what are they doing more often? Answer: staying in for the flicks.

Australians spent $818 million on cinema tickets in 2005 (down 10 per cent on 2004). At the same time they bought $975 million worth of DVDs (up five per cent on 2004). That's a historic social shift: we now spend more on movies for home than on movies at the multiplex. It has huge implications for those who make and sell entertainment, because what used to be the tail is now wagging the dog.

Every Australian household buys seven discs a year, to watch on the giant screen installed in the family room. The discs that united the nation in 2005 are shown in the table below. The first five are predictable echoes of the cinema box office of a few months earlier. But then it gets interesting.

Number six is The Notebook, a romantic tearjerker. It made a mere $6 million in cinemas late in 2004, but clearly left a strong impression on those who did see it, because it sold massively on disc -- as did such other box office blips as Team America World Police (only $5 million at the cinema), Princess Diaries 2 ($7m), Phantom of the Opera ($7m) and National Treasure ($6.5m).

Among the 50 top selling DVDs of last year, three came from television (two seasons of Little Britain and the first season of The OC). You couldn't have predicted such success from the ratings of those shows, which never attracted more than a million viewers in the mainland capitals. Clearly word of mouth from the few people who did see them on the box was enough to encourage others to catch up on disc.

The cinema slump and the DVD surge lead to two conclusions:

1. No film will ever make more than $40 million at the Australian box office again.
The names Titanic, Crocodile Dundee, Shrek 2, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy can be carved in stone as the biggest moneymakers of all time. The peak from now on will be the $35 million made by The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Fans will still go to the multiplex to be among the first to see the latest blockbuster, but they'll happily wait a couple of months to see more modest movies on disc. For small to medium flicks, the future no longer involves what Steven Spielberg calls "sitting in the dark with strangers".

2. The DVD may be the Church of the Second Chance, but it's not the saviour of local drama.
It would be nice to think Australians were staying away from home-made flicks at the multiplex and home-made dramas on the box only because they know they can catch up with them later on disc. If that were so, The Oyster Farmer, Hating Alison Ashley, Three Dollars, and Somersault would have been in the company of such obscurities as Alien Vs Predator, Raise Your Voice, and Cinderella Story in the best seller list. No such luck. Among the top 50 DVDs of 2005 there is only one Australian creation: Whatever Comes Next, a collection of performances by the standup comedian Carl Barron.

So whatever else the silver disc is doing, it is not relieving Australian producers of the obligation to make their movies and TV series entertaining.

What makes you buy a DVD? Are the bonus features important? Which DVDs have the best extras? Below, give us your recommendations.

Top selling DVDs of 2005
1. The Incredibles
2. Madagascar
3. Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith
4. Shark Tale
5. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
6. The Notebook
7. Troy
8. War of the Worlds
9. Batman Begins
10. Finding Nemo
11. Team America World Police
12. Robots
13. Meet The Fockers
14. Garfield
15. The Last Samurai
16. Racing Stripes
17. Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
18. Phantom of the Opera
19. Dodgeball Uncut Version
20. National Treasure
(Source: GFK marketing)

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. To join a daily discussion of Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

• by David Dale in The Tribal Mind at 08:37 AM
• Comments (30)

A place we would quite like to be

by David Dale.
The average Australian is cheerful, humane, inventive, mischievous, obsessed with novelty, cycling between self-confidence and self-doubt, generous, skeptical, and aggressive only when cornered. Anyone who lacks even one of those qualities is simply un-Australian.

That seems to be the contention of Who We Are, a small book published on Australia Day. It brings together a pile of data on the details that define us -- how we behave, what we enjoy, and who we admire -- in an effort to pin down those elusive "Australian values" that politicians and pundits keep going on about. In the process, it may provide a basis for feeling patriotic -- except it also says the average Aussie is uncomfortable with displays of nationalism.

You're bound to be dubious about generalisations of this kind, but these are some of the characteristics the book suggests as typical values:

A similarity to marsupials. Who We Are quotes John Carroll, Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, thus: "One of the leading symptoms of insecurity is a tendency to extremism, to fanaticism or fundamentalism. It is a leading mark of Australia as a political culture to have always and without exception been skeptical of idealism, hostile to extremists, innately drawn to the moderate. The marsupials [koalas, echidnas, kangaroos, platypuses] set a tone, in their way of being. In part it is their lack of aggression: except when cornered. The quiet way they go about negotiating their habitat has affinity with the way the people respond to bureaucratic controls."

