Ask the Leyland Brothers: Instructional TV, travel and popular memory

Abstract

This article considers television made by two Australian brothers, Mike and Mal Leyland, specifically their long-running series from the 1970s, Ask the Leyland Brothers. The program used viewer participation to set an itinerary for the brothers, who travelled extensively by car to film responses to viewers' questions about Australia. Mike and Mal Leyland brought images of the Australian countryside to very large television audiences, providing entertainment and instructions about how to travel, appreciate and consume the country they and their audience lived in. While this example of ‘instructional TV’ was extremely popular in its 10-year run on television, and is fondly remembered by audiences, it is not prominent in the ‘official’ discourse of Australia's TV history; thus, it poses a particular set of questions about television and cultural memory.

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of the ARC Discovery Project, ‘Australian television and popular memory: new approaches to the cultural history of the media in the project of nation building’.

Notes

1. Watching the opening sequence today, it seems a real relic of the 1970s. Mike says of it in his autobiography: ‘The title sequence had scenes of us and Australian locations. To grab the viewers’ attention, I filmed a young woman jumping out of the water in a wet Ask the Leyland Brothers T-shirt for a few seconds through the theme song. This created a bit of controversy though the majority of our audience loved it and we had numerous letters over the years asking to see more “wet T-shirt” shots' (Leyland 2003, 180).