Thank God You’re Here. Or perhaps it should be “thank the slackness of Australian Content Standards”. Channel Ten has been buying up advertising space to promote its not-so-new line up of low budget but “hot” content.

All of which has provoked renewed rumblings from within the scriptwriting industry about the way in which Australia’s cheap and cheerful station meets its Australian Content standards: not through high quality scripts reflecting Australian life in all its phases, but with sketch comedy, including the improvised comedy program Thank God You’re Here, the essence of which is that it does not have a script.

At a time when writers overseas are getting bolshie, scriptwriters in Australia are asking how it can be that a theater sports program counts as Australian drama.

The answer lies in the progressive watering down of the definition of Australian drama. First, sketch comedy was included in the mid 1990s. The argument was that because it had a script, it should qualify. Critics rightly predicted this would result in a reduction of quality drama, because sketch comedy was cheaper and quicker.

Then in 2002, the definition of Australian drama changed again to include programs with dialogue improvised by actors. At the time the discussion (see Section D6 of this document) was about high quality cutting edge programs like Going Home and Wildside, which included dialogue improvised by actors within plot lines and scenarios devised by script writers. But now the “improvised dialogue” provisions are being used to squeeze in Thank God You’re Here.

Obviously Channel Ten wasn’t sure it would count. A spokesman for the Australian Communications and Media Authority told Crikey yesterday that the program was “examined” in 2006 and 2007 after a “compliance query” from Channel Ten. ACMA decided it qualified as Australian drama. Channel Ten must have hardly believed its luck. (Channel Ten did not return calls asking for comment on this story).

As the table on page five of this report on 2006 compliance shows, Channel Ten more than met its Australian drama requirements mostly thanks to sketch comedy shows like The Wedge and Ronnie Johns Half Hour. Neighbours is the only candidate with a long-form script. And, buying Channel Ten a nice 62 out of its 335 drama score, was Thank God You’re Here.

Australian Content standards are under pressure. Who can doubt that when we finally fully enter the digital broadcasting age, commercial networks will argue that audience fragmentation means that they should be dropped altogether?

Another idea being quietly floated is that the commercial networks should be able to pay the ABC and SBS to “pick up” their obligations for them, leaving the commercials free to screen whatever will draw an audience most cheaply.

An interesting idea. And in the new media age we do have to realize that our ideas about formats and scripts and the way content is devised are bound to change. Thank God You’re Here is, after all, popular and often fun.

But for discussions about Australian content to be worthwhile, we should be resisting the regulatory slippage in what qualifies as drama. As it is, Australian audiences probably don’t realize what they are missing.