A festival of failure. Founded by rejects from British society, Australia has a holiday devoted to a military fiasco, a hero hanged after bungling a bank robbery, an alternative anthem about a thief who commits suicide, and a film industry that keeps making self-critical movies that nobody goes to see.

The cultural cringe. A belief, prevalent until the 1970s, that any work done by Australians would inevitably be inferior to the work of British and American people, and that we needed them to teach us how to be "world class".

The cultural strut. A belief, growing since the 1970s, that we have nothing to learn from other countries because Australians are the best at sport, acting, directing, winemaking, modelling and music.

Early adopting. Australians embrace new entertainment technology faster than most other nations: colour TV, the CD, the VCR, the mobile phone, the DVD, the iPod. Same story with food. The national diet now includes spaghetti bolognese, satay, butter chicken, pad thai noodles, sushi, and yum cha in equal proportions with Big Macs, pizza and meat pies.

The tall poppy syndrome. A tendency to ridicule those who display arrogance about their wealth, fame or success.

Self-deprecating humour. Why do Australian men come so quickly? So they can get to the pub and tell their mates about it.

Linguistic cuteness. The garbo's off on compo because he went troppo. We'll give the kiddies their Chrissie pressies by the barbie, so come round for brekkie and bring your cossie, a few tinnies and something to stop the mossies.

Backshed creativity. The book claims that Australians invented the notepad (Tasmania, 1902); plastic lenses (Adelaide, 1960); counterfeit-proof money (Canberra, 1988); prepaid mail (Sydney, 1838, two years before the London post office started using stamps); ultrasound (Sydney, 1961); preferential voting (Queensland, 1892); a cure for most ulcers (Perth, 1985); forensic lights as used in CSI (Canberra, 1989); and Kiwi boot polish (Melbourne, 1906) even if the Kiwis invented the thong.

In the introduction to Who We Are, the author thanks "the readers of The Sydney Morning Herald, whose thoughtful responses to my weekly column, The Tribal Mind, spurred me on to new inquiries and corrected many a misapprehension". So we'd better turn this discussion over to you. Below, you may care to dispute the national values listed here, or suggest some alternatives.

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. To join a daily discussion of Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

• by David Dale in The Tribal Mind at 10:13 AM
• Comments (330)

In boastful strains, then let us sing

by David Dale.
EVERY time we sing Advance Australia Fair, we are perpetrating a fraud on the world. Do we really want to turn our schoolchildren into con artists?

The Bureau of Statistics last week released 2006 Year Book Australia -- a 776-page report that functions as the annual reality check on the claims made in the national anthem. And far from giving Australians all a reason to rejoice, it exposes a monstrous credibility gap. Young? Golden soil? Sharing boundless plains with those who've come across the sea? Who are we kidding? Let's take the national boasts one by one.

"We are young ..." If you think half the population being older than 36 is young, you'd have to be a typical self-deluding baby boomer. The bureau reports that in the mid-1950s, 29 per cent of the population was under 15, and 8 per cent was over 65. Now only 20 per cent is under 15 and 13 per cent is over 65. The bureau stops short of suggesting we should start turning our schools into nursing homes, but remarks:

"Australia's population is ageing because of sustained low fertility - which has resulted in proportionally fewer children in the population - and increased life expectancy. South Australia has the highest median age (38.5) followed by Tasmania (38.4) and NSW (36.6). The Northern Territory has the lowest median age (30.6). The community faces the challenge of providing policy, programs and services to meet the changing values, behaviours and attitudes of an older population."

The report says Australians now have one of the highest life expectancies in the world: "The life expectancy of males (78 years) is exceeded only by Hong Kong and Iceland (79). The life expectancy of females (83) is exceeded only by Hong Kong and Japan (85)."

"... and free"? A much smaller proportion of us are convicts than was the case 200 years ago. The total prison population is 24,171, but that's rising as the wheels of justice grind ever more slowly: "Over the past 10 years, the proportion of prisoners who were unsentenced (awaiting trial or sentence) increased from 12 per cent in 1994 to 20 per cent in 2004."

