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Two viewers (Carol Raye, Gordon Chater) prepare to tune in to The Mavis Bramston Show.
Curator’s notes
Mavis Bramston’s first episode for 1965 opens and closes with wonderful self-referential send-ups of imagined audience members. This opening segment gleefully allows a ‘lowbrow’ public to dissect its content, singling out the two controversial elements of the show: topical satire and ‘vulgar’ content. The sketch perpetuates, and revels in, the series’s reputation for controversy and cheekiness.
The closing segment, again starring Chater and Raye, provides an imagined ‘highbrow’ response. A television critic and his wife switch off the show as it ends and discuss it in glowing terms. The critic then makes an about-face, dictating a scathing review to the newspaper over the phone. He slams the show’s irreverence and vulgarity. The underlying suggestion is of hypocrisy among commentators who make a show of defending public taste but behind closed doors have a different opinion.
The Mavis Bramston Show attracted both praise and condemnation in the public sphere at a time when what was considered appropriate for television was dramatically different to today. Over the years, the Australian Broadcasting Control Board investigated Mavis for a range of possible offences, including a double entendre-laden sketch about flower arrangement and a doctored version of Prime Minister Menzies’s farewell press conference, which put a ‘humorous and false slant’ on his words. The series raised the ire of church groups, which at one time proposed a boycott of the series’s sponsor, Ampol. Letters to the newspapers expressed concerns over children watching this ‘offensive’ show.
Alan McKee, in his book Australian Television: A Genealogy of Great Moments (2001, Oxford University Press), provides a fascinating glimpse of the ABCB’s flustered response to Mavis Bramston’s popular success. In 1965, the board admitted that this type of program was simply ‘not foreseen’ when it created its Program Standards upon television’s introduction to Australia in 1956, and wrote to commercial broadcasters voicing its concerns over topical satire.
The board recognised that a ‘worldwide … basic change in attitudes’ was affecting what was regarded as appropriate subject matter for television. However, it expressed concern over ‘vulgarity or indecent suggestions’, ‘serious topics treated with ill-considered levity’, ‘appearing to give irresponsible comment’, and ‘the use of words and phrases and the discussion of topics which are not even now generally acceptable in mixed company’.
At the same time, critics praised Mavis’s ‘sophisticated’ and ‘cutting-edge’ approach and complained when these qualities seemed to slip. An Age newspaper ‘Monitior’ review speculates in April 1965 as to whether ‘certain unofficial censorship forces have been at work, and the emasculated versions to which we have been subject are the results’. In 1966, two years into its run, Sydney Morning Herald critic Harry Robinson’s assessment provides a strikingly similar cross-section of the audience to Mavis’s own:
Nowadays, Mavis is more likely to upset intellectuals than prim and proper people … To them, the highbrows, she is not as witty as she ought to be. As for the others, well, people are harder to shock now and a few naughty lines pass without a 'tut tut’ or even a 'tut’.
