Giving the gift of lifeOctober 11, 2007
60 Minutes' Tara Brown narrates a series that aims to increase organ donation. By Bridget McManus.
TARA BROWN, a reporter on 60 Minutes, has interviewed London bombing survivor Gill Hicks, met Australian prisoners inside Klong Prem, the notorious "Bangkok Hilton", and was on camera with broadcaster Derryn Hinch when he was diagnosed with a liver tumour. So it was perhaps with some relief that she signed up for the more detached role of presenter on Channel Nine's documentary series The Gift that charts the agonising journeys on both sides of organ donation.
"On 60 Minutes, I'm incredibly involved in my stories, from interviewing to the scripting to the post-production," Brown says. "For The Gift, being a little removed is a lot easier. Those stories are incredibly emotional and as a viewer I was greatly affected. I imagine I would be an emotional wreck if I filmed them all. It's a very intimate process."
The first episode of The Gift is one heart-wrenching scene after another. Grainy video shows seven-year-old Zaidee riding her bicycle then cuts to her father telling through tears how "her spirit filled the hospital" the night when, after she died from an aneurism, her kidneys, corneas and parts of her heart and liver were removed for transplantation. An elderly mother strokes her 36-year-old son's hand as he wakes after a heart transplant. Four-year-old Bella, yellow with liver failure, frolics in a garden as her parents explain their desperate wait for a donor. And 49-year-old Joan is read her last rites before a liver transplant.
"I don't think the aim (of the program) is to shock people," says Brown. "I think the message is a fairly clear one. It is to let you know what these people are going through. Perhaps one of the reasons why Australians don't rate particularly highly as organ donors is because we don't think about it. There's probably a complacency and also we just don't want to think about death. We want to live forever. But when you see a program like this, it might make you think twice about what offer you can make if something awful happens to you."
With more than 2000 people in Australia on waiting lists for transplants and just 202 organ donations last year (according to LifeGift, the Red Cross Blood Service's organ donation co-ordinating service), anything that highlights the demand for donors is positive.
Presumably in the name of this good cause (and in the interests of making compelling television), the producers of The Gift (FremantleMedia) milked the families' stories for all they are worth, overlaying heartbreaking imagery with emotive lyrics such as Avril Lavigne's Keep Holding On. Not that the drama needs enhancing. The honesty of the people involved is disarming yet dignified, their willingness to share their suffering remarkable.
Brown, who writes her own scripts for 60 Minutes and did so on A Current Affair in the '90s, made minor changes to The Gift's narration, "to suit my style", she says. The language that describes people on The Gift would not be out of place on a tabloid current affairs show, especially the pointed use of the word "Aussie", as in "Joan is a 49-year-old Aussie mum".
"I don't think we're looking for cultural identity," says Brown. "What ('Aussie') is probably trying to communicate is the character of a person in a really short amount of time. The program is trying to say, in a shorthand way: 'Here's a mum who's just like your mum and my mum and she's going through a terrible time.' It's just a way of letting you know that she's one of us."
Of the rivalry between A Current Affair and Seven's Today Tonight and the criticism in the press of those programs' tendency to beat-up stories, Brown says: "A Current Affair is a competitive place and it's a commercial venture — ratings count. For most of the people who are working on those programs, churning out those stories, their focus is on doing the story. In terms of the media turning on itself, I think that idea is created by people who aren't actually (making television)."
It is that work ethic that Brown says keeps morale high at Nine when it is under scrutiny due to management changes, the shock exits of personalities and the release of Gerald Stone's controversial book Who Killed Channel 9?
"It's an interesting time, it really is," she says.
"I'm being completely candid when I say that I work in a place where morale is great. When things get depressing is when there is yet another negative headline about Channel Nine. You can understand why some of those headlines are written but there's a lot of information and a lot of headlines that you don't understand. The (public) view of Nine is much more negative than the experience of Nine. It's had its upheavals and there have been changes but that's part of life and part of the cycle of the business. Whatever is the cause of the upheavals, it'll calm itself down and we just have to keep doing what we do."
The Gift premieres tonight at 9.30pm on Nine.
Contact the Australian Organ Donor Register on 1800 777 203.
http://organdonor.com.auhttp://www.medicareaustralia.gov.auThis story was found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/10/10/1191695971410.html
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