Age of enlightenment

Now that SBS has turned 30, it's time for the broadcaster to decide exactly what it wants to be

Scene from National Geographic's television documentary Great Migrations: Born To Move

Now that SBS has turned 30, it's time for the broadcaster to decide exactly what it wants to be

TURNING 30 is difficult. It's an age when a lot of decision-making has to be done. If you're a woman, you might start to wear one of those "Oh my God, I forgot to have a baby" T-shirts. Men know it's time to get a serious job, possibly a grown-up career, and even settle down. For them it's the "Oh my God, I don't have a mortgage" T-shirt. (Though, these days, you see a lot of young women wearing both.)

Whatever, suddenly being 30 is a lot different to only being 29; it's time to acknowledge that you are at last a grown-up person. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Thirty: the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair."

That's the big problem facing cash-strapped SBS, which turned 30 last week: a financial thinning out to the point of emaciation and an increasing sense of loneliness as viewers continue to slowly desert her. This is a terrible pity, as the network has given us some great TV over its three decades. But at 30, SBS just can't take a trick when it comes to presenting itself, or even arguing much of a case for its survival. Critics -- and there are many -- bemoan the decline of its multicultural activism, the legacy of 12 years of conservative Howard government board appointments (when fashion designer Carla Zampatti was appointed chairwoman), and the way four years ago advertising was offered as the only possible saviour to a company seemingly stripped of assets.

There is still widespread disdain, both inside and outside the organisation, for the methods of managing director Shaun Brown, recruited from New Zealand in 2003. There is also a kind of wonder that, having largely abandoned its increasingly soft multicultural vision in pursuit of the mainstream, already over-catered to by the other networks, its audience share has shrunk even further.

Many independent producers I know no longer even pitch ideas at SBS.

"They just don't know what they want; there is no programming vision," they tell me, despondent at what they see as a policy vacuum. "Anything ethnic mate, that's also a good story," one producer was told at a recent conference.

SBS just doesn't seem all that special any more, even though it's certainly come a long way in its three decades. For a time it was suggested SBS had even shifted our understanding of what it was to be Australian, regardless of the fact many of us only found it on the remote infrequently.

Full-time transmission began at 6.30pm on October 24, 1980 (United Nations Day), as Channel 0/28, with Who Are We? a documentary series hosted by veteran newsman Peter Luck. SBS had been created as an independent statutory authority by the Fraser government in 1978, many of us mistakenly underestimating the gaunt, taciturn PM's genuine commitment to human rights and cultural diversity.

Multiculturalism became a central idea in the way we saw ourselves over the next two decades, and SBS, an expression of government social policy, provided niche programming for diverse groupings of special audiences, much of it multilingual. The bulk of the English language content on the station was increasingly classy news and current affairs, documentaries and factual and entertainment programming that covered a broad spectrum of topics.

Even if you had no special ethnic ties, SBS was still a great place to occasionally drop into and hang around for a while. Especially if you liked the round ball game (SBS was often called "Soccer, Bloody Soccer"), professional cycling, German and Scandinavian crime series, esoteric cooking shows (Iron Chef was a cult favourite) and raunchy, uncensored foreign language movies. (Comedians had a field day with these, didn't they?)

By the late 1990s policy renewal led to greater emphasis on the viewing habits of the SBS occasional loungers and hangers-on, the "monolingual Anglophones", like First Watch, who liked to roam around all over the TV looking for good shows.

But then after Brown and his NZ cronies took control, announcing their plans to extend the station's advertising, they somehow managed to lose the hugely popular David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz and The Movie Show to the ABC. It was an abrupt, painful relocation that alienated many supporters. More problems became apparent several years later when SBS's World News Australia was extended into the old Toyota World Sports 7pm timeslot to form a single, high-powered one-hour news and sports bulletin.

The focus was intense. Once a flagship program for the multicultural broadcaster, now under intense pressure after it was decided to allow ad breaks during programs, the news show suddenly had two anchors. The driven, eerily handsome Stan Grant, returned from CNN's Beijing bureau, controversially joining long-time presenter Mary Kostakidis, also ethereally good-looking (though her slightly uneven teeth were always oddly reassuring).

She was SBS's biggest star. One night when I tuned in as I often did, she looked like a chocolate truffle still waiting to be removed from its wrapping, a crinkled aubergine outfit prettily sitting up around her shoulders. She appeared to be dressed for a cocktail party. But her diction, fluency and vocal inflections were steely, resonant and impeccable.

Insiders said Kostakidis was displeased with the new format, and turbo-charged Grant was said to have had little time for her. They looked like they were in different shows, maybe even parallel universes. But despite the frostiness and obvious alienation, for a short time they presented the best news bulletin in Australia by a long shot, far removed from the tabloid weirdness of the commercial stations and the staid, slightly languid ABC presentation.

