I’m working up an idea for a new TV series at the moment about censorship. Still early days but i’m keen to connect up the current debates about censorshop — particularly the proposal for a national internet filter and sedition laws — with the history of cultural censorship in Australia.

I’m not planning on doing a tits and arse story or something with gratuitous shock value. I want to to explain and explore why, how and who Australia censors. I’m someone who has explored the topic for a while i’m still not entirely clear as to the precise process and raitonale for censorship in Australia. Makes me think it’s ripe terrain for a new series.

I also think it’s one of those areas where there is a great potential to connect up common threads from the theatre and visual arts with the mass media and with current events — which always appeals to me. It seems that nothing gets are from the ghetto of the arts section and onto the news pages quicker than a censorship related scandal or story.

I’m also interested in the tales of people who have been censored or have been at the centre of censorship scandals. I’ve got my head around the last decade or two but i’m interested in hearing from people with a bit of historical perspective or with suggestions for interesting tales.

Some artists clearly court censorship by pushing boundaries and adds to their notierity and boosts their careers. While in other cases (the famous Eugene Goosens saga springs to mind) an encounter with censored material — or even calls for censorship — can be enough to ruin someone’s career or forever marginalise someone.

At this stage, i’m bouncing concepts and ideas around before sitting down to sketch out how a series might work. I’d actively looking for examples and observations — interesting tales and stories — that might be good fodder for the show.

What do you think? Any ideas?

I’d resisted posting this for a while because i wasn’t exactly sure how to introduce it.

Part of me was tempted to launch into an elaboration of my theory of why and how Adelaide is the least interesting cultural place in all of Australia. It is. Honest.

Part of me was tempted to elaborate on the highly amusing idea i pitched among a few ideas to ABC TV a few months ago to do a series called “Marcus Westbury’s Classical Re-Education” (or something like that), that would have been very similar to this interview. Should that series does ever get plucked out of the great TV ideas waiting room in the sky, Peter Goers has skyrocketed above my former some time sparring partners GIles Auty and Richard Gill as the person most likely to re-educate me in the first episode.

Part of me was tempted to point out that the ABC publicity department may have pitched this show a little wide of the mark in lining up interviews. Given that this was literally the only interview they organised for the entire series i do wonder. I’m curious about whether anyone called, say, Triple J?

I will resist all of those things. Instead, i think i will simply introduce this piece by saying that I don’t really know anything much about Peter Goers except that we both love Newcastle. Which is good enough for me.

Weirdest. Interview. Ever. It started out all very friendly and then he TURNED ON ME. Apologies for the audio quality.

* It is worth pointing out that i really enjoy doing interviews like this one (hence the series idea above) and i like talking to people like Peter. I love a roubust exchange of views. If Peter ever wants to get me back for a regular segment i’m around Maybe there’s a gig for me at classic FM?

The second episode of Not Quite Art Series Two goes to air on TV on ABC1 across Australia at 10pm local time tonight.

If you’re in Australia, it is possible to download all episodes of the series in full and for free from the ABC web site. However as a lot of people have observed this series is unavailable outside Australia due to copyright restrictions. I thought i should explain.

The primary reason for this is that the series (and tonight’s episode in particular) features a lot of work by artists who are at the margins of what you can legally do under current copyright law.  Actually, pretty much the whole episode tonight deals with remix, mashup, copyright and creative commons – it is actually about what you can and can’t do under current copyright law.

I was actually quite pleasantly surprised when the ABC legal people allowed us to show the work of artists such as Soda Jerk (that’s some of their stuff above) in tonight’s program. However, the trade off was that because they were relying on specific provisions under Australian law that they were not willing to make it available outside Australia – which is a shame because from all reports (and from many disgruntled comments) there was a large audience out there in the rest of the world who were interested in it.

As it stands, the ABC has exclusive rights to make the series available online for 30 days after broadcast. My plan is to make a Creative Commons, ipod sized version of the program available for “official download” sometime shortly thereafter. At the moment, that will be subject to clearing some of those same legal hurdles mentioned above.

In the meantime, if you’re from somewhere other than Australia and you want to get hold of a copy, what to do? Well, personally, if i was in your position (and as an Australian who waits months on ends for a shitty subset of international TV to eventually find it’s way here, I am often in your position) I’d try to find out where there might be a copy of it online somewhere and download it. Yahtzee Croshaw, who was in last week’s episode seems to have overseas fans that are getting hold of copies. Surely someone must have put the damn thing on bittorrent by now?

