Remembering Television: A Gap in the Records

National television archives routinely collect all manner of material about the medium, including information about producers, performers, writers as well as copies of the programs in which they were involved. In media studies terms, the industry and text side of the television equation is usually well attended to. Less well observed is how television was actually watched or what it meant to those who were doing the watching in specific geographical and cultural locations, then or now. Within the archives, the audience is rarely visible except as an anonymous ratings statistic. With this gap in the records in mind, it is salutory to note how often claims are made about the experience of television or the impact it has had on its viewers without anything but the slightest trace to work on. In this paper I will briefly identify those places in which the television audience has appeared including the random but revealing personal anecdote (Morris), as well as the occasional oral history (Barfield 2008), before reporting on the first stages of an ARC project entitled Australian television and Popular memory which promises to offer a new version of Australian television history.

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