Compulsive Viewing is a curious mix of both history and memoir. The author is reluctant to use the word ‘history’, instead describing his book as an ‘insider’s account’ of the Nine Network. Stone, who is best known as the founder of 60 Minutes, is at pains to point out that this is not an academic history. Academics and media commentators, he laments, convey a total lack of empathy with the medium of television; providing a detailed time line of legislative and programming developments in Australia, he contends, would have ‘the clinical coldness of an autopsy’.

Nevertheless, the book proceeds on roughly chronological lines. We follow the Network’s development from the launch of TCN-9 in 1956 to the acquisition of GTV-9 in 1960, the golden days of Graham Kennedy and In Melbourne Tonight, the establishment of World Series Cricket, the emergence of 60 Minutes and Midday, the frenetic television wars of the 1980s, Alan Bond’s short but inglorious tenure at the helm of the Nine Network, and the advent of lifestyle television. The book concludes with a reflection on the challenges posed by convergence and digitalisation to free-to-air television.

The Packer dynasty has little in the way of archives and even less inclination to grant researchers access to them. Stone has done us a service, then, in pulling this book together. Although Compulsive Viewing is by no means a hagiography, Stone’s long association with the Packer stable has given him access to some records – including files relating to World Series Cricket and archival Nine footage – that would be hard for anyone but an insider to come by, and he has also conducted extensive interviews with television executives and celebrities.

The author explains the formula that has made 60 Minutes such a success: ‘focus on the most compelling personal stories and the big picture is sure to reveal itself’. This is the literary technique that Stone himself employs throughout Compulsive Viewing. Thus we are presented with stories about members of Nine’s ‘star factory’ – Kennedy, Ernie Sigley, Ray Martin, Jana Wendt, George Negus, and Don Burke – to illustrate points about management style, creative control, editorial independence, and so on.

But this is a long book, and after a while Stone’s insistence on the colourful and the controversial begins to grate. Virtually every chapter begins with an outrageous anecdote, and some of the chapter headings (such as ‘lights, condoms, action’) are just plain silly. There are also some shocking puns – the introduction is entitled ‘the view from cloud 9’ and we are told that Bond’s ‘idea of making a good impression was to splurge $54 million on an impressionist painting’. Similarly, there are a few too many concessions to fashion; do Nine’s executives really need to be described as the ‘Darth Vaders’ or ‘tabloid gladiators’ of the industry? Stone deserved more judicious editing, and the way many of the innumerable quotations are typeset is quite unconventional.

These are disappointing lapses as Compulsive Viewing is an interesting and important book. The commercial media in Australia has been poorly served by historians. Stone’s experience as a journalist and a television and magazine executive means that he has a lot to say, and many uncomfortable questions to pose, about the media – past, present, and future. For example, he explains in absorbing detail the deceptive techniques used by current affairs programs, proposes guidelines for the treatment of individuals caught in the glare of a television investigation, and discusses the role of endorsements in lifestyle programs. Indeed, the parts of the book that deal with television ethics make fascinating reading in the context of radio’s ongoing ‘cash for comment’ controversy.

Everyone, Stone notes wryly, is an expert on television programming. Still, there are some surprising omissions in Compulsive Viewing. While the author neatly situates the advent of one-day cricket in 1977 in the context of television rights, he does not have much to say about sport in the 1980s and 1990s. He acknowledges Nine’s dominance in sports broadcasting, but only mentions Wide World of Sports, which went a long way to making sport accessible to the layperson, in passing. And the Super League battle, which revolved around the major media players’ interests in both pay and free-to-air television, is dismissed in a couple of pages in the concluding chapter on James Packer.

It is probably fair to say that the strongest sections of the book deal with the years from the 1960s to the 1980s. There are times when the reader yearns for a little more historical acuity. There are too many ‘firsts’ implied, and not enough historical parallels drawn, in Compulsive Viewing. Stone explains how television creates a sense of community and commonality; viewers are able to share an experience with many others and there are increasing opportunities to participate in programs by writing in for ‘fact sheets’ or contributing to online discussions. While this is a sound point, Nine has not been the only element in the Packer empire to cleverly foster a sense of audience engagement. The Australian Women’s Weekly, for example, deployed this technique in a sophisticated and sustained manner from its launch in 1933. There are other strands of continuity in the dynasty: for example, the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs published an increasing number of supplements from the 1950s on in an effort to appeal to the niche markets that Stone talks about when discussing the infotainment programs of the 1980s and 1990s.

For all its faults, Compulsive Viewing is an interesting and candid book, and it is more modest, thoughtful, and provocative than many of the autobiographical works produced by Australian journalists and media identities.