Maturing artistic voice gasped as Alvin Purple was pulled

AUSTRALIA'S actors, writers, producers, directors, agents, scene painters, film crews, and even weary novelists started 1976 full of hope and promise.

AUSTRALIA'S actors, writers, producers, directors, agents, scene painters, film crews, and even weary novelists started 1976 full of hope and promise.

Finally the local product was taken for granted, the cultural cringe all but interred, the new Australia Council for the Arts was reassuring practitioners and audiences, and Gough Whitlam's New Wave had become a subsidised part of the mainstream.

1976 marked a time of consolidation in Australian culture, at least at the year's start.

Doubt set in towards its end when, after only three episodes were screened, the Alvin Purple sex comedy, in which I starred, undressed and often jokeless, was banned in September by the chairman of the ABC, the appropriately named Sir Henry Bland.

Bland's actions were front-page news ("Alvin Pulled Off") and editorials lambasted "the sheer craziness" of the ABC chairman playing Mrs Grundy over a show that failed to offend most of its audience of more than 2 million.

Bland was seen as the new Liberal government's hitman. He said he "couldn't care less" if the ABC had no current affairs programs, and that he wanted to "cut the staff down to size". Many suspected Malcolm Fraser planned to disband the ABC.

When staff banned any replacement show, viewers were treated to 30 minutes of test pattern. Alvin reappeared later - Bland only lasted five months.

Fraser didn't, as it turned out, rip Aunty's arms off in 1976, and popular culture flourished.

Sydney's Nimrod Theatre continued to produce new plays, and a new company called Hoopla, later the Playbox Theatre, opened in Melbourne, dedicated to Australian plays. The alternative theatre, focused on Australian stories, had a radical flag-bearer, too, in Steve J.Spears's The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, as it toured to packed houses.

Reg Livermore was the defining presence of the year. The accolades associated with his Betty Blokk-buster Follies and Wonder Woman placed him, he acknowledged, "in the grand tradition of overkill".

Graham Kennedy appeared in his first film, Bruce Beresford's version of David Williamson's election-eve play Don's Party.

Don Crombie's Caddie and Fred Schepsi's The Devil's Playground were also successful. Brett Whiteley won the Archibald Prize for Self Portrait in the Studio, an interior of Sydney's Lavender Bay where he lived in a demanding relationship with heroin.

Seemingly just as deadly, Fraser's "razor gang" signalled funding cutbacks and an unpalatable awareness that the arts must become a business to survive.

None of this worried Paul Hogan, still the jester of the year. But Norman Gunston (aka actor Garry McDonald) won the Gold Logie. It was the first time a fictional character had won.

It was that kind of year, really.