"We've golden soil ..." Actually brown dust might be a better way to put it. More than a third of the driest continent on earth is effectively desert, says the report, and because of global warming "by 2070, the southern boundary of the Australian desert would be expected to move south by 100-200 kilometres". There will be a rise in average temperatures of between 1.4C and 5.8C and "a warming of this magnitude will substantially increase heat discomfort in the arid zones".

What are we doing about this? Only pumping out more greenhouse gases. "At last check more than 17 tonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted per year for every Australian," says the report. "Only the United States had a higher rate of emissions of CO 2 per head among OECD countries."

"Wealth for toil ..." Not if you're Tasmanian and not if you're a waitress. The report says employees in Canberra have the highest average weekly earnings - $1161, compared with $1052 in NSW and $888 in Tasmania. Men in the mining industry earn the highest weekly ordinary time earnings - $1628 - while women in the hospitality industry earn the lowest - $674.

Toil time is stretching, too. The average weekly hours worked by men is 41.5, but for a male manager or administrator, the average jumps to 51.6 hours.

"Our land is girt by sea" True enough, and 85 per cent of Australians live within 50 kilometres of it. But we're not exactly nurturing this asset: "The level of fishing activity has increased over the last decade to the point where almost all the major known fish, crustacean and mollusc resources are fully used. Some major species such as southern bluefin tuna, eastern gemfish and school shark have suffered serious biological depletion." The report says Australian fisheries production declined by 10 per cent in 2003-04 (to $1.6 billion).

"Our land abounds in nature's gifts" Somewhat less than before. The report says the "lost value of land" from degradation due to economic activity was $330 million in 2004, up from $270 million in 1994.

The nation that once rode on the sheep's back is in need of other transportation. Wool production has halved since 1990 and the value of wool produced in 2003-04 was $2397 million, less than half the value recorded in 1988-89 (although we are still the world's biggest producer).

"... renowned of all the lands" Strangely, this is not just a PR puff. The report says there were 5.2 million short-term visitor arrivals in 2004, up 10 per cent on 2003 and the highest number of arrivals ever recorded. The international tourists consumed more than $17 billion worth of goods and services produced by the Australian economy.

So perhaps we don't need to shift the anthem to Waltzing Matilda for a while yet. Below, lets hear your views on forcing kids to engage in misleading advertising

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. To join a daily discussion of Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

• by David Dale in The Tribal Mind at 08:40 AM
• Comments (112)

Test your telepathy

by David Dale
We have a winner in the contest to predict how well The Chronicles of Narnia, King Kong, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Fun With Dick and Jane would do at the Australian box office..
This is what this column asked, back on December 20:

How well can you read the mood of Australians? Here's a special Tribal Mind holiday contest. We want you to predict the final box office takings for four movies currently cramming the multiplexes -- The Chronicles of Narnia, King Kong, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Fun With Dick and Jane -- given only this background information:

Australians went to the flicks less often in 2005 than in 2004; and on average, blockbusters have tended to total, by the end of their runs, three times what they made in their first week.
At the beginning of 2005, The Incredibles made $7.6 million in its first week, and ended up with $26.7 million, so it conformed with the "three times" rule. But Meet The Fockers broke the rule by opening with $8.8m and ending with $34.9 million -- because it got fabulous word of mouth. And Matrix Revolutions opened with $9.7 million and totalled $18.1m -- because it was a load of crap. So think carefully about possible contributing factors before making your predictions on how Australia will respond to these four movies. This is what you need to know:

In its first week, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sold $15.75 million worth of tickets. Can the fourth Potter beat the first Potter ($42m) or even the third Potter ($33m)?

King Kong made $8.59m in its first week. Can it approach Peter Jackson's last epic -- Return of the King at $46m?

The Chronicles of Narnia made $8.79m in its first week. Will it follow the averages and end up with $26.4m, or is it better than that?

And for the purposes of comparison, we include the new Jim Carrey comedy Fun With Dick and Jane, which made $2.28m in its first week.

Your task: tell us what those films will total by the first week of February, 2006, and explain your reasoning. Your four predictions must be registered (via the comments below) before midnight on Monday January 2, 2006.

In February, the readers who came closest to all four totals, or who offered the most plausible analysis of the nation's moviegoing habits, will win a modest prize: the popular culture guidebook WHO WE ARE -- A miscellany of the New Australia, by David Dale.