Obviously, i’m not in any way endorsing this practice. I am certainly not encouraging anyone to leave links in the comments to places it can be slyly downloaded or anything like that. I’m not suggesting people should upload the choice bits to youtube or anything like that.

No Siree. I’m just saying that’s what I would do.

Here’s also a little piece i wrote the relates to the content of tonight’s episode.

Anyhow, I thought i’d open up a thread here for anyone who might want to leave comments or questions about the new series.

A clue to this is the fact that i spent a small fortune on clothes, actually paid for a haircut (for the first time since the day NQA series one finished filming) on the weekend, and have been getting up to look in the mirror every twenty minutes while i am waiting to get started.

We are shooting in Melbourne over the next few days, Sydney over the weekend and Brisbane early next week. Then we’ll take a break before heading off to the Northern Territory and Singapore in July and probably doing some additional stuff in Sydney and Melbourne around that time.

The new series has a strong emphasis on the way in which communications technology is changing our culture: where we get it from, what inspires us, what we have access to, and where our culture makers find their audiences.

I am also on a desperate hunt for any long lead publicity. Let me make this clear: I AM ALMOST ENTIRELY WITHOUT STANDARDS and will be willing to do pretty much anything.

This includes (but is not in any way limited to):

• Doing that stupid section about the contents of my shopping basket in the weekend magazine bit of the paper (does that still exist?);
• Having my photo taken with zany props or dressed fashionably in the ludicrously expensive clothes I’ve just bought;
• Talk seriously about the issues raised in the series and my cultural obsessions more generally;
• Offer a detailed and thoughtful analysis about Australian culture and cultural policy;
• Gratuitously slag off stuff in a headline grabbing way;
• Do dodgy email interviews with even dodgier blogs;
• Talk about my favourite cafe/ book/ film/ travel destination/ sexual position/ football player/ graphic designer/ album/ Home and Away star/ computer etc (and make them up if necessary) to fill those little columns
• Submit myself for detailed, gruelling probing interviews complete with allowing you to make amateur psychological assessments;
• Be available to journos and camera folks who might want to come along and actually talk to us while filming;
• Talk about This Is Not Art (turning 10 this October!), LOUD, Noise, Next Wave, HSIV, the 2020 summit, challenging Olympic athletes, the Logies or anything else that i might have been involved in down the years.
• Write something for your publication (if i can find the time!)
• Just about anything else that gets you a little closer to meeting your word limit on deadline.

You get the idea. Seriously, i’d love to try and drum up some interest in the new series – so if anyone out there has any thoughts let me know. Happy to talk to newspapers, mags, blogs, radio, tv, zines, street press, student press, morse code publishers, and town criers. Actually that town crier idea is a winner – i might work that up.

The series will go to air in late October. So if you are involved in any kind of publication that is likely to be coming out around that time then drop me a line.

I’ve been quiet on the posting front because i have been deep in writing for a new series of Not Quite Art (yes this is the same series that was briefly known on this site by the working title of Culture Shock). Director Emma Crimmings and I will begin filming next month and the series will probably be shown on the ABC around October.

25 words or less version: “it’s a bit like the last series, only geekier.”

Obviously whether geekier is a good or a bad thing, depends on how in touch you are with your inner geek – my inner geek lurks dangerously close to the surface.

In the meantime, if you can’t get enough Not Quite Art action, please buy a DVD of the last series! They’re available RIGHT NOW! If you loved Not Quite Art (or hated it and just want a decent quality copy to complain about) then pick up a bargain at $34.95! I’d offer to sign them for you (i have signed a grand total of ONE autographs and ONE person ask to get their photo taken with me since this being a high profile media personality caper begun so it would boost my ego no end) but i’m not physically near the big room with all the DVDs in it. However i do promise to buy you a beer if you see me around and you have some verifiable proof that you bought a copy!

You can order Not Quite Art DVDs from here.

Buy one, i’m poor! Also, if you’re after more regular updates or hints about the new series then i’d encourage you all to join the facebook group.

Meanwhile, i need to get back to writing the new series. Right now, it’s an exercise in trying to figure out how to join some rather disparate dots . . . . . . . . . .

A new series, Culture Shock, is in the early stages for ABC TV (Australia). All going to plan (which these things rarely do in my limited experience) we should begin filming around around July and the series should air in about October 2008. Yes, I already know that the title is a bad cliché – it was a working title that accidentally stuck.

Below is an extract from a very early draft blurb…

Culture Shock is a 3 part half hour series for Tuesdays at 10 on ABC1 written and presented by Marcus Westbury.

