The Chaser Report - Mitch McTaggart on the enduring incompetence of Australian TV

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Comedian and host of SBS's "The Backside of Television" Mitch McTaggart joins Zander and Dom to unpack why Australian TV sucks. Mitch takes a look at the forces behind shows being produced, as well as the effect they have on Australian culture in a hilarious and critical way. Listen and find out if Australian TV really is dead, or just in a stage of metamorphosis. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to an afternoon edition of The Chaser Report. Today, The Backside of Television, Zander Sivanov and I, Dom Knight, will interview the wonderful Mitch McTaggett about his show that goes on a comedic journey through some of the most ridiculous moments on Australian television. That's in a moment on The Chaser Report. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers. Joining us now is the presenter of the backside of television, Mitch Mataggart,

whose latest show looks through the history of Australian TV through a fascinating lens. Thank you so much for joining us, Mitch. Hello, everyone. How's things be, Mitch? Have you finished shooting the 2021 raps yet? Just about. There's one tiny little pickup shot, I'll pick up shoot this weekend, depending on how disastrous December is.

The thing that, like, strikes me about the backside of TV was just, like, the star color contrast and just how vibrant it looked. That's good. I mean, we want it to look interesting because I feel like, you know, Media Watch has a certain kind of mature look, I guess. And so we wanted to kind of go the opposite of that. Yeah. Because this, I mean, like, the whole third episode of the series is very much focusing on how, like, TV has kind of gone past millennials. Yeah. I guess the colors keeps everybody engaged.

It's like dangling a little carrot in front of everybody. How did the backside of TV come to light? And how did you get into doing this Charlie Brooker-wrapped-S-style show? I had done a version of it on Channel 31 in Melbourne in 2019. And that was just completely out of boredom. And then we, because we had that pilot essentially, we just kind of showed that to SBS and said, hey you want this and they were like yeah and off we went and that was fun it just kind of happened

that way i feel like we came across the came along at the right time um because there's kind of that appetite for this kind of content but there's also a gap in the market for it because with a lot of the end-of-year specials especially um mostly covering politics or world events or world TV but no one's specifically focusing on Australian TV which I feel is interesting right and certainly plenty to kick in that subject matter Mitch like as in me physically kicking television if you need to but I mean yeah it's it's a pretty target rich environment isn't it look yes but at the same time there's still a lot to like about it and and some of the feedback that I've been getting on it was that it was I'm like

not interested in saving TV or glorifying it, that I want to destroy it or whatever, which is really not true. Like, I think it comes from a place of love because it wouldn't be a show about TV on TV if I hated it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's a lot of effort you have to put in to make this show. Like, how many hours and hours and hours of Australian TV did you have to watch to write this? Oh, my God for much.

It's just, the most frustrating thing about researching for a show like this is that you could watch literally hours of stuff and come up with dittily squat for stuff for a segment and so then you just have to abandon it because like I watched hours of a show I kind of remember what it was now that that may have had some kind of relevant clip in it and didn't and then it was just oh my like you grieve you go through this phase where you just upset about it and you're like I've just wasted my life doing that it's not even like oh man anyway I remember yeah back in the days of um chaser shows with a lot of clips we'd watch the whole of breakfast television um like every single moment that happened collectively someone would

watch for and I did a few you know sunrises and even watching it on kind of as a video file that you've recorded um and skipping the ad breaks and all that it was just it was like painting for gold and there was so often no gold in three hours of morning television it was just brutal. Oh, absolutely. And actually, side note, I remember this article by Ben Jenkins, who I think at the time was working for you guys. Yeah, his first job in TV, we broke him by making him watch all of sunrise.

Well, absolutely. And so he wrote this article, which just is burned into my head where he essentially articulated his nervous breakdown as a result of having watched all of the breakfast television. He was essentially watching 12 hours of breakfast TV each day and double. speed or triple speed or however he did it and i just i admire that dedication and i mean we can all understand and respect that essentially well it was yeah it was back when they were doing that current affairs segment that we used to do and and he used to just have to basically we'd record

six months worth of sunrise and um the today show and all there were all these other weird ones at the time like on channel 10 that died a quick death and so the team would have to watch the entire thing, high speed, looking for one particular thing. But we'd actually then go and categorize each kind of clip so that there were examples of like lambsle promotion or a crappy throw from one thing to another. It was the most painful possible way to make television. And Mitch and I can't believe you've embraced it. It will do your head in.

