The Tribal Mind: Let us comfort you

Wednesday May 9, 2007 04:08 PM

Who We Are

To discuss Australia's top takeaways, go to Chiko and the gang

by David Dale
Australians are crawling back into their cocoons. The age of adventure is over. You can tell from the way they're watching TV. Don't try to show them anything edgy, surprising or demanding. They want slow, reassuring, and predictable.

The programs that symbolise the national mindset right now are Domestic Blitz and Better Homes and Gardens. We demonstrated enough bravery by watching The Chaser boys and electing Kevin Rudd. Now we're pulling up the drawbridge.

This behaviour pattern seems to go in three year cycles. From 2002 to 2004, as we retreated from September 11 and the Bali bombings, the top shows reassured us that every problem had a solution. Messy garden? A team of fairies will fly in for a weekend and redecorate it. Messy crime? A team of scientists will shine a blue light on it and find the culprit within an hour. Our favourite sitcoms came with cues to tell us when to laugh.

In 2005, we started to take a few risks, tolerating and then embracing shows that kept us in suspense from week to week.

Who will survive the island? What secret will be revealed about which desperate housewife? Who will be voted off the dance floor? By 2007, our favourite comedy was about a hyperactive boy with reading difficulties and a drama teacher exploiting a student dead from a drug overdose. And we needed no laugh track to give us emotional prompts.

Now George Bush has ruined the world's economy and the Arabs keep putting up the price of petrol. Once again we want television to tell us that everything will be alright. In Domestic Blitz, a team of experts fly in and take 48 hours to renovate the home of a needy family. Better Homes and Gardens shows us how to survive rising prices, feed the family and paint the shed. Safe sitcoms are back, with How I Met Your Mother and Two and A Half Men apparently sharing the same canned laughter track.

Nostalgia is what it used to be, with 20 to 1 drawing 300,000 more viewers than it could manage last year (when we preferred to look forward). And football, the ultimate in escapism from the chaos of reality, is getting record audiences.

Even the edgiest new hits are predicated on reassurance. Your restaurant is failing? Gordon Ramsay can fix it with a kick up the arse. Worried that commercials are conning you? The Gruen gang will explain how to spot the mind tricks.

The only difference between 2008 and 2002 is that there is no longer such a thing as the mass market. The buzzword this year is fragmentation, which means the programmers have to work harder to offer equal doses of comfort to every demographic niche. How they are doing that will be the subject of the next Tribal Mind column, which will also include any theories on social change that you'd care to raise by going to Comments

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). To discuss Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

COMMENTS

Are TV programmers really trying to 'offer comfort'? Call me a cynic, but the sole purpose of these shows is to lull the mind into a receptive state ready for the sales messages. Just switching the TV on at all these days is a deliberate act of submission to consumerism: "OK, I'm receiving, now sell me something for God's sake!"
There's no comfort to be derived from these shows, only a vague sense that tomorrow there will be something new worth buying that will make life meaningful. It's an old line, but for crying out loud, give your brain a break and try reading a book instead.

by Will Belford on June 16, 2008 at 07:43 AM

The arabs are putting up the price of petrol, are they? They sell it for $15 a barrel. I wonder who's putting it up to $130 . . .

by c on June 16, 2008 at 07:45 AM

The bravery is not lacking in the audiences - it's lacking in the programmers. People are watching the current shite because there's no other choice. Big Brother is failing because everyone is sick to death of crap but the programmers are too frightened to go out on a limb and give us what we really want .... instead they just repackage and repackage and repackage and those who have high speed broadband access go there instead.

by Lis Bastian on June 16, 2008 at 07:57 AM

My theory is that we're still in the aftermath of the Bush / Howard / Blair era of conservative finger-pointing and fear fear fear. People are still following J Howard's lead in overstating the threat to national security from illegal immigrants by continuing to tune into shows like Border Security & Sea Patrol. Another factor contributing to the success of mediocre 'sitcoms' and lifestyle programmes is the rise of shows like Today Tonight, A Current Affair & Sunrise / Today. They've set themselves up as guardians of the nation's moral conscience, attacking anything vaguely contrversial or challenging (Summer Heights High, The Chaser, Bill Henson etc) the result being people don't trust their own ability to decide what's funny or interesting. I might be overstating their influence but I think it all gets through into the public consciousness to a degree.

by darren on June 16, 2008 at 08:42 AM

Why are aussies retreating into their cocoon, scared sh*tless I should think. What between between rising interest rates, rising petrol and the coming Carbon Tax on everything family. What do you expect? Half the country will not be able to afford a car, electricity or even catch a bus. All they will be able to do is live in their backyard and scrape together enough to pay their mortgage. It reminds me of the words from a Bob Dylan song - "Freedom's just around the corner from you, with truth so fine on what good will it do?"

by Michael on June 16, 2008 at 09:14 AM

What a load of utter nonsense. Didn't 'edgy' shows like the Office, The Mighty Boosh & Ali G (just to name a few) all become huge hits during your supposed 'retreated' period? So Chris Lilley's next show will be a complete flop because of rising petrol prices? I really like your 'three year cycle' theory. i didn't realise television ratings were due to the El Nino effect. A Lazy column.

