A commercial network could have grabbed strong ratings with a show like First Contact, but Ray Martin is both glad and sad that Nine and Seven left it to SBS to undertake the project.

The idea came from a single statistic – six out of 10 white Australians have never met an Aboriginal person. That hasn't stopped many of us, particularly in the media, from making all sorts of generalisations.

SBS chose six ordinary whitefellas who were, as Martin says, "ill-informed, if not ignorant, about blackfellas" and took them to various Aboriginal communities "to see if their beliefs and their opinions and their prejudices were reinforced or broken open".

Martin went along as a sounding board.

Yes, it's a reality show, but Martin says it wasn't the usual approach of "Let's lock 'em up in a house and see how much they can hate each other". Even with the more cautious SBS style, there was plenty of drama.

"Being in the business for 50 years, I've no doubt this would work on commercial television," Martin says. "The impact if it was on Seven or Nine or Ten would be enormous. Talkback radio would be all over it like a rash and it would have a mammoth impact."

He recognises that on the past performance of even the hottest SBS documentaries, First Contact will be lucky to pull an audience of 600,000.

"I just hope it's not SBS-only viewers and I just hope it's not just university-educated people who already have their opinion," he says. "I hope it's people who have never met blackfellas who will have a look.

"Full marks to SBS for doing it. You and I know that commercial television in Australia is more conservative than the banks. They won't take any risks, even when the ABC does program after program that rates 1.2 million. That's a pity, because I think commercial audiences would lap this up.

"I think every Australian realises that the Aboriginal problem, quote unquote, is our festering sore, that we need to understand it."

Martin has been an activist for reconciliation for 40 years, long before he learned of his own Aboriginal heritage.

"My great great grandmother was a Kamilaroi woman who lived till she was 104 and died in Tamworth. We learned that in the 1990s, when my sister was doing a family tree. It had, I think, been hidden in a working-class family where the last thing you need when you're trying to scramble your way up the social order is having the tag of being a blackfella.  I'm 1/16th Irish and 1/16th Aboriginal, of which I'm very proud."

The show takes a positive view, Martin says. "It's not John Pilger out there doing a full-blooded double-barrel blast. If you're looking to confirm your left-wing views about what a pack of racists Australians are, you won't see it. That's just not true. We haven't solved the problems but we have moved on in a far more positive way than Pilger understands."

So what did the white travellers learn from the experience?

"You have your fingers crossed hoping that the people will play the game, in the sense that they need to ask questions and they need to be interested and at least be open to answers. If they don't play the game, you don't have a television show.

"In the end I liked them. What surprised me was how incredibly polite and respectful working-class Australians are. Even when they disagreed with some indigenous people they were talking to, or they didn't like what they were seeing, they went away and afterwards said quietly, 'I don't agree with that' or 'this needs to be cleaned up'.

"The only opinion they would have had beforehand was that blackfellas probably get a special deal and are probably better off than poor whitefellas. I hope they learned it is more complex than 'they sit around in the dirt and they're lazy and they don't want to work' or even 'they commit suicide and they've got depression and scabies'. It's much more than that."
First Contact starts on Tuesday, 8.30pm, SBS. 

Us and them and them

Here are three top 20 ratings charts. They are designed to let you tell at a glance whether Australia's television tastes are more influenced by the people who colonised this continent 226 years ago or by the people who coca-colonised our culture 58 years ago.

Most watched fiction series in Britain
1 Downton Abbey     2 Eastenders     3 Coronation Street     4 Doctor Who     5 Emmerdale     6 New Tricks     7 Lewis     8 Grantchester     9 Casualty     10 Scott and Bailey     11 Holby City     12 Gotham     13 The Chase     14 Peaky Blinders     15 Homeland     16 CSI     17 Under the Dome     18 Hollyoaks     19 The Simpsons     20 The Walking Dead   

Most watched fiction series in US
1 NCIS     2 The Big Bang Theory     3 NCIS New Orleans     4 The Walking Dead  5 Madam Secretary      6 Blue Bloods     7 Mom     8 The Good Wife     9 Criminal Minds     10 Scorpion     11 Modern Family     12 Scandal           13 How To Get Away With Murder     14 Person of Interest      15 The Blacklist     16 Hawaii Five-O 17 Once Upon A Time     18 Castle     19 NCIS Los Angeles     20 Grey's Anatomy      

