Sport - a spectacular television event

This video clip, showing behind the scenes of a transmission from Wembley Stadium, is an excerpt from the series Australian Report, first produced in 1973. Australian Report is a Commonwealth Film Unit production. This video clip is on the website From Wireless to Web, produced in 2005.

The website is a selective history of broadcast media in Australia. Decade by decade, from radio and newsreels to TV and the internet, this history shows how the Australian broadcast media developed and shaped the way Australians see themselves.

From Wireless to Web is a Film Australia production in association with Roar Film.

Students explore the impact of people, events and movements of the past on Australian identities.

Students examine values reflected in national celebrations and commemorations, what these represent to diverse people and groups, and how these have changed onver time.

Students have the opportunity to identify values that support social cohesion and consider ways in which this can be undermined or strengthened by individual and collective action.

World Series Cricket – WSC – reinvented cricket as a spectacular television event. Its day-night games were designed for prime-time broadcasting. The players’ traditional cricket whites were replaced with bright clothes and dramatic night-lights imbued the game with a sense of theatre. Channel Nine’s marketing department developed the jingle, 'C’mon Aussie, c’mon, c’mon’. 50,000 spectators flocked to the Sydney Cricket Ground to watch the first WSC game of 1978 and the matches had brilliant ratings for the Nine Network.

Nine’s eight cameras vastly improved the television coverage with views of the game from a range of angles. This enhanced the quality of replays, and for the first time live coverage was combined with computerised statistics, plus player and expert interviews. The innovations in cricket broadcasting that occurred during the WSC era are still felt over twenty years later.

1. Students discuss their favourite sports – both as a viewer and as a participant. As a non participant how do they mostly engage with the sport? (for example, actually going to watch a game, listening on radio, watching on television, viewing on pay television). Which activity provides the most interesting report of the sport?

2. In small groups, and using data from the video clip, the internet and other sources, explore why sport appears to be such a major influence on the lives of so many Australians. Is it a part of our national identity? In what ways might sport act as a form of ‘social cohesion’?

3.Use the link below to hear a ‘synthetic cricket’ broadcast. Watch the Australian Report video clip. Then explain the ways in which technology in media broadcasting changed the ways in which sports were/are covered in the media between the 1930s and the 1970s and 2000s.

4. There hve been recent discussions among sporting organisations, for example, AFL, ARL and the Australian Cricket Board, and media owners about television rights to broadcast games. Huge amounts of money is paid by televison networks for the rights to broadcast sporting events. Why are media organisations prepared to pay for the rights to broadcast sporting events? What are the advantages and disadvantages of sporting organisations selling the rights to just one media group? How are the supporters of ‘minority sports’ catered for in current Australian media organisations? In a democracy is it OK for a small group of media organisations to control the broadcasting of sporting events?

Go to From Wireless to Web for more about the history of broadcast media in Australia.

Go to 75 Years of Radio: Synthetic Cricket