Bloodbath

Book excerpt: Patricia Edgar has been named one of the ten most influential people in the development of Australian television production. Her candid memoir offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at the television industry and its politics. It also tells her own story-of how a young girl from Mildura became a leading innovator in Australian children's television production, and a voice to be reckoned with in a tough business. As a regulator and policy maker, Dr Edgar's take-no-prisoners style won her great fans and made her bitter enemies. Dr Edgar was the first woman appointed to the Australian Broadcasting Control Board. For ten years she fought for more locally produced, first-release children's drama on Australian television. In the early 1980s she helped establish the Australian Children's Television Foundation, creating some of the most celebrated television ever produced for Australian children, including the Round the Twist series, which sold into more than 100 countries. During her twenty-year tenure, the ACTF won multiple awards including a coveted Emmy and made co-productions with the BBC, Disney and Revcom. Along the way, Dr Edgar worked with a host of notable Australians, including Janet and Robert Holmes O Court, Bruce Gyngell, Hazel Hawke, Phillip Adams, Gulumbu Yunupingu and her brothers Galarrwuy and Mandawuy, Steve Vizard, Hilary McPhee and Paul Jennings. Bloodbath sets its author's triumphs and setbacks in the television industry into the wider perspective of political and economic change, the forces of consumerism and the global marketplace. This memoir reveals Dr Edgar as she really is-a sensitive, thoughtful, determined woman, still working to make the media environment one of quality not pap and a force for learning as well as entertainment. Bloodbath is a must-read for every Australian in the media industry, every parent raising a child, every woman who ever strove for career success, and anyone interested in how leadership works.