Most watched fiction series in Australia
1 The Big Bang Theory     2 Home and Away     3 Criminal Minds     4 New Tricks  5 Scott and Bailey          6 Gotham     7 Upper Middle Bogan     8 NCIS     9 Modern Family     10 Scorpion     11 Castle     12 Dr Who     13 It's a Date     14 The Blacklist     15 Madam Secretary     16 The Code     17 NCIS Los Angeles     18 Wonderland     19 NCIS New Orleans     20 Party Tricks  
(Audience data from BARB, Nielsen, OzTAM, October)     

You'll see that the new season of Downton Abbey is tops in Britain. It would also be in the top 10 for the US and Australia, except that those countries have chosen to delay showing it, on the assumption that its core audience is too old to know how to download the latest episodes and won't mind waiting a few months for a fresh dose of Crawley family action.

Many of the other UK hits are broadcast here on esoteric platforms with tiny audiences, so in our top 10, only New Tricks and Scott and Bailey have successfully distracted us from our addiction to such Americana as Criminal Minds, Gotham, NCIS and Scorpion.

As for the rest of the US top 20, Scandal barely rates here because Channel Seven thinks we're not interested in US politics and plays it after 10pm on Tuesdays; How To Get Away With Murder will start on Seven early next year (and no doubt be moved to late night within weeks); new seasons of Grey's Anatomy, Blue Bloods, Mom, and Person of Interest haven't started here yet; and The Good Wife struggles to pull more than 300,000 viewers to its Wednesday night slot on Ten (suggesting the Americans have better taste than we do).

If you extend your study to each country's top 30, you might conclude that the US has culturally colonised the entire English speaking world, and also that Australia has been doing a bit of reverse colonisation in recent years. The Brits clearly enjoy US shows as much as we do, though they love Homeland more (it's our number 30 and their number 15) and The Big Bang Theory less (it's their number 26 and our number 1, suggesting our sense of humour has become more American).

Our top 30 contains 18 US shows, six UK shows and six locally-made shows (because the biggest local hits, such as House Husbands, Love Child, and Winners and Losers, were not running in October, when we did this survey). Britain's top 30 contains 16 UK series, 11 US series and – wait for it – three Australian series. No. 24 on Britain's hitlist for October was Wentworth Prison, the remake of the Aussie classic Prisoner, which plays here on Foxtel under the name Wentworth; No. 27 was The Code, the ABC spy thriller which made it to No. 16 on the Australian chart; and Britain's No. 28 is our beloved Home and Away.

That means we have managed to send them back our convicts and we're halfway towards balancing the six Britishers that currently inhabit our top 30 (including Doctor Who, A Touch of Frost, Judge John Deed and Midsomer Murders). Next we need to  take on the Americans.

Breaking badder

Fans of the multi-award-winning US series Breaking Bad have been wondering what happened to the spin-off - Better Call Saul - which BB's creator, Vince Gilligan, was enthusing about earlier this year. Saul Goodman was Walter White's lawyer - the most cowardly, sleazy, unscrupulous unethical, and hilarious shyster ever seen on television. He was played by Bob Odenkirk, who was equally hilarious (but more honest) as the reluctant police chief in Fargo.

The answer: Gilligan is well into making the first season of the new dramedy, which will be set in 2002, eight years before the events of Breaking Bad. Joining Odenkirk as Saul's brother Chuck will be Michael McKean, best known as David St Hubbins of Spinal Tap.

Better Call Saul will be available first in Australia on a new subscription video service called Stan, months before it makes it to mainstream television here. Stan is partly owned by Channel Nine and partly owned by Fairfax (which publishes this newspaper, so I should probably say something mean about it to demonstrate my independence). Details are sketchy, but it looks like you'll have to pay about $10 a month. Better Call Saul is expected to start on Stan in February.

For more, see smh.com.au/entertainment/blog/the-tribal-mind.