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'TODAY it would be called a reality show, but in the early 1950s the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Incognito was billed as light entertainment. Alas, no recording of the radio program survives in the corporation's vast audio archive. Nor does it earn a mention in Ken Inglis's two-volume authorised history of the ABC. Yet Incognito is one of the most influential programs the national broadcaster has ever put to air, if only because it caught the ear of the Melbourne-based critic AA Phillips. The idea, thought Phillips, was quaint enough: to pit a local artist against a foreign guest, with the audience asked to adjudicate. Occasionally, listeners would favour the home-grown performer, thus producing 'a nice glow of patriotic satisfaction'. The program, however, was founded on the belittling premise that 'the domestic product will be worse than the imported article.' Phillips coined a neat description for this 'disease of the Australian mind' and immediately his aphorism, described in a 1950 Meanjin essay of the same name, took hold: 'the cultural cringe'.' (Author's introduction)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 9 Apr 2014 16:39:14
118-131
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-121815-20130922-0000-griffithreview.com/edition-36-what-is-australia-for/index.html
Cultural Creep
Griffith Review
Subjects:
- The Lucky Country 1964 single work non-fiction
- The Prodigal Son 1958 single work prose
- Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport 2008 single work picture book
- Samson and Delilah 2009 single work film/TV
- Animal Kingdom 2010 single work film/TV
- The Boy from Oz 1998 single work musical theatre
- The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 1985 reference criticism biography
- Summer Heights High 2007 single work film/TV
- Angry Boys 2011 series - publisher film/TV
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