Here are the ticket sales as of January 30:

Narnia has totalled $33.8m after five weeks.
Dick and Jane has totalled $11.5m after six weeks.
King Kong has totalled $21.4m after eight weeks.
Harry Potter has totalled $35.5m after nine weeks.

Now here's the winner announcement: Nobody got the figures exactly correct. Most people underestimated Narnia and overestimated Kong. The reader who came closest was Craig McGowen, who wins a copy of Who We Are for speculating that Harry would make $34.5m, Narnia $31m, Kong $22m and Jane $11m.

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. To join a daily discussion of Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

• by David Dale in The Tribal Mind at 09:12 PM
• Comments (36)

Split infinities

by David Dale
As you know, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't. If you are in the first category, you'll want to know about a new dichotomy just thrown up by research: Innies (people who, as babies, rode in a pram or stroller that had them facing the parent) and Outies (people who rode in a stroller that faced the destination ahead).

According to Britain's National Literacy Trust (here), pram position can have a profound effect on how children learn to communicate and come to deal with the people and things around them.

Babies facing inwards see and hear the person talking to them. Babies facing outwards see the passing parade and may hear a disembodied voice. So two different approaches to life are formed.

It is reasonable to speculate that Innies grow up to be teachers, writers, marketers, psychologists, restaurateurs, lawyers and portrait painters, while Outies grow up to be pilots, explorers, architects, athletes, taxi drivers, programmers and house painters.

This discovery lets us expand a list developed by the managing editor of Atlantic Monthly magazine, Cullen Murphy. In an oft-quoted article called "The Power of Two", he said dividing humanity into "dyads" provides a useful tool for classifying behaviour. One of his favourite divisions is "There are two kinds of people in the world: Italians and those who wish they were". He also enjoys the Ogden Nash verse: "There are two kinds of people who blow through life like a breeze. And one of them is gossipers and the other kind is gossipees."

In this country we're familiar with such divisions as conservative vs progressive, gay vs straight and republican vs monarchist, but Murphy offers almost infinite refinements. He slices people thus:

Dog (ie active, needy) vs Cat (ie calm, self-contained)
Saver vs Tosser
Cook vs Cleaner-upper
Prickly vs Gooey
Manual vs Automatic
Whitebread vs Wholemeal
Deciduous vs Evergreen
Sun vs Planet

To which we may now add Innie vs Outie. Murphy calculates that a mere 20 dichotomies yield more than a million possible combinations, but worries what would happen if someone with all the qualities in column A met someone with all the qualities in column B. He fears that "as with the theorised collision of matter and anti-matter, the universe as we know it would instantly cease to exist." Or perhaps it led to the formation of the Australian Democrats.

Anyway, let's see how the system might work. We could describe Australia's best liked woman, Magda Szubanski, as gooey, dog, wholemeal, automatic, innie, planet and deciduous -- at least as revealed by the characters she plays. Australia's best liked man, Andrew Denton, is prickly, cat, manual, cook, sun, evergreen, and innie.

George Bush is dog, gooey, tosser, automatic, whitebread, decidous, planet and outie. John Howard is prickly, cat, outie, cook and whitebread. Peter Costello is also whitebread, but gooey, dog, innie, cleaner and planet.

Are there better ways to slice humanity, and how would you classify some of this country's public figures?

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. To join a daily discussion of Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

• by David Dale in The Tribal Mind at 07:48 PM
• Comments (26)

All the way with USA?

For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.
For background on popular culture, go to
The films Australia loved.
The TV shows Australia loved.
The music Australia loved.
The DVDs Australia loved.

by David Dale.

Here is the proposition for today's debate: that Australians are just mini-Americans. This column will present the evidence for and against, based not on the foreign policy of this country's government, but on the way Australians consume their three favourite entertainments. Then you can adjudicate ...

The movies
Of the 30 highest grossing films in Australia this year, 26 were American and four were British. Over the past decade, the tastes of Australians have become so predictable that distributors use this rule of thumb: any American film shown here will make in $A one tenth of the total it makes in $US.

Did that formula still apply in 2005? Well, The Pacifier made $11 million here and $US111 million over there. Monster-in-Law made $A8.9 million and $US83 million. And in its first four days, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire made $US103 million in America and $A12.4 million here.