Tribal Mind replies: The Office (both US and UK versions), The Mighty Boosh and Ali G were ratings failures, watched only by the same tiny minority who now watch 30 Rock.

by David on June 16, 2008 at 10:37 AM

so it is no wonder that Australia has the highest amount of tv downloads per capita...

by Renata on June 16, 2008 at 10:45 AM

"our favourite comedy was about a hyperactive boy with reading difficulties and a drama teacher exploiting a student dead from a drug overdose"...
What shows are those? Neither of them sound familiar, so either the descriptions are overly vague, or I dont watch nearly enough television!

Tribal Mind replies: Both in the one show and both played by Chris Lilley.

by Manda on June 16, 2008 at 11:55 AM

I think the author has not appreciated the changing demographic of who is watching television. The adventure watchers are getting their entertainment online and the people watching these programmers are perhaps those with the least time online.

Tribal Mind remarks: You have precisely anticipated next week's topic.

by Office Coffee Machine on June 16, 2008 at 12:42 PM

In viewing the future Future Watch employs the Anglo-American Hegemonic Cycle. This is informed by "Socionomics" and "Social Cycles". Robert Prechter promotes Socionomics and William Strauss and Neil Howe promotes Social Cycles. Some quotes below provide an introduction to this field of thought:
Simply put, the socionomic hypothesis is that social mood generates social events, not the other way around. This is why the stock market - the primary historical database of collective optimism and pessimism - turns before pivot points in the economy and cultural expression (How Can You Use the Tax Revolt Indicator? elliottwave.com June 27, 2007).
Socionomics is the study of social action that expresses social mood. Social mood arises endogenously from unconscious herding impulses... A positive mood motivates people to produce more, act peacefully with their neighbors, purchase uplifting entertainment, etc., and a negative mood motivates the opposite actions. So mood shapes economic, political and social trends...
Crowd psychology creates peaceful eras and turbulent eras. After the mood has trended positively for a longtime, peace reigns, as it did in the1920s, from the mid-'50s to the mid-'60s, and during the 1990s. After the mood has trended negatively for along time, turbulence reigns, as it did in the 1930s, the 1970s and since the peak in 2000...� (What is Socionomics? An Interview with Robert Prechter, Executive Director of the Socionomics Institute, socionomics.net).
A turning is an era with a characteristic social mood, a new twist on how people feel about themselves and their nation... A society enters a turning once every twenty years or so...� (William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning, (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), p.99).
None of these turns (or decades) had to be exactly what is was, but each was a phase of history America had to transit. What we remember as the 1960s could have been altered - perhaps made better, perhaps worse. Yet with the altering we would have experienced a better or worse 1960s, not a repeat of the 1950s or a hastening of the 1980s. The American high did not require institutional racism or sexism, but it did require a social stasis. The Consciousness Revolution did not require a Vietnam War or Watergate, but it did require a youth revolt and cultural experimentation. Today�s Unravelling does not require profane media or endless budget deficits, but it does require individualism and institutional decay. A Fourth Turning does not require economic depression or civil war, but it does require public sacrifice and political upheaval� (William Strauss and Neil Howe, pp.310-11).
Above from the article "The Kevin Rudd, James Scullin and Gough Whitlam Rhyme"

by watcher7 on June 16, 2008 at 05:20 PM

Isn't the trend here not towards less engagement but rather towards engagement with more trivial and spurious things? We need fear and danger at all times to define and validate ourselves, but we get this sense of danger - and the sense of protection against it - from different places according to our culture and preferences. Just as Americans vote Republican when they want to feel strong and Democrat when they want to feel just, Australians consume the sort of media that provides what we consider to be excitement, and we feel engaged with life - edgy, or whatever the word is at the moment - regardless of what it is we're engaged with. If our obsessions at the moment are more image-driven and imaginary, that's a metaphysical crisis, not a lack of nerve or energy. Given that, the danger here isn't that we be suffocated by our cocoons. It's that we pull down our concept of the world to fit the mediocrity we're comfortable with; Sea Patrol etc. can be read as threatening or reassuring but either way they turn it into something much less than it is. Australia's totally justified in embracing comfort as long as we remember how much more there is in life.

by Nicholas on June 16, 2008 at 06:30 PM

Office Coffee Machine got in ahead of me.
I haven't watched "TV" on a TV in my own home this year. What's the point of doing so in Australia? Anything decent is either set adrift on the schedule by the programming nincompoops or is running so far behind overseas airings that any plot leaks are devastating.
BTW Ratings aren't capturing all of what people are watching - just what broadcast TV they're watching. There's so much excellent English-language programming that isn't available here at all, so why turn on the telly when the programming cupboard is stocked with gruel?

by Proper Copper Coffee Pot on June 16, 2008 at 08:45 PM

The Sun-Herald

Who We Are

The Tribal Mind: Let us comfort you

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