Picking up from the themes explored in Not Quite Art, Culture Shock takes the audience on an insightful and amusing journey through an increasingly fragmented cultural landscape – where the Internet and communications have given all of us a set of cultural choices and influences unimaginable even a decade ago. Culture Shock finds an eclectic and amusing mix of artists, writers and musicians whose work has found their audiences through networks well outside the traditional Australian structures of cultural authority. Along the way it asks a deeper question about what might happen to a society that is gradually losing its set of common cultural reference points?

Over three episodes, Marcus Westbury takes us to meet Australian artists and creators exhibiting and performing internationally while remaining largely unknown in their own communities, to see how curators and administrators deal with influences, audiences and expectations that can come from almost anywhere on earth, to meet musicians headlining major tours and festivals in Europe and America while rarely receiving Australian radio airplay, and into the world of blogs, politics and ideas where increasingly polarised and polticised communities often talk loudly amongst themselves.

Culture Shock takes us into art, music and writing that sits within both high and low culture. It looks at the spectrum of specialist cultures and niche audiences unleashed globally by communications technology. With rapid change in art and cultural influences occurring all the time, this series is not about art that is dependent on technology but on the new cultural landscape that has grown up because of it.

Responses to and thoughts about the series idea are very welcome. I am also very keen to find artists, creators or arts-people (I’ve never really liked “arts workers” for some reason) who may be doing something that illustrates the series ideas. Feel free to contact me if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

Not Quite Art was my first attempt at writing and presenting a TV series. It was named as one of the best shows on Australian TV in 2007 according to the Sydney Morning Herald and described by The Age as “the freshest, most illuminating, thoughtful and funny locally made arts program in years.”

From the ABC Press Kit:

NOT QUITE ART

The art show that believes there is life outside the galleries.

Host Marcus Westbury, founder of the This is Not Art Festival in Newcastle and the former director of Next Wave Festival in Melbourne takes on a tour of how the art world looks from the other side.

Ep. 1 ICONS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Tuesday October 16 10pm, ABC TV Australia

Why do we spend far more money building sterile palaces to dead artists and their artefacts than supporting living ones?

Presenter Marcus Westbury travels to his home town of Newcastle, Australia where the cultural vision looks a lot like a real estate development. He then takes a trip to the Scottish city of Glasgow, where DIY culture has transformed an post-industrial casualty to a hub of happening culture in Europe.

Marcus puts forward the question of whether you can buy culture by building an iconic building or even franchising a McLouvre or McGuggenheim? Or is culture a messy, dirty thing that comes from the bottom up, refuses to behave, is borderline illegal and breaks a lot of occupational health and safety rules?

This episode features a guest appearance by the Pasha Bulker.

Ep. 2 THE NEW FOLK ART
Tuesday October 23 10pm, ABC TV Australia

Is culture a set of elaborate and elaborately funded life support systems, or an infection that’s trying to attack us? What’s the difference between a Symphony Orchestra and a covers band (apart from about $40million dollars a year) and why does the Australia Council spend more money on A SINGLE opera company than all the visual artists and musicians (not including symphony orchestras) in the country combined?

This week presenter Marcus Westbury meets artists that have turned the laneways of Melbourne into one of Australia’s prime tourist attractions (whilst dodging the police), finds out what uncollectable art is, hangs out with multi media musicians The Herd and wonders why the computer games industry has so much money and so little content. Creator of the Australian game, Escape from Woomera, Katharine Neil has some ideas why, which she shares with Marcus.

WARNING: May contain traces of criminal activity!

Ep.3 THE BUSINESS OF CULTURE
Tuesday October 30 10pm, ABC TV Australia

Where does art stop and business begin? Is the difference between art and commerce whether you make money out of it or whether you are making it to make money? Why does Melbourne have laneway bars and NSW have poker machines and what the hell does that have to do with art?

Marcus Westbury ventures into a video art bar, meets an artist who sells ideas, reveals the angst of being a sneaker designer and comes across a magazine that you can only read on a wall. Along the way he asks if are artists are just the underpaid R&D guys for big fashion, design, music and business?

With sneakers on show at the National Gallery of Victoria and every new art movement the basis of an advertising campaign, as a society, are we just better consumers than art critics?

This episode features Marcus in a suit.

Writer/Presenter: Marcus Westbury
Director: Brendan Fletcher
Producer: Frank Haines
Editor: Melanie Annan
Design by Tin&Ed
Commissioning Editor: Megan Harding

You can still download the original series from the ABC TV ‘Not Quite Art’ page or read some reviews of the series here and here.