But then again, if Australians were Americans to the scale of one tenth, Bewitched would have made only $6 million here, when it actually made $10 million, and In Her Shoes would have made $3 million instead of $8 million. Perhaps those deviations can be explained by the presence of Aussies (Kidman and Collette) in leading roles. Even if we don't like our own movies, we like our own stars.

Let's compare our box office with theirs, for the year's top ten:
1. SW3: Revenge of the Sith $A35.2m; $US380m.
2. Madagascar $A25.2m; $US193m.
3. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory $A24.5m; $US206m.
4. War of the Worlds $A21.4m; $US234m.
5. Mr and Mrs Smith $A21.4m; $US186m.
6. The Wedding Crashers $A16.6m; $US209m.
7. Batman Begins $A15.5m; $US205m.
8. Hitch $A14.0m; $US179m.
9. Robots $A13.7m; $US128m.
10. The Fantastic Four $A12.0m; $US155m.

The music
Among last week's 50 best selling albums (click here for ARIA chart), 15 were performed by Australians, 12 by Europeans and 23 by North Americans. But when the totals for the year are counted, the top seller will be the decidedly ocker Missy Higgins, and the top ten will include John Farnham, Savage Garden, Pete Murray, Shannon Noll and Anthony Callea.

The box
Of the 50 most watched regular series on Australian television this year (excluding news and current affairs), 32 were Australian, five were British and 13 were American. And even when we watch US dramas, we don't necessarily respond to them as the Americans do. Cop franchises such as CSI and Law and Order are still huge over there, but are fading fast here. Desperate Housewives was watched by one in seven Australian households and only one in 13 American households.

These are our favourite US shows, and their rankings in their own country:
1. Desperate Housewives (2 in America)
2. Lost (4)
3. CSI (1)
4. House (15)
5. Grey's Anatomy (5)
6. Super Nanny (not in US top 50)
7. CSI Miami (6)
8. CSI: NY (10)
9. The Amazing Race (22)
10. Frasier (ended in US).
(Without A Trace is 3 in America and 11 here, despite having Australian stars).

So there's the information. Below, you can deliver your verdict (and any other evidence) on whether we've been culturally coca-colonised.

Footnote: If Australians do resemble Americans in their TV tastes, Channel Seven will become the number one station next year, because long-standing deals with US producers have allowed it to grab all the top-rated new series in this US season: Commander in Chief, Criminal Minds, My Name is Earl, Ghost Whisperer and Prison Break, in addition, of course, to the new seasons of Lost and Desperate Housewives. Channel Nine's only hope is to commission bulk quantities of great Australian entertainment. They'd better start now.

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. To join a daily discussion of Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

• by David Dale in The Tribal Mind at 12:38 PM
• Comments (304)

The mystery of the missing geeks

For the latest media trends, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare
For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.
For background on popular culture, go to
The films Australia loved.
The TV shows Australia loved.
The music Australia loved.
The DVDs Australia loved.

by David Dale.
This was the most puzzling piece of data released by the Bureau of Statistics during 2005: a third of Australian homes do not own a computer, and 44 per cent of Australians do not have access to the internet at home.

We're supposed to be the nation of early adopters, for god's sake, the land that leapt at the VCR, the CD, the mobile phone, the DVD and the iPod. And yet the bureau suggests that nine million people cannot share these words with you. Sounds more like the land of luddites.

Early in 2005, the Bureau surveyed 15,534 households to reach this conclusion, so the figures have a ring of truth (the TV ratings, on which billions of dollars of advertising decisions are based, are estimated from a sample of just 4,000 households).

So what are The Nine Million doing with their spare time? Reading. Talking. Singing. Eating. The rest are either making love or else expecting rain. Clues may emerge from some more details on what Australians learned about themselves in 2005:

Who we like. A research organization called Audience Development Australia showed pictures of 600 TV personalities to a sample of 1000 viewers in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and asked two questions: Which ones do you recognize and how much do you like them, on a scale from 0 to 4. The favourites were: 1 Andrew Denton; 2 Magda Szubanski; 3 Michael Caton; 4 Ernie Dingo; 5 Glenn Robins. Caton (of The Castle, Hot Property and Dancing With The Stars) bumped Rove McManus from the top five.

