Aunty at last wakes up to the benefits of efficiency

IT was heartening to read the other day about the intention of ABC managing director Mark Scott to render the broadcaster more efficient.

A March 27 media release announcing the establishment of an ABC resources division mentioned efficient or efficiency nine times and, in so doing, touched on one of the scribe's more sympathetic nerves. The fact is the scribe has always been a stickler for efficiency, particularly as it applies to media matters.

It's difficult to say, looking back, exactly when this mindset took hold. But at some stage the scribe decided that so long as he was destined to be, then he'd be efficient. It has reaped enormous dividends as successive editors have quietly, often rather privately, commended him on his efficiency. Nothing embarrassingly flash; just a warm arm around the shoulders and a few gentle words of gratitude and congratulation.

The well-meaning scribe has occasionally even tried to spread his efficiency cult among some of his colleagues. Glancing casually around sometimes, perhaps the results are faintly disappointing.

Anyway, Scott's shake-up will see television studios more comprehensively automated and the hiring out of ABC program-making facilities - perhaps including staff - to ensure everything and everybody is efficiently deployed during the peaks and troughs of the program-making cycle.

Scott's former employer, The Sydney Morning Herald, speculated on March 28 the planned efficiency drive could cost about 300 ABC jobs over about five years. The secretary of the ABC branch of the Community And Public Sector Union, Graeme Thomson, counters that there wouldn't be so many peaks and troughs if the ABC hadn't commissioned out so much of its material, as opposed to making it in-house. And Thomson says all the indications available to him suggest a strong desire by some executives to farm out even more ABC programming to the private sector. The private sector might also sometimes conveniently and incidentally avail itself of ABC studios and technical back-up. But that's probably another story.

The ABC's standard stance, for years, has been that its schedule should be a mix of internal and external productions.

But that doesn't necessarily preclude Thomson from having picked up some authentic vibrations emanating from a renewed zeal in favour of outsourcing. Some may recall the strong rumours last year surrounding the science series Catalyst and the spiritual program Compass.

If Thomson is correct, then the ancient scribe would suggest this is, at the very least, the umpteenth occasion such commissioning fervour has seized everyone's ABC. But a pattern spoiling several written reports commending outsourcing has been an absence (with the possible exception of up-market drama, where independent co-producers enjoy tax offsets) of convincing arithmetical proof that outside productions are more cost-efficient. It may, for some mysterious reason, be the case. But it's almost never reinforced with unequivocal, inarguable evidence that in-house material is comparatively too expensive.

If more content is to get made outside, we must sincerely hope Scott and his present crop of managers are more efficient in guarding ABC integrity than was the executive group that became embroiled in the notorious "backdoor sponsorship" farce of the early 1990s. It was an unedifying scandal that cost, directly or indirectly, several corporation executives - including its then managing director, David Hill - their jobs.

Instances of the corporate world subsidising programs commissioned by the ABC (but not made by it) are too numerous to mention here. But one of the most blatant rorts (given front page treatment, back then, by this journal), the 1994 Export Australia affair, has been deftly sketched for posterity by David Salter in his 2007 book, The Media We Deserve. Salter, a long-time television producer and journalist, wrote: "The (Export Australia) scam was instigated and managed by a Melbourne advertising-PR agency listed as LMT Gallery Pty Ltd. Taking the publicly available Austrade export action lists as their starting point LMT approached small companies with export ambitions, offering them an attractive promotional and marketing package. For a fee of $20,000-$25,000 LMT would make the company a corporate video featuring their business. The deal-clincher was LMT's guarantee these promotions would be transmitted nationally on ABC television, introduced by (a then high-profile presenter) Peter Couchman and end-tagged with an infoline fax number for potential clients. The videos were made by a private production company, Horizon Films, and delivered in finished form to the ABC. In an inexplicable lapse of diligence the corporation contracted to take 50 episodes of EA for an unlimited number of runs (on Sundays, at 6.55pm) and at no charge (for screening them). Meanwhile, LMT and Horizon Films would split up to $1.25 million, revenue that depended on the ABC's naive complicity."

The moral arising from all that would appear to be that the closer outsourced content gets to factual material, so the more efficient must be the parent broadcaster's oversight. Few blamed LMT or Horizon. The odium fell, rightly, on the ABC.

There's just a sliver of space left to clear up a couple of things from a recent column (March 20) that dealt largely with increased volumes on television background music, ads and promotions. Several fellow complainants have written to the scribe about this matter and, yes, he did neglect one of the most obvious reasons for incidental background music suddenly blowing you out of the armchair: an uneven soundtrack. Some soundtracks are so variable you must constantly adjust the sound volume, whether it's the background music or spoken dialogue. With all the gadgetry available nowadays you'd assume an uneven soundtrack would be instantly fixable. Apparently not. Other correspondents point out that televised commercials frequently employ something called compressed sound.

The scribe has no precise idea what compressed sound is. But if it's another way of saying loud, then the makers of such commercials should, please, cease and desist.