With fifteen to twenty minutes of advertisements every hour on so-called free-to-air television, overnight celebrities created by unsavoury “reality television”, and endless game shows, it is increasingly difficult to recall a time when mainstream television was a cultural force. But in the middle of the last century it most certainly was—at least sometimes. Ken G. Hall’s decision at Channel Nine to show feature films uncut from the key Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox packages educated a whole generation in thirties and forties cinema, especially when the other networks followed suit and we got to see full versions of the…