from www.qnews.com.au

NATALIE: Good morning, Alan McKee.
You’re a long way from Glasgow and have experienced a lot of success in your career to date, from authoring several books, past president of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia, past editor of Continuum. You’ve worked on Big Brother, done script-writing for comedy and are now Professor in Film and Television at QUT. What factor or factors do you attribute for getting you to where you are today Professor Alan McKee?

ALAN: When you put it like that, it does sound like I’ve done a lot of stuff doesn’t it, and yet I look so young – well, no, I am quite old. I think the primary thing is bloody mindedness. A lot of my career has been doing things just to prove people wrong. When somebody says to me, no there’s no way its possible to do that, and I know you can’t do it, I do it just to piss them off. I don’t know whether being queer fits into that but, being outside of the norm necessarily means you always have to prove yourself, or maybe just means I’m a more aggressive queer because I am bloody minded, but certainly being bloody minded has helped.

NATALIE: In 2002, during a Radio National interview you proposed a cultural experiment called ‘Put down a book’ week. What was the purpose of this idea and what did it entail?

ALAN: Oh yes, ‘Put Down a Book Week’. The idea was that people all over Australia are addicted to reading books – some people will read 3 or 4 books a week. They’ll finish one book and pick up another one, and its just terrible and we need to stop it. Now obviously that’s ridiculous. But the reason I wanted to do that is because it was really pissing me off that at the time there was this group of people running a campaign called ‘Switch off TV week’. Turn off TV week – and you always hear people trying to persuade you to watch less television. Another report comes out every other week saying TV is bad for children, you mustn’t let your kids watch more than a certain number of hours of television a night or a certain number of hours of television a week and they come up with all these arguments like ‘they’re not getting enough exercise’ and that ‘sitting in front of a screen is bad for you’, now if that were true we should be arguing that children shouldn’t be allowed to read books either because reading a book doesn’t do you any more good than watching television, but of course nobody says that because books are good and tv’s bad, and its just thoughtless anti-tv snobbery. And the reason is because television is the medium of the masses. TV is a working class medium whereas books are seen to be more high class. Its just straight forward elitist snobbery and I can’t be down with that. That has actually driven a lot of my career, getting pissed off with people being snobs and hating working class culture, so that was really what it was all about. That I was trying to say, look if you really believe that kids shouldn’t be allowed to watch TV because its not exercise then put your money where your mouth is and ban books as well. I was just trying to make a point that they’re being elitist and they’re being snobs.

NATALIE: How successful was your campaign?

ALAN: Oh not at all, but the point was that it was about trying to get people to think about the hypocrisy of trying to ban television. Of course, the people who are the snobs they just got shocked – how could you say that, but don’t actually have any arguments against it? How could you say that? The same kind of thing about the person who sits in his office celebrating Shakespeare. One of the arguments of Shakespeare is that reading Shakespeare makes you a better person. My arguments against that are, if reading Shakespeare makes you a better person then professors of Shakespeare would be the best people in the world, but they’re not. They are just human beings like everyone else, just as petty and small-minded and vindictive as every one else. Reading Shakespeare doesn’t make you any better, but you try and make that argument and all the people who love Shakespeare say, how can you say that? Okay, I’ve made an argument, can you engage with that? But they have nothing to give back to you because it’s illogical and irrational, it’s just something they believe in really passionately, they can’t actually engage with the argument.

NATALIE: It sounds like you enjoy stirring the pot a bit?

ALAN: That’s the thing, and again one of my minor psychological problems is that if I can’t change things I have to speak my mind on it and at least you can try and keep things on the agenda.

NATALIE: Your latest book The Porn Report was described by The Weekend Australian as ‘engaging (and startling), confronting and confounding’. What inspired you to write The Porn Report?

ALAN: I work in a university and I get paid with public money and I think that brings with it a certain responsibility to do research that is going to be of interest to ordinary people. And my area is media studies /film and television and if you’re thinking about what issues in that area actually concern ordinary Australians, pornography is way up at the top of the list. People are worried, does it have an effect on society, is it damaging to children, does it lead to violence against women? That sort of thing is what people are concerned about and so I wanted to do some research on that. It was also because I was very aware that a lot of the research that had been done was very poor. There’s a lot of research that’s been done on pornography over the years, a lot, but it all started from the assumption that pornography is bad, and then it set out in various ways to try and prove that. There’s never been any academic research done, and this is unbelievable considering there have been thousands of articles in the last thirty years. There has never been a single piece of academic research done that started by asking the question, what are the effects of pornography both positive and negative on society, and on consumers? Nobody had asked that, so clearly it was virgin territory, nobody had done anything like it before.

NATALIE: What did the research for the ‘Understanding pornography in Australia’ research project entail?

ALAN: Three things, it was the production, the content and the consumption of pornography. For the production we interviewed Australians who make pornography, for content we did an analysis of the conent of the top fifty of the top selling dvd’s in Australia, foreign dvds, and for the consumption we did a survey of one thousand consumers of pornography and detailed inerviews with 46.

