FROM:
THE NATIONAL INTEREST
with Terry Lane
Broadcast: 28 April, 1996
A debate with Clive James, Frank Divine and Terry Lane

"Australia has got a fine tradition already established in the ABC. The ABC needs a lot of correction, constant correction, but to break this thing down and substitute it with something smaller and weaker and more besieged would be a fundamental political error which, I think, people in the intellectual community should not connive."

"If culture only goes to the people with culture already, then the society starts to fragment. One of the beauties of a powerful public service broadcasting system is that people will stumble across things they didn't know about and be drawn into them."

"... even on a one channel system in Australia I'm sure that the ABC does supply things that commercial TV would never do no matter how interesting the topic. I don't think you'd get your one and a half hour symposiums about Helen Demedenko on a commercial channel at all. I think you'd get a twenty-five second news flash and that would be it."

"America has a knack of exporting its best television...take for example situation comedy which is a very high standard in America, at its best is unbeatable. But Britain is the place to watch it, not America. In America it's largely unwatchable because there's a commercial break between the opening title and the first scene and that's the first of your commercial breaks. And there's even a commercial break between the last shot of the last scene and the credit roller which goes past at high speed. I really think we should do anything to avoid that."

A cassette copy of the full program is available from the ABC