What we hate. These TV commercials provoked the most complaints to the Advertising Standards Bureau: 1 A naked couple leave home and climb into a Holden Astra; 2 A woman hits a man with a spanner after he puts a car part in a dishwasher with Morning Fresh liquid; 3 A baby is splattered with blood after a car hits a woman pushing a pram (Queensland Transport); 4 The buttocks of four women are shown wearing Triumph Sloggi Hot Hips Briefs; 5 Pall bearers hurry a funeral so they can drink Carlton United mid-strength beer.

How we indulge. Sales of red wine and rose were up 7 per cent in 2005, while white sales were up 2 per cent. Every Australian child, woman and man drinks 27 litres of wine a year. Putting that statistic more sensibly, the average adult drinks six glasses of wine a week, of which three and a half would be white and two and a half would be red or rose. (For a discussion of how Australia eats out, click here.)

The Bureau of Stats, celebrating its 100th birthday this month, noted that back in 1905, average wine consumption was six litres a year, or less than half a glass per adult each week. Other evidence of rising connoisseurship came in cheese consumption: up from 1.6 kilos per person in 1905 to 12 kilos per person in 2005. So that must be what the other nine million are doing: swigging sauvignon and chewing cheddar.

At least they weren't inhaling addictive substances. The National Drug Strategy Household Survey (of nearly 30,000 people) found that 20.7 per cent of Australians over 14 are regular smokers (down from 24.9 per cent in 1998) and 11.3 per cent use marijuana (down from 17.9 per cent). The most enthusiastic smokers are aged between 20 and 29 (24 per cent of men and 23 per cent of women in this age group say they smoke cigarettes daily). But while puffing was down, popping was up: 3.4 per cent said they regularly use ecstasy (up from 2.4 per cent).

What we read. A middle-aged symbologist almost defeated the teenage wizard. For the first half of the year, Dan Brown's thrillers The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, featuring Professor Robert Langdon, topped the bookselling chart -- until Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince appeared in July. That was, in turn, bumped from the top by Bryce Courtenay's latest potboiler, Whitethorn. The non-fiction hits of the year were Steve Waugh's autobiography Out of My Comfort Zone and the meatloving CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet.

But few books came anywhere the sales of Australia's primary reading matter: The Sunday Telegraph (720,000 a week), Women's Weekly (640,000 a month), The Sunday Herald-Sun (620,000 a week) and Woman's Day (516,000 a week).

What excites us. More dancing, less singing; more doctors, less cops; more security, less quizzing. The TV series which held Australia's attention this year were Desperate Housewives, Border Security, Lost, Dancing With The Stars, House, and Grey's Anatomy, while the biggest losers were Australian Idol (down 34 per cent in audience), Law and Order: Criminal Intent (down 26 per cent), Without A Trace (down 17 per cent), CSI (down 13 per cent), and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (down 11 per cent).

Australians went to the cinema less often, but the movies for which we bought most tickets were Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Madagascar, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and War of the Worlds. The top selling DVDs were Madagascar, The Incredibles, Revenge of the Sith and Shark Tale -- which suggests that this year many Australian homes installed a second DVD player in the kids' room (and moved the VCR to the attic).

Locally made films enjoyed a modest recovery, if that term is appropriate for a box office share of 3 per cent, compared with the all time low of 1 per cent in 2004. The most profitable Australian product was a horror flick called Wolf Creek, based on the activities of Ivan Milat, followed by a tale of suburban heroin addiction, Little Fish. Little Fish made $4 million, compared with $35 million for Revenge of the Sith, confirming Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving as brilliant actors but not sufficient in themselves to bring Australians back to their home movies.

Who we hum. We may have lost interest in our own Australian Idol winners, but we loved American Idol's Kelly Clarkson, whose album Breakway sold 370,000 copies during the year. The other musical moneymakers included Missy Higgins (The Sound of White); Coldplay (X & Y); Black Eyed Peas (Monkey Business); Michael Buble (It's Time); Eminem (Curtain Call: The Hits); and James Blunt (Back to Bedlam) whose squeaky angst will be remembered as The Sound of 2005.