But by the end of 2007 Kostakidis, known as "the heart of SBS", had left the network, her supporters claiming she had led the fight against the commercialisation and the dumbing-down of the network. It was all a terrible pity and SBS has struggled ever since, its original purpose diluted, and incessant internal struggles undermining its position as the home of quality, culturally relevant TV.

But even as its rationale has been eroded both by the internet and by increasingly aggressive pay TV with its seemingly countless international news and movie channels, it's given us some unforgettable recent shows.

Medical drama RAN: Remote Area Nurse, filmed entirely on Masig Island in the tropical Torres Strait north of the Cape York Peninsula, was the standout local drama series of 2006. The Circuit, a six-parter exploring the hardships and issues faced by remote indigenous people in the Kimberley, shared honours the next year with the ripping crime series East West 101 (more seasons of each followed). SBS graciously offered the best documentary series that year too, Great Australian Albums, from producer Martin Fabinyi, a classy exploration of the creation of four Australian musical masterpieces across four decades.

And last year there was the unforgettable First Australians, Rachel Perkins's wrenching documentary history of the effects of white settlement, told largely from the perspective of black Australia. There was also Claudia Karvan in Tony Ayres's award-winning TV movie Saved, a powerfully understated story of how an emotionally fragile woman's support, and practical social advocacy, for an asylum-seeker almost destroys her life.

So, although she's just turned a rather shaky 30, I'm not writing SBS off just yet, even if many now believe the reality of multicultural Australia should be brought into the mainstream of the public sphere through the ABC. It's just impossible to believe the ABC is all that interested.

As an old uncle I have only one piece of advice. What about simply equipping a bunch of young, ethnic filmmakers with the gear and letting them loose on their communities to tell their own stories?

THE History Channel marks Remembrance Day on Thursday with Charles Bean's Great War, Wain Fimeri's dramatised documentary tracing the life of Australia's official World War I correspondent. It examines the way Bean's experience at Gallipoli ultimately motivated his desire to establish that unique and wonderful institution, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

It's a wonderful story told with grace, quiet humour, and a great deal of cinematic skill. The tall, skinny, rather quaint journalist, with his russet hair and clerical manner, was known to the troops as "Captain Carrot, the war correspondent". He was an unlikely figure amid the carnage of that war, "a battle born of ambition in high places that ends in low slaughter"; bravely stalking the trenches in pursuit of what eventually became a mountain of facts.

Never without his faithful Corona typewriter, his brass telescope and blank diaries, Bean recorded the war like no other. He revolutionised official war histories, writing democratically, emphasising not generals but soldiers in the front line, leaving us an honest and highly detailed account.

This film is slightly more linear than Fimeri's remarkable earlier Revealing Gallipoli, though he again juxtaposes interviews with a round table of distinguished war historians, voiceover narration (here nicely presented by actress Nadine Garner), and archival footage. It's more of a filmic biography, with Bean beautifully played by Nick Farnell and his wife Ellie by Margot Knight. And on a small budget, with typically inventive and arresting camerawork by director of photography James Grant, Fimeri delivers an elegiac and thoroughly arresting portrait of one of our great writers. As he always does, Fimeri works in a kind of speculative reverie; always alert for what literary critic Peter Steele, writing about biography, once called "riddle, quizzicality and quirk". And like a biographer, Fimeri sees his job as winkling out the truth: one of interpretation, selection and conjuring a terrific story.

IN an unprecedented global event tomorrow night, National Geographic premieres the extraordinary seven-part series Great Migrations in an estimated 330 million homes, 166 countries and 34 languages. It's the epic story of the greatest spectacle nature orchestrates -- the waves of wildebeest crossing the Serengeti, the wingbeats of a billion monarch butterflies lifting from the mountains of Mexico, the armada of walruses floating with the ice through the Bering Strait.

The first four episodes chronicle epic animal migration and additional hours include a special on scientific investigations into the reasons animals move in order to ensure their species' survival.

There's also a fascinating behind-the-scenes special on the advanced technology required to capture the extraordinary footage and the dramatic challenges faced by the intrepid camera crews.

Watching this incredible series reinforces the notion that increasingly nature exists only to entertain us on TV. It certainly shows just how far the idea of wildlife documentary has evolved from its origins in 1878 when Eadweard Muybridge's photos of frozen trotting and galloping horses stunned artists, scientists and critics in the US and Europe.

Charles Bean's Great War, Thursday, 7.30pm, History

Great Migrations: Born to Move, Sunday, 7.30pm, National Geographic.