The production of a television event: When Gunston met Gough at Parliament House

This paper considers 1970s television personality Norman Gunston’s coverage of the dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on the 11th of November, 1975. The paper explores the power of television comedy to intervene in the construction of a political event and transform it into a joke. Specifically, the paper describes how Gunston’s comic practice of carnival mobilises resistance to the usual view of the Whitlam dismissal. The paper also considers television’s capacity to transform a political episode into a television event resonating with the technology’s cultural force. Deleuze suggests that ‘television is the form in which the new powers of “control” become immediate and direct’ (1995a: 75). Exploring Deleuze’s suggestion the paper proposes that the Gunston-Whitlam encounter demonstrates television’s potential to produce a mode of resistance to control, a point on which Deleuze is not particularly optimistic (1995a: 76; 1995b: 175).