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. To join a daily discussion of Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

• by David Dale in The Tribal Mind at 10:37 PM
• Comments (21)

The things we did this summer

For the latest media trends, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare
For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.
For background on popular culture, go to
The films Australia loved.
The TV shows Australia loved.
The music Australia loved.
The DVDs Australia loved.

by David Dale.
As the temperature soared and the fires raged, Australians escaped into lands where polar bears pull chariots through snow, fantasies about revenge on corporate criminals, reminiscences of cricket's glory days, and conversations with dead people.

In other words, our preferred entertainments over the past fortnight have been The Chronicles of Narnia, Fun With Dick and Jane, Steve Waugh's memoir Out of My Comfort Zone, and the TV melodrama The Ghost Whisperer.

We also helped the rapper Eminem to clean out his closet (his Curtain Call: The Hits was the top selling Christmas album), saved the career of a failed Australian Idol contestant (Lee Harding's Wasabi was the top single) and got nostalgic about a suburban satire we'd seen only two months ago (Da Kath and Kim Code was among the best-selling DVDs).

But mostly, we sat in the airconditioned darkness of the multiplex. Australians spent $35.4 million on cinema tickets in the week ending Wednesday Jan 4 -- up 46 per cent on the previous week's box office.

Narnia was the biggest contributor to that. In two weeks it has been seen by two million Australians, approaching the record of the last made-in-New-Zealand battle epic, Return of the King. Narnia's success came at the expense of another Kiwi-filmed blockbuster, King Kong, which is falling from the box office heights after three weeks and will be lucky to total $20 million. It may be too long and too scary for the summer audience.

The surprise hit of the season has been the comedy Fun With Dick and Jane, in which Jim Carrey punishes greedy capitalists. It had such strong word of mouth that its second week takings were up 80 per cent on the first week.

Holiday TV viewing was down compared to the rest of the year, but The Ghost Whisperer, in which Jennifer Love Hewitt sees spirits, is averaging a healthy 1.2 million in the mainland capitals. The surprise hit is Futurama, the satirical cartoon series which was cancelled four years ago by the Seven network and revived last month by the Ten network. Averaging a million viewers, it has become the program most watched by people aged 16-39.

The disaster is the Australian soap HeadLand. Seven is showing it four nights a week through the silly season in hopes of creating an addiction, but between Christmas and New Year it averaged only 730,000.

Instead of turning on broadcast TV, Australians seem to be using their sets to watch DVDs. The consumer research organization GfK Marketing reports that a DVD-buying surge in the week before December 25 was led by three films, Madagascar, Revenge of the Sith and War of the Worlds, and two TV shows released on disc -- Little Britain Series 2 and Da Kath and Kim Code.

The books we received on December 25 included Whitethorn, Bryce Courtenay's epic return to South Africa; False Impression, Jeffrey Archer's first novel since his release from prison for perjury; and, to help us recover from seasonal excesses, the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet.

The Tribal Mind column by David Dale appears every Tuesday in The Sydney Morning Herald and you can find past columns at www.smh.com.au/tribalmind .

And for Joss Whedon's predictions for the future of television, click here. He notes, for example, that "Lost has that one-of-a-kind alchemy that really can't be copied. Therefore, look for the original series Misplaced; as well as Unfound; Not So Much with the Whereabouts; and Just Pull Over and Ask!"

AUSTRALIA'S HOLIDAY FUN

The films we queued for
1 The Chronicles of Narnia $11.1m (total $19.9m)
2 Fun With Dick and Jane $4.1m ($6.4m)
3 King Kong $3.9m ($16.6m)
4 Chicken Little $3.5m ($3.9m)
5 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire $2.5m ($32.2m
6 Cheaper By The Dozen 2 $2.5m ($4.9m)
7 Just Like Heaven $2.3m ($3.5m)
8. The legend of Zorro $1.5m ($2.4m)
(Ticket sales December 29-Jan 4, MPDAA)

The books we read
1 Whitethorn (Bryce Courtenay)
2 Predator (Patricia Cornwell)
3 Out of My Comfort Zone (Steve Waugh)
4 Guinness World Records 2006.
5 False Impression (Jeffrey Archer)
6 The CSIRO Total Welbeing Diet.
(Nielsen BookScan, week to December 24)

