ABSTRACT
Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)-Television has a special place in Australian and world television despite its low ratings—historically between 1 and 3 per cent of the overall viewing audience. SBS bypassed the existing import distribution channels for Australian television. Deliberately international, SBS managed the local and the Australian in a new way. SBS showed that, in an Australian context in which some 30 per cent of the population are of mixed Anglo-Celtic and non-Anglo-Celtic descent, there could be a demand for drama and information programming which staged ethnicity and cultural mixing. The common culture shared by the Irish, British, Scottish, Welsh, New Zealand and North American immigrants with Anglo-Celtic Australians is more a series of resemblances than a system of identities. The inter-ethnic soccer violence between Greeks and Macedonians is replicated at a lower level in recent cricket crowd incidents between Australian and British supporters.
