In the event of apocalypse, remember TV

There’s Australian TV content that you’ve never heard of

Sitting in archives

Collecting whatever the digital equivalent of dust is

Probably never to be watched again

But they’re there

Little pieces of ourselves

Not lost, but hiding

A snapshot of our culture, our spirit, and I assume, our casual sexism

An archive is only truly effective, or worth it

If humanity has the means to access it later

So 1000 years from now

Will we know what a DigiBeta tape is?

Will we understand wmv compression?

A lot of people don’t really understand it currently*

(*a little joke for video editors, there)

And obviously, I’m scared of nuclear war

Largely because it’ll also wipe out our TV history

And is Australian TV bomb proof?

Judging by 2006’s Let Loose Live - no

It’s fascinating which content makes it into eternal preservation

I’d like to meet the person who submitted

- as well as the archivist who accepted -

Alan Jones Live

A 1994 Channel 10 phone-in talkback show so bad

That the press noted it made SBS ratings look respectable

But old TV can reveal things, about us

Like how little we knew -

Endless ads for personal soaps in the 1960s

All praised the benefits of hexachlorophene

Then we discovered in the 70s that long term use

Might have caused some light brain damage

Oopsy

Conversely, old TV can show us how much we did know

But ignored -

Science and tech newsmagazine Beyond 2000

Did a climate crisis special

Highlighting all the same things we’re now debating, politicising

But in 1989

Mind you they did also say one day computers will have

More than a gigabyte of RAM

Which is not incorrect

But still

As time goes on

Older TV becomes a disjointed, surreal curiosity

Because we’re increasingly unmoored, untethered

From the world that birthed it

The topical satire of 1977’s The Naked Vicar Show

Is alien now

Or perhaps it’s just that comedy, and culture, inexorably evolves

Unlike Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s penchant for the word “poof”

So I hope that 2000 years from now

When the country is a desolate wasteland

Someone can access our television, warts and all

And come across Alan Jones Live

And even without all the context of 1994

They’re still able to say “Jesus, this show is rubbish”.