by Jimmy Nightingale

Created on: October 28, 2008

As a child of the sixties, I was subjected to an early diet of badly dubbed TV shows and movies.

This was back in the days when TV stations closed off overnight and the only viewing between midnight and dawn was a hallucinogenic blur of colour called a test pattern accompanied by classical music. Kids viewing kicked off the day and invariably this was either "The Thunderbirds", those floppy jointed heroes rocketing around the world saving people from all manner of disaster, or a dubbed Japanese sword fest called something like "Return of the Ninja", with cloaked figures leaping into trees, disappearing or despatching their foes with elaborate flourishes of their samurai swords. Brilliant, yet often painful to watch, mainly because the dubbing was so far out of kilter that it was hard to work out which characters were saying what. And this is even if you could understand the heavily accented English delivered in gruff staccato fashion.

Sub-titles would definitely have been helpful. Then again, as a kid watching this stuff, it was all about the adventure and goodies (in this case a dubious association given that ninjas were historically hired assassins) triumphing over baddies. My parents must have found it very entertaining to watch my brother and I duel it out with sticks and try to mimic the poor match between mouth movements and voices. A couple of decades later, I had the fortune to work with a fellow who could do this very well and it was brilliant to watch. His efforts were so clever that it made me wonder whether the shows weren't in fact dubbed at all, that the producers just employed a bunch of actors with the same kind of voice wizardry.

I was also a child born of non-English speaking parents and was subjected to a steady diet of foreign language movies. In the 1970s, a foreign language TV station commenced broadcasting in Australia. Up until then, programming on the free to air stations was ostensibly a mix of Australian, US and British movies and TV shows. Like the new found hankering for Italian, Greek and Chinese food, Australian tastes were diversifying, helped along by a flood of migrants mostly from Europe after the end of the Second World War, and there was deemed a sufficient market to sustain a broadcaster that restricted itself to foreign language movies and sport (usually the round ball version of football - called soccer in some parts of the world).

I remember watching German and Hungarian movies with subtitles and see my parents have an occasional

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