The music we played
1 Curtain Call: The Hits (Eminem)
2 Back To Bedlam (James Blunt)
3 Reach Out: The Motown Record (Human Nature)
4 Breakaway (Kelly Clarkson)
5 Monkey Business (Black Eyed Peas)
(Album sales, December 26-Jan 1, ARIA)

The telly we watched
1 Nine news (9) 1.5 m
2 Today Tonight (7) 1.3m
3 The Ghost Whisperer (7) 1.2m
4 Seven news (7) 1.2m
5 Midsomer Murders (9) 1.1m
6 Better Homes and Gardens (7) 1.1m
7 Getaway (9) 1.1m
8 Australia's Funniest Home Videos (9) 1.0m
9 Cricket: second test Aus v South Africa (9) 1.0m
10 ABC News (ABC) 979,000
11 The Mask of Zorro (10) 968,000
12 Futurama (10) 955,000
(Most watched, mainland capitals, December 25-Jan 2, OZTAM)

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. To join a daily discussion of Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

• by David Dale in The Tribal Mind at 10:14 PM
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The desperate, the embarrassing and the born again

For the latest media trends, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare
For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.
For background on popular culture, go to
The films Australia loved.
The TV shows Australia loved.
The music Australia loved.
The DVDs Australia loved.

by David Dale.
In considering who jumped the shark in 2005 -- as in, the people, programs and organisations that passed their peak, lost their mojo, turned into embarrassments, found themselves on the career toboggan or became candidates for Dancing With The Stars -- this column offers these nominations:

Peter Costello, Australian Idol, Nicole Kidman, Channel Nine, the Star Wars franchise, Indonesia, Ray Martin, Blue Heelers, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (and the whole makeover genre), Rove McManus, CSI, Neighbours and Kim Beazley. What additions or subtractions would you make to that list?

And was there anybody who managed to unjump -- as in, rocket back from apparent oblivion (as John Travolta does every eight years)? We're thinking of Teri Hatcher redeeming herself with Desperate Housewives, Bruce Willis with Sin City, Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Eddie McGuire by holding Who Wants To Be A Millionaire together against the toughest competition (even if his performance at the Logies had the fins circling). And was the success of War of the Worlds enough to balance Tom Cruise's fishy behaviour while promoting it?

If you're puzzling at this point about the whole concept of jumping the shark, you'd better click here for background on TV shows that have done it. Early in 2005 this column wondered if the term could apply to people as well (here), and questioned Nicole Kidman's JTS status in the light of her decision to star in a perfume commercial and Stepford Wives.

We received 181 emails, of which 74 thought Kidman had jumped, 39 thought she hadn't, 63 debated other candidates and five thought David Dale had jumped the shark journalistically for even suggesting Kidman was in the embarrassment zone. Since then, Kidman has appeared in Bewitched (which, like Stepford Wives, started wittily and collapsed after 20 minutes. Do two semi-stinkers add up to a whole fish? Does a habit of accepting roles without reading a finished script make an actor Jaws-bait? )

Reader Jeff Coe thought the classic JTS signal for a TV series is "when 1) someone's long lost father, son, daughter, whatever turns up; 2) there is suddenly a lot of flesh (sex scenes etc on a show that normally didn't show much flesh); 3) people die who were relatively important to the script."

To those symptoms, Richard Salmon would add a cameo appearance by John Cleese or Jennifer Lopez. Royce Leong thought that "the classic JTS moment has got to be the prequel. Desperate to relive success is taking the same characters and going back in time when things were 'new' again. Examples include Star Wars, Star Trek, Ring, Batman, Superman, the Exorcist, Indiana Jones (the young version), Bond movies (I heard Orlando Bloom is tipped to play a young James, and it just might involve sharks)."

Diana Simmonds said "The Bill seems to jump the shark with some bizarre new plot twist or violent death/death threat about every three months, but to date it's the shark that dies ... I'd hazard that it also happens in real life too -- Cheryl Kernot jumped the shark when she appeared in the red frock in Women's Weekly."

The political equivalent in 2005 was when Peter Costello showed his eagerness to be all things to all people by seeming to endorse the teaching of creationism as science in schools. His desperation is matched by Kim Beazley's hopelessness.

So join this discussion. Tell us who is and is not fin-ished.

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). His latest book is Soffritto -- A delicious Ligurian memoir. To join a daily discussion of Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

• by David Dale in The Tribal Mind at 09:11 PM
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