Over the years it has been fascinating to see what kind of fan mail on-air personalities at the Australian Broadcasting Commission get from your average “Joe or Jill Blow” punter in suburbia. Below is one such paean of praise received by the popular ABC Television personality Tim Bowden in the early 1990s. Included also is the program team’s deeply meaningful and well thought-out reply to the writer on behalf of the venerable Tim.

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25th February 1992

87b Worthog Road

CAREY GULLY SA 5144

Mr Tim Bowden
Presenter, ‘Backchat’
ABC
GPO Box 9994
SYDNEY NSW 2001

Dear Tim,

I am writing to the ABC because I know that the National Broadcaster (trademark copyrighted) is just as committed to critical environmental issues as is the present Commonwealth Government(?). I am making my concerns on this matter known in the hope that the ABC, through the intervention of your own cutting edge, “finger on the pulse of the nation” [insert additional preferred cliche here] feedback mechanism, will take the necessary steps to preserve a vital endangered species in this country.

The species in question is the Shakespearean Teledrama! This threatened creature, so important to the intellectual and cultural ecosystem of the country, has not been spotted on Australian screens for bulk aeons of time! It was last sighted on Oz TV in the late 70s and early 80s when the ABC ran several episodes of the brilliant and highly ambitious BBC Shakespearean production which set itself the task of bringing all 37½ of the Bard’s plays to the small screen in one series.

Since then the ABC Drama Department has obsessively overdosed on contemporary crime and police shows, meanwhile archetypical dramas in the shape of the great, classic tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, etc) have been driven to the point of televisual extinction. I am outraged at the ABC’s flagrant and criminal neglect of the much-beloved ‘Shakes’. I am so ropeable that I could happily strangle the Head of Programming with the ABC’s own Lissajous curves! The ABC has a duty to protect this globally-imperilled species and not let it disappear without trace, denying Australian taxpayers the enrichment to be had from such magnificent Shakespearean fauna.

I must warn you that if ABC TV does not rectify this deplorable omission, I am quite prepared to discipline those responsible for this monumental neglect! If Commission Masthead, Lord Talbot Duckmanton, is not willing to subject himself to a humiliating public act of retribution, I am willing to accept a token proxy in his place, someone sufficiently symbolic of the organisation’s ethos but none the less highly expendable. Tim, I believe that’s your cue to take one step forward …

Yours in good faith, flage-u-later,

SS

Mistress Sloane Snodgrasse
Dominatrix-General

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March 14th, 1992

‘Backchat’,

ABC-TV,

GORE HILL,
Sydney, NSW

Miss Sloane Snodgrasse,
87b Worthog Road,
CAREY GULLY SA 5144

Dear Miss Snodgrasse,

Tim is very busy at the moment, being tied up with various projects including writing his book on WWII, Hitler: South Hobart RSL’s Part in his Downfall, but he asked that we pass on his best wishes and commends you for your enthusiasm as an obviously avid viewer and supporter of the ABC.

Tim would like you to know that the National Broadcaster always appreciates any correspondence it receives from a fawning public and that every letter is valuable to someone, somewhere, at some time.

Yours sincerely,

D. Hemingway-Browne,

Personal Assistant,
‘Backchat’