You may be thinking that with so many wonderful things to do in this glorious country, that there’s no need to watch telly.
Wrong!
When the evening meal has been eaten, the dishwasher has been loaded and our daughter has been put to bed, then chill out time isn’t far away. At some point in the evening we will flop into our favourite comfy chairs, turn on the box and enter that hypnotic state known as watching the telly.
So, what do we have out here? Let me talk about terrestrial television, the stuff you don’t have to pay for.
Terrestrial TV here is not unlike the UK is in its setup. We have five channels: 9, 7, ten, SBS and ABC. Simple eh? I’ll give you 3 guesses what ABC stands for. (Clue: think of what the BBC stands for and see if you can give it a new twist so that it might work in Australia).
Yes, that’s right. Just like the BBC, the Australia Broadcasting Corporation is the state owned TV station and shows no advertisements. Unlike the BBC though, we don’t have to buy a TV license to watch it. So there is another great reason to move to Australia, no more TV licences.
The programming is not up to the same standard as that in the UK though. There are lots of news programmes and they put on plenty of movies. Many of them are old movies and quite a few are foreign movies with subtitles. But, funnily enough, the foreign films have usually turned out to be the most entertaining programs on TV.
Shows that appear on terrestrial TV that you will have heard of include Desperate Housewives, Life on Mars, Skins, Parkinson, Brothers and Sisters, 24, Lost, The Simpsons and Heroes. Oh, and ……. Of course….. Home and Away and Neighbours!
If you like music, then ABC has a great program called Rage that is on every Friday and Saturday starting late and goes pretty much through the night. If you like football, then SBS has some good shows.
The UEFA Champions League Hour, which shows highlights of the champions league on Thursday evenings, and on Sunday afternoons there are three programmes all about world football. It’s really pot luck what you get to see on those shows. It’s always good football but it may not be what you were hoping to watch.
Having said that, they do cover many major events live. Coming up this month courtesy of SBS will be the UEFA cup final, the Champions League cup final and the FA Cup final.
But if you want to watch Premier League Football, you will have to dig into your pockets and pay.
I’ll tell you all about that next week.