NATALIE: What was your parents reaction when you told them you were writing a book on porn?

ALAN: Oh my mother is just so proud to have a son who is a professor that when I sent her a copy of the book she put it on the coffee table for all the neighbours to see.

NATALIE: What would be the strangest or most bizarre thing that you heard or learnt during your research for the book?

ALAN: The single most bizarre thing that I found out that was that there are a sexual group of people who are aroused by young girls’ feet and they have photographs from sound of music on a website as a pornographic masturbation aid.

NATALIE: What else did the research entail? I remember seeing you at a lecture and you said that you had to watch lots and lots of porn. How did you find the experience?

ALAN: Oh it was very strange for me watching straight porn, very odd cos you watch it and you think, oh, that doesn’t go in there, but you get used it.

NATALIE: With your colleague, Christy Collis, you lead the development team for the new Creative Industries program in Entertainment Industries at QUT. What inspired this program?

ALAN: Christy and I came up with this idea together. The main idea is that universities are by and large full of snobs and it’s amazing that when you consider culture in Australia, art is very – it’s tiny part of culture. There are very few people that actually regularly go and see a performance or go to an art gallery, and yet that’s what universities are all about. And of people who actually go and see art, most are truck rallies or music festivals or watch reality TV programs. That’s the vast majority of the population. But universities when they deal with it at all, is teaching students how to criticize it, they don’t actually teach students how to make it. So they’ll teach you how to be an art critic but they won’t teach you how to make a reality TV program. That just makes no sense to me at all because it means that for the people who are actually working in those industries, the university system has completely disengaged them. So you can’t do any university training that’s going to help in that career, you just have to go out there and try and work it out for yourself – and that makes no sense whatsoever. And of course people that work in the university system generally can’t see it, because as one of our colleagues said in a total state of disbelief, universities can’t train people how to write jingles – how can you do that? If you can train them to be performance artists, why can’t you train them to write jingles? There’s absolutely no reason you can’t, but these academics mostly —— which is why we’ve gone for so long without it. And when you think about it, it’s such a bloody obvious idea, its common sense. It’s like, doh, of course we forgot about 95 per cent of culture, ah yes.

NATALIE: And you’re in a good place to do it as well, the university for the real world QUT.

ALAN: There’s no other university in Australia, possibly Edith Curren, but there’s no other place, QUT is so far ahead. If you’re interested in entertainment and the kind of culture that ordinary people actually consume, there is nowhere else you can do it. The idea of creating an entertainment degree, there is nowhere else I can highly recommend QUT, come and study here.

NATALIE: How does this program differ from other Creative Industries programs such as Media and Communication and Mass Communication?

ALAN: Most of the other media communication degrees are about looking at how the media works. There’s very few that will teach you – how you would make a good episode of a trashy reality TV show for instance – the basic skills that you need. Understanding story, understanding how you make good characters, casting for characters? How would you get the funding for it? What kind of program you’d need to be to get onto various TV stations? What demographics you’d be looking for? What kind of stories they’d like to see? Everything you need to know – everything that you need to know to make good entertainment. What it will do is give you the basic skills to be able to go out and get an entry level position in the entertainment industry and do well. We did a lot of industry research before we started and one of the things we kept on hearing from Channel 10 and the people down at the Warner theme parks was that, when they employ someone with an arts degree the first thing they had to do was spend the first two years is beating everything out of the their heads that they learnt at university before they could start teaching them how to do it. Whereas the students that learn this degree are going to be able to go in at an entry level position and when they’re asked to do some audience research, they’ll understand why they’re doing it. And when they’re told to produce something trashy and downmarket, they won’t misunderstand and they’ll know what they’re doing and why, rather than turning around and saying, but surely we can do some kind of art.

NATALIE: The first lecture for the program ‘Introduction to Entertainment’ is the best lecture I’ve ever seen and has gained quite a lot of interest in the media both on Ten news, Nova and You tube. Its innovative presentation featured the lecturer stripping into a red sequined dress and performing a song and dance routine. How does this presentation reflect the man behind the lecture?

ALAN: We wanted to start the lecture by first of all showing the students what entertainment is. Secondly, to show them we know what entertainment is, so they can trust us. We know what entertainment is about. And thirdly, to get them involved, because we know when students feel a part of something, they’re more likely to be engaged. So we videoed this lecture, the students are in it, we put it around the internet, Channel 10, et cetera. The students are in it so they’re a part of this phenomina and it’s a two minute song and dance number. We can take that, and over the next few months take it to bits and show the students all the things you need to think about in order to make something like that. It is months of work just to get a two minute song and dance routine, and that’s what they can learn. Obviously it was my idea and it’s a camp gay man getting to make his musical. When I saw my friend sashaying around in a red sequined dress and belting out a song and dance number, it’s every gay man’s dream.