And I'm not sure about the kind of resources that you had, but I feel like you guys had a lot more at your disposal and a lot more people, whereas I think it was just me and the internet in a lockdown. Yeah, no, he definitely did. Which is so limiting, which I think is one of the reasons why a lot of the clips are just appalling quality, which annoys me personally because I see it in the show and it's like, oh, God, wish I had that in 1080 or whatever, but anyway. So are you just trawling YouTube to find these clips?

essentially and there's because there's I think I'm becoming more aware of those kinds of services that log and archive stuff

because I had absolutely no idea until about three months ago that there are organizations that do that stuff for you

which I think is how the bulk of media watch is put together which blew my mind and broke my heart and frustrated me

so much anyway but yeah It's mostly just going down YouTube rabbit holes. There's a lot of stuff that is archived on Twitter. It is an amazing, people post so much stuff, so much content, especially breakfast television and just those kinds of important clips just on Twitter that just this

endless history of stuff. And that's essentially the bulk of it, which, and I want to know that there's so much more stuff that I have not even seen that exists that is. you know, in the National Film and Sound Archive vaults. Oh gosh, imagine, imagine trying to go through that. You need to duplicate yourself to try and. Then how do you construct a narrative? Because there's this massive pipe of content.

And, I mean, we didn't have much on YouTube back in the day. And now almost everything's up there that you might, everyone ever found interesting. How do you shape that into a narrative? How did you choose the topics? I think we, I go in with a rough idea of what I want to say in a certain segment and I think it's largely a matter of just finding clips that kind of can support it. I guess maybe an easy example would be the true crime segment we did

in episode one and the very loose hypothesis that true crime gets worse. And so I think starting with a basic enough and reasonably obvious enough thought and building it up from there um let's more the the the i guess the comedy and the the shitty moments kind of shine a lot more than trying to convince someone of a more impossible argument i suppose i i think that's my answer yeah it's probably easier to have a subject in mind before you you know go diving through otherwise you've got the entirety of australian tv over decades to try and boil down exactly and I think it's easy to kind of, with already kind of a rough knowledge of what has happened or like little clips that you remember and stuff and kind of thinking, how can I, what's that

going to look like if I germinate that a little bit more and let it blossom and where's that going to take me? And I guess in that same kind of way of thinking, a lot of stuff that I did start exploring went nowhere as well because it's like, I don't know what this is saying now. Sure, funny clip of, I don't know, someone doing a shit or whatever, but I can't use this now because it's not, you're not saying anything substantial, which is actually one of the things that we wanted to avoid in doing a show like this because we didn't want to just have a parade of unconnected little shitty moments. I like to think the show is not shit moments. It's, it's a broader collection of things to make a point essentially because I feel like all those

current clip shows do that. Here's a shit thing. Let's talk about the shit thing for five minutes onto the next shit thing. Yeah, so I'm sounding quite negative. I'm sorry. No, one of the things that struck me about this series is that it kind of hammers home

Australian TV's loose relationship with the truth. Like in the true crime segment, they talk about how they were just getting psychics on TV to talk to people's dead children. And then in the later episode where you're talking about a current affair, you're looking at, you know, the way that these shows have stoked conspiracy theories out over the last 20 years

and now are shocked that there's that many anti-vaxes. Is it, was that an intentional throughline thesis throughout the series, or what was your approach to these different moments? I think that kind of happened organically. It all kind of ended up being this theme about it, which, whether or not that's subconsciously, what is in my head and what I think about Australian TV

or if it's something else, else, but it felt like we're all kind of organically moving toward that. And I don't really know what that says about me or the state of Australian television. But I don't know, who knows? But it makes sense in this year, I guess, too, because it's one thing to look at a whole bunch of different TV clips and have a bit of a laugh. And that's definitely worth doing. And goodness knows, we've done that before.

