Art for ABC Arts’ sake
Head of ABC television's arts and entertainment, Amanda Duthie, talks up their commitment to the Arts.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under News
ABC Arts has been in the news this year, principally because there have been criticisms that the broadcaster is diminishing its commitment to the Arts.
Many commentators noted this was against its own Charter.
But as I wrote in August, the Charter is deliberately broad.
“The functions of the Corporation” decrees it is “to encourage and promote the musical, dramatic and other performing arts in Australia.” But there is no specific directive as to where or how this must be executed. ABC can showcase Arts on Radio and Online more than Television without breaching the Charter.
Today there’s an interesting interview with head of ABC television’s arts and entertainment in The Australian, written by Graeme Blundell.
Duthie responds to the criticisms that emerged.
“The disappointing thing was that the breadth of work the ABC has acquired or commissioned for both ABC channels and online was ignored,” she says. “Arts is everywhere on the ABC if you start looking for it.”
This is true, although some might argue that historically viewers didn’t have to look for it quite so much, because the genre had better profile programming.
“We simply can’t cover everything,” she says.
You can read more about ABC Arts, including 2012 highlights, here.
3 Responses
It’s a tragedy what the ABC has done to its Arts programming. Who else is going to broadcast this kind of stuff if not the ABC? It sure as hell won’t be the FTAs!
They’re all like that now Ronnie. Just hot air and meaningless spin.
Amanda Duthie had delivered a totally underwhelming interview. She has no vision to articulate, and worse – it’s boring. Commissioning Eps who are essentially curating content from the independent sector need to have spent some time working in it as a producer. If her work experience has been working her way up through the ranks from the tape library there’s no experience from outside the ABC to draw from – and it leads to the kind of meaningless spin throughout the article. It’s like reading a press release.