Imagine my delight, then, to see Sabi Sands featured in a segment on Channel Nine’s Getaway, on 27 March 2002. When I flicked to the travel show on 19 August 2004 – my attention having wandered from the 7.30 Report – there Sabi Sands was again. The same lodge and the same reporters, Ben Dark and David Reyne: ‘This is a heart-pounding, blood pumping, up-close-and-personal experience …’. The segment was identical to the earlier one, with only the cost of airfares and accommodation updated.

Since 2002 this practice at Getaway and its Channel Seven counterpart, The Great Outdoors (TGO), has taken off, and the time lag between stories has diminished. Dark’s report on Angkor Wat appeared on Getaway on both 7 March 2002 and 24 July 2003; Sorrel Wilby’s report on voodoo appeared on 27 March 2002 and 24 July 2003; Brendon Julian’s report on Seven Spirit Bay appeared on 4 July 2002 and 19 August 2004; Catriona Rowntree’s report on southern Tunisia appeared on 27 March and 24 July 2003; her report on Buenos Aires appeared on 8 May and 4 September 2003; and Wilby’s report on the Aeolian Islands appeared on 1 May and 7 August 2003. Over at Seven, stories about Uganda, Antarctica, the Cotswolds and London’s East End have been shown more than once. These are just the reports that this occasional viewer has noticed have been repeated on TGO; its website is more adept at concealing the programme’s repeats than is its rival at Nine.

Oops, I used the word ‘repeat’. The point here is that not one of these programmes appears to have been advertised as a repeat. Technically, they’re not. By slipping some old stories into ‘specials’ with alluring titles like ‘Islands in the Sun’, television stations can avoid labelling their programmes ‘repeats’ while incurring substantial savings in production costs. One would have thought that Channel Seven was already getting maximum bang for its buck. Complete episodes of TGO are repeated over summer and sometimes on weekends, meaning it is possible that a story could be broadcast three or four times before any on-sales or ‘specials’.

When TGO returned from its summer siesta on January 31 this year, the show’s website advertised the ‘All new Great Outdoors: Don’t miss the series return’. But the programme wasn’t all new, for at least one story (about Mykonos) had been shown before. I don’t think any viewer would have been surprised that the Getaway team’s behind-the-scenes tours of CSI and ER, David Reynes’s Sex and the City tour of New York and Reynes’s chat with Erik Thomson, star of The Alice, alluded to programmes on Channel Nine. Cross-promotion is one thing, but misleading advertising is another.

Occasionally in these travel programmes, there’s very little new content at all. The ‘Ultimate Shopping Holidays’ special that aired on TGO on 5 April 2004 (during the Easter non-ratings period) featured Tom Williams’s story about arts and crafts in Hanoi, which had previously been seen on Seven’s Room for Improvement. The stories about a massive shopping mall in Alberta, Toys ’R’ Us in New York and shopping with actor Melissa George in Los Angeles had all been broadcast earlier on TGO. At the very least, these repeats should be acknowledged in promotions as ‘highlights’, just as singers’ compilations are labelled ‘greatest hits’.

This practice could also spread – if it isn’t already underway – to other lifestyle shows. And while it may make short-term commercial sense, it can’t be good in the long term. If it continues, there will be little incentive for viewers to remain loyal to particular programmes. After all, how many times would they really want to see the same breathless reports on the same exotic locations? TGO still sometimes appears in OzTAM’s list of the top ten programmes on metropolitan stations, but Getaway now struggles to stay in the top twenty.

Free-to-air television is governed by the Broadcasting Services Act (BSA) of 1992, which reflected a deliberate shift to a market-oriented approach to broadcasting and ushered in an industry-based self-regulatory régime. The peak broadcasting bodies were invited to develop codes of practice concerning content in accordance with prevailing community standards and to register these codes with the Australian Broadcasting Authority. The revised Television Code of Practice registered by Free Television Australia in July 2004, and in force for three years, says nothing at all about repeats. The ABA has confirmed that the issue is not mentioned in the BSA and seems not to have been addressed by the earlier codes of practice. It appears that custom, rather than compulsion, has resulted in programmes being listed as ‘Rpt’ in television guides.

Free Television Australia was unwilling to respond to ABR’s questions about the issues raised in this column. Trusted to self-regulate, Channels Seven and Nine have begun to erode what is meant by the terms ‘new’ and ‘repeat’. How far will they go in the two years before the Television Code of Practice is reviewed?