kidattypewriter

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Now You Know Your ABC

This account of the ABC of old is rather charming:

Incredible though it may seem, the ABC used to be unbiased. In the 1950s and 1960s Channel 2 did not have bellowing advertisements for itself between programs. Instead it had a few well-spoken women, such as Corinne Kirby and Ruth Nye, who would sit in an arm chair, with a vase of flowers nearby, and simply chat to the viewers. Other ways of filling up the five or ten minutes between shows were with songs by a pair of Scandinavian folk singers called Nina and Frederick, who were a bit like Peter, Paul and Mary - if you took out Paul. Other fillers were short, relaxing films of cats trying to open a door, or peaceful scenes of farm life.

In those days ABC television really didn't have advertisements - unlike the ABC television of today.

That's from Diogene's Lamp. I'm not sure who the fellow is that writes it, but he describes himself as having 'a mordant eye', and has a penchant for one-liners by people like Menzies and Mencken - not to mention Breton Creperies. Please consider.

4 comments:

Dave said...

Hi. Read your comment about feed on armagnac'd. Your feed exists (go to http://willtypeforfood.blogspot.com/atom.xml and you'll see it) but there's no link to it from your page. I've got advice (yeah, the net's full of unsolicitied anonymous advice, I know) for ya.

If you just have a glance in blogger Settings/Site Feed, click on the little question mark next to Publish Site Feed and you'll get to http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=698 which might help. I reckon you just need to put the HTML down the bottom into your sidebar somewhere - the link to BlogSiteFeedUrl. Then people should be able to see it and get to it when they go to your page.

Good luck! Nice work here, by the way.

TimT said...

Ah! Thanks, not-so-anonymous Dave!

Anonymous said...

Have you noticed the ABC turning the volume up in its newest Ads as well?

You can have a tv show at a reasonable volume and then the ads come on and boom full volume and your clamping your ears down.

No the ABC may be a government entity but it is now a commerical entity aswell. The programs are encouraged to have merchandise available in the ABC store its all about sell sell sell...why else would all the good programs go to commercial networks...a la good news week...

TimT said...

That's what you get when you rip taxpayers money off them and feed it indiscriminately into a bloated bureaucracy that is more interested in self-preservation ahead of good old fashioned values like being nice and generous and drinking tea and the lash and ...

*looks around*

Oh, sorry, I didn't notice I had visitors.

Email: timhtrain - at - yahoo.com.au

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