But to then look at what the clips do to the viewers is a whole extra dimension and going, has this actually made us susceptible to conspiracy theories? Has it changed our relationship with the truth? And this notion of us being post-truth is something that we've seen play out at a time when every weekend people take to the streets to complain about public health measures that save lives. So, I mean, I think it's way more ambitious, isn't it,

to actually look at the impact of TV rather than just looking at TV in isolation. Yeah, totally. And I think there's not enough being said about what the impact of TV is because I mean I can't say what that is I don't think anyone can comprehensively say what it is but it is definitely doing something it has to be doing something and I think the more we talk about it and the more we peel back the layers and analyze it the better because TV is pretty powerful and I don't think enough people

kind of grasp that especially people who might be the ones going out and protesting and all that kind of stuff, not maybe understanding where their influences have come from and not really paying much attention to it, which I think is quite worrying ultimately as well. And a lot of people say that in America, Fox News has been essentially creating these little bubbles that people live in separate from facts about who win elections and things like that. What were some of the favorite moments in terms of conspiracy theories back in the past that

you unearthed? What were the ones where you really went, oh, my God, that's gold. going in? I think for me it's the fluoride stuff because around 2010, around, around is there. Mount Gambia was one of the last areas of Australia, or at least South Australia, to start fluoridated water. And that just began this influx of stories from today, tonight about fluoride is toxic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And just watching the back even now, just like, What are you doing? Why did that happen?

And it's only 10 years ago that, I mean, really, 10 years ago? That's, that's, it's boggling. And I don't, I just don't get that, that, I guess it's a fear of change that the fact that in that kind of localized area that something was changing and therefore that must be bad and let's do a lot of stories on it. But also, I'm honestly still speechless about it. And I wish I found more footage about it because the only stuff that I was able to find about the anti-fluoride stories and stuff were uploaded by anti-fluoriders.

Oh, wow. You know why that is? That's because big fluoride has gone through and delayed it all of the primary evidence. 100%. Absolutely. And that's with the conspiracy stuff, a lot of the things that I was able to find was only because they were preserved by the people who agree with it, not people who disagree. just mad it's that whole it's like watching that whole concept of merchants of doubt playing out

in real time you know and that that's the fascinating thing i find about this series is that you know you talk about like the anti-vaccine movement being proven that scientists that they're interviewing have been proven wrong multiple times that their work has been um identified as lousy or poorly researched yet five or six years later a current affairs is still pulling out these people so that they have an opposing side that they treat as equally as a verified medical opinion? It is frankly lazy journalism. And I don't understand why we keep doing it in that arguments don't, those kinds of arguments don't exist because they're not arguments. It's just because you're bringing on someone to oppose the other view. I mean, why are we doing that?

Why does that always happen? Like, you could argue the most preposterous thing. would say we are already doing that and then just have anyone to counter it and then apparently that's journalism you've done a story now oh by the way Mitch sorry at the end of this episode we're going to talk to someone who thinks that your show is all false which would be incredible can I I I'm so into that my god the chaser report less news more often but then that's the thing it's not really about the fluoride is it it's about the notion of government and they're keeping something from you. And this is the stuff that loosens our bonds of trust and of belief in the system. And one small thing happens and then before you know it,

you're doubting the very nature of science, right? I mean, I feel like that's happened a lot in the past few years, perhaps with climate being a bit of a gateway for a lot of the people who we see on the streets, is that people just don't believe evidence and facts anymore. It's, it's pretty scary. Absolutely. And I think one of the key takeaways for me from making this series is that I don't think anything that I've presented in the series is due to any kind of deliberate maliciousness from networks or executives or whatever. I genuinely believe that what has happened in Australian television is largely a result of a grab for ratings and incompetence.

Honestly, I know it sounds like a joke, But it's, it really, I don't think there's enough coordination with people who are higher up who can make these kinds of decisions to really coordinate something meaningful. I think we've just evolved on autopilot to get to a point like this. Isn't that always the case though that given a choice between incompetence and the vast conspiracy, it's almost always incompetence? And particularly having worked in the Australian TV industry somewhat, it's a pretty compelling argument. that it's just hopelessness. Yeah, it's people saying yes to things that they probably shouldn't have, but don't think about anything down the line because why would they think about that down the line?

They just need to keep their jobs now. And then all this shit starts kind of coming through the door. They're just going, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. People are saying yes to things to put their faces on, like, in front of stories, which is why we kind of pointed out the actual hosts of like 60 minutes because I think there needs to be accountability there. But there isn't because they're just saying, yeah, I'll put my face to that. That's fine.

There won't be anything to come out of that. Like, that won't be bad. But it's just a slow kind of, I was going to say, Jenga. That's where you stack things up, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a slow kind of Jenga kind of scenario, I think.

How have we not had a Jenga reality TV show? Oh, my God, there will be. We're doing snacks now. With chocolate bars or something. That'd be great. Also, the notion of networks ripping each. other off is a particularly brilliant thing to go and look down. What were some of the juiciest examples on that? The thing that baffles me with that is that all the examples

we pointed out were ones where they were up against the original show in literally the same time slots. Like, why? Like, it's one thing to rip off a show, but it's another thing to just bang it on against each other. Like, I don't get that and just do something else. But I guess the dumbest example would have been the one that we talked about in the most detail was cops LAC being put on against the same time as Rush was because they just wanted another cop show there. But I feel like kind of bringing the incompetence angle back in again because the I guess there was this assumption that just because it's a cop show at that time slot it will succeed. and why? Like there's no accounting for the factors to whether or not it would be good. It'd be fascinating to go back, wouldn't it,

and actually interview the programmers who make their decisions? Because I'm sure you would find an absolute void of any strategy. And they'd just be bullshitting, basically, about what... Oh, you know, there's a very deep-seated love in the viewership of cop shows at this particular time. And then someone puts another kind of show on. It's like, oh, amazing. Yeah, there's obviously, you know, it's just bullshit as a... at a very high level getting paid a fortune.

Absolutely. It's people holding onto their jobs and not thinking about the tomorrow, I think, is probably the best way to summarize what I feel is the executive level of television. I think my favorite example of that was that very strange period. I feel like it was in the early 2000s when every commercial station had this basically completely fraudulent late night call-in show like QuizMania and Uplake with Hot Dog and they were basically spending hours and hours with the dumbest and most boring quiz question

like a question that any three-year-old could answer and then somehow, I don't know, I don't remember the mechanic, but they just had three or four hours of people just blathering and getting people to call in these very expensive premium numbers to hope that they'd win a quiz and then none of them ever got through.

It was, that was amazing. And I think I definitely wanted to meet the hosts of that show and admire their stamina for just being able to go on about it. And it actually reminds me of a clip that I think it was the war on everything because that would have been peak. Yeah, yeah. A quiz show where you found the clip of someone ringing the wrong network to answer the question on the other network.

It was an amazing piece of television. But because it's, you know, late-night queer show, it's like, who cares about that now? And I really wanted to use that clip. I had actually marked it, but I thought, ah, no, Chase has already done it. I'm not going to, I can't reuse it because it's already... Oh, you can reuse our version of it and comments on it.

That's all right. Yeah. No, no, no, no. I think that also goes into the rules of the show and that if it's kind of already been comprehensively covered by another show, like, you know, your media watch and your Sean carloff and all that kind of stuff. Generally, we don't want to touch it.

We kind of want to offer that. No, I'm joking. You've only got so much time to play with of TV. You want to make original observations? Of course you do. But it's a great area. And they all died within like a week or two of each other. Oh, it felt like they were on for years because even without ever having watched an episode,

I mean, who watches a full episode of content like that? It's just... I mean, to be honest, Chaz. Yeah. I remember being online, like talking to him on Google chat while we were both watching those things. It just got at the point where I was like, I just got to go to sleep. But he was just like, can't look away.

He got to keep going. Yeah, it's funny because TV time is so precious normally. I mean, you've got, what, three episodes to do this. It's hard to get, goodness knows it's Chase hasn't had to show up in many years, although individual people have. But it's really hard to get half an hour of TV. And Andrew Denton used to say to us, you've got. whatever it is, a certain number of hours, what are you going to say with them?

But then for shows like that, there's almost a limitless hours and breakfast television and whatever. So it's funny, the way that access to television, like who gets to actually make television shows, the bar is so high for almost anyone and yet really low in some weird cases like Daryl Summers. Absolutely. It is baffling the kind of people that are on TV because, they were on TV.

So there's, if you're in, you're in, and it doesn't matter. And then I think that kind of breaking through becomes almost impossible because you've got this kind of like old TV, new TV clash of people. And I think that was most kind of articulated for me when Tom Gleason won the gold Logie because I think he was bringing to it the cynicism of the new TV crowd and upsetting the old TV crowd. Very much. And yeah, there was just this real, almost a war between the TV factions, I suppose, which I

think is so interesting and really sets a stage for what TV is going to be like in the future, whatever that is. I think one thing you do with this series, especially as you're looking at, old TV and new TV is you kind of chart this weird fall in representation on Australian TV. Like, it's almost like you talk about how in the 70s Australian TV is being quite progressive almost and then we fall all the way down to the bottom to the point that Australian is just outrage if it's anything bar a white heterosexual couple on screen in the mid-2000s. It's bleak and I feel like in hindsight, in the

the 70s TV was maybe more. They were still figuring out what TV is going to be. And I think they wanted to really kind of see how close they could flight of the flame with it. And then I guess they realize they don't want to be that progressive. So I kind of scaled it back for some reason because maybe it's just appealing to the broadest amount of people or realizing that broadening it equals ratings. Maybe that was the realization of the 70s. I have no idea. But it's really quite depressing to think of how advanced it was in the 70s and that we're just kind of becoming a bit more on that same level, perhaps. It's all wildly speculative, of course, because I wasn't around in the 70s, but here we are and here I am talking about it. Yeah. And I guess it gets

to that Tom Gleason observation of like, well, we look at our TV industry now and over the 10 years how a lot of the original content programming has declined or stuff that's truly original gets complaints because the people who watch TV isn't the audience that these shows are intended for. And then you have this kind of landslide effect of no one is watching Australian TV anymore. And we're always talking about American and British TV rather than content we make ourselves. Exactly. And there is also so much TV being made than ever before because there's more channels like for Australian TV making more content. It's the, I don't understand the model here. I don't think they do either. Yeah. Because I feel like everybody's been bemoaning the

quality and output of television, but that hasn't stopped. You know, they're now being 30 to 35 channels broadcasting 24 hours a day so you've got 30 days of TV being made or being output every day and so there's just so much on but the quality of it seems to have gone down but there's more of it I can't make sense of that well the other thing I guess is it's funny the notion of a clip show because certainly for me the main way I digest television these days is probably in clips It's probably saying things on YouTube, probably seeing things people have shared on social media. And certainly shows like breakfast television shows, I'll watch far more clips of, say, sunrise or the today show, which is still not very many in total, but via social media,

like on Twitter or something. So, yeah, who is, what even is television anymore, I guess, is an ongoing conversation. That's a very good point. And I can't, I couldn't even begin to answer that because I genuinely think, TV as we know it is dead and that's not necessarily a bad thing it will absolutely evolve into something else i think we're currently in an evolution some kind of transitional phase of it and it'll become something else and hopefully they'll harness the kind of social media side of things a bit better because tick tock is going off i mean they should do something with

TikTok, I guess. Truly, because there's, like, mates of mine who are doing TikTok things now, I know nothing about TikTok, who are doing things on TikTok, and they're getting millions of views. Yeah, but it's clips in its most extreme and disconnected form with the narrative that you find not there at all. There you go. Well, we're in mourning for Australian television, but at least we have you to draw it all together and find some kind of deeper meaning slash ridiculousness in it all.

I'll do my best. And finally, Mitch, when's your end of year show? When should we tune in? January 1st. I do not know the time's not yet, but I'm guessing, judging by the program classification, it'll be after 8.30. Very, very good. And of course, all this on SBS on demand as well.

Thanks, Mitch. Thank you. The Chaser Report. News you know you can't trust. Thank you so much for joining us for this afternoon edition of the Case report, if you want to watch Mitch's television series, the backside of television, it's on SBS on demand right now, and his new special, which reviews 2021 a year in television, will come out on New Year's Day. So check both of them out. Our gear is provided

by road microphones, and we're part of the ACAST creator network. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow. Catch you tomorrow morning. All right.