by Nick Place
‘This American operation had five TV stations and newspapers and radio and so on … they had a TV station [WEWS TV] in Cleveland, Ohio, which was very much like Melbourne,’ Cairns recalled. ‘It was comparable. I stayed there for some weeks and I was full of enthusiasm. This was something we had to be very much involved in.’
The HWT won its licence from a field that included Opposition Leader, Dr Evatt, and the federal secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, Mr TNP Dougherty. But the Broadcasting Control Board didn’t have much of a decision to make.
One licence went to General Television Corporation Pty Ltd, a shiny new entity specifically created for the task by Astor Television’s Sir Arthur Warner and backed by the newspapers The Argus and Australasian, as well as Hoyts Theatres, Greater Union Theatres, Electronic Industries Limited, JC Williamson Theatres Ltd and radio stations 3XY, 3UZ and 3KZ. Everybody wanted a piece of the new media.
The HWT licence was won in an unusual alignment with Packer in a handshake agreement in Melbourne to work together against GTV and the Fairfax-dominated ATN in Sydney. (It was a partnership that lasted until the day in 1958 when Herald executives picked up the paper to read that Packer had bought GTV-9, despite promising them that he would alert them before making such a move. The Board of HSV was forced to do some fancy corporate footwork, eventually tying in with ATN-7 for a new partnership.)
The winners were announced in a 37-page report published on 18 April 1955, and the race was on. Gyngell decided early that it was essential that TCN-9 should be the first to broadcast in Australia; that being able to say you were first to air meant something important, even if he wasn’t sure what. In Melbourne, executives from GTV and Herald Sun Vision were telling newspaper reporters that they hoped to be on air in time for the Melbourne Olympics, only 18 months away. It was a ridiculous deadline, a crazy timeline to set themselves given how green they still were about how television even worked. But this was a time for confidence, and maybe a time for cowboys. Even the Control Board was making it up as they went along, admitting that their demand that overseas shareholders in the commercial licences be limited to 15 per cent was made despite suggestions at the public hearings that the Board had no right to make such claims.
As for choosing which station would carry which number, well, the Control Board decided that time-honoured methods would suffice. ‘We had all the elements of a chook raffle,’ Keith Cairns said. ‘The Control Board put the numbers in a hat and I picked Seven. He picked Nine. We were pleased because we wanted to be Seven.’ A life-long golfer, Cairns added: ‘We thought it was a lucky number, and in golfing parlance, a seven iron goes further than a nine iron.’ (Even today, Seven staff contest the annual Keith Cairns Golf Cup.)
Now the licences had been awarded and the clock was ticking, things began to move quickly. But nobody could be sure they were even on track. ‘Packer’s position on TV was “I don’t know if it’s going to take off, but everyone says I should be in it”, which is why he gave the head programming role to a 24-year-old,’ said Gyngell. ‘A lot of executives with financial backgrounds were brought in to run Nine, but it didn’t work out. They had no idea about TV and spent £3000 on curtains.’
Right throughout the process, there were instant winners and then there were those who would look back at opportunities lost. There was the potential bidder for a Sydney TV licence in 1954 – Bruce Gyngell remembered him hazily as Mr Scrimenger – who was somehow alleged to have connections to the Australian Communist Party or maybe China at a time when Prime Minister Menzies was deep in a ‘reds under the beds’ campaign. Exit stage left, Mr Scrimenger, forever branded as a potential polluter of Australian minds everywhere. Or the less sinister but equally forgotten bidder, Mack’s Happy Home Furniture, who threw a happy hat into the ring for a Melbourne licence, apparently acting under instructions from God, but came up short once the Herald & Weekly Times flexed their considerable muscle.
Others didn’t even spot the gold they were sitting on. The owner of a run-down weekender for sale on top of Mount Dandenong in 1955 was probably thrilled when his real estate agent broke the news that somebody was interested in buying his shack and its rocky land with a good view. The poor vendor wouldn’t have had any idea, until it was way too late, that the ‘Mr Smith’, or whatever faceless buyer’s name his agent was negotiating with, was actually Keith Cairns, by then general manager of HSV-7 and backed by all the financial might of the Herald & Weekly Times organisation. If he’d been able to see the HWT executives face-to-face, he might have had a vital inkling of how high the stakes were in that transaction. As far as the buyers were concerned, it went way beyond whether his weekender had woodworm or needed re-stumping.
If only … if only the weekender owner had realised that his little shack just happened to be sitting in the exact and only spot on the entire mountain where Seven could place its transmission tower to guarantee line-of-sight telecasts across Melbourne. If only he’d realised how vital that piece of land was, to host the giant tower that still stands there today, beaming Seven’s picture across the metropolis, the weekender’s owner might have been a little braver in how he played his cards. He definitely could have achieved a much, much better price.
Many of the lucky winners of that time were working in radio, especially at the Herald & Weekly Times’ top-rating radio station, 3DB, or the popular 3XY, with nothing but blind luck in timing to thank for the lucrative and exciting careers about to unfold before them.
‘I was able to raid 3DB,’ Keith Cairns said. ‘We had stand-up fights over that. Our salaries looked as though they would be better and the industry was going to be good. Initially, the struggle was to get [technical] staff. On my visit to WEWS Cleveland Ohio, I met superb people. They encouraged us to send our people and Packