Moving Pictures

I helped dismantle Channel 9 today. Not in a “death to the capitalist media overlords” way – sadly – but with a screwdriver.

Yes, the Bendigo Street studios of GTV9 are closing and everything must go! The building was originally a piano factory, then a cannery, but from 1957 it’s been Television City. The glamour of Graham Kennedy, Don Lane and Sale Of The Century clings to the walls like a poorly-cleaned toilet. Some say Bert Newton haunts these corridors and he’s not even dead.

But Channel 9 is moving to Docklands, so they’re having the world’s biggest car boot sale. They’ve auctioned their equipment online and when a friend went to pick up a Umatic tape machine I said I’d go along. In my head this would involve visiting Richmond, selecting a carefully-marked box, and going home for biscuits.  How wrong I was.

House Of Games: The James Bond Secret Agent Game

In the first of our new series, John will be exploring what happens when you take popular culture and throw dice at it.

I grew up in a house full of board games. I also grew up with both my older brothers roughly 200 kilometres away at a Boarding School, so I didn’t get a chance to play those games very often. School holidays, mostly. Since I was quite a bit younger, I always lost. An eight-year-old will usually not beat a 16-year-old when playing Poleconomy.

So to this day I see board games as the ultimate representation of loneliness and defeat. Only kidding! I love ’em. The sight of a large rectangular box can still bring on nostalgic flashbacks, as can the smell of certain chipboards and solvents. We had a cupboard full of games, mostly strategic, grown-up games – things like Battleship, Mastermind, Risk… Intelligent, adult, worthy games.

As a child, however, I sometimes yearned for those other games – the ones based on trashy, mindless American entertainment, with lurid artwork and novelty playing pieces – I wanted to play Six Million Dollar Man – Bionic Crisis, or The Love Boat World Cruise Game. I dreamt that one day the Murder She Wrote Game would be mine.

But when I became a man, I put away childish things. No longer did I dream of moving a small cardboard picture of Lee Majors around a piece of reinforced cardboard. And by that time, the board game was on the way out, man – everyone knew grunge-based CGI virtual-reality porn was the entertainment of the future. There was no room for poorly-designed games based on Are You Being Served?

Pop-culture-based board games were something I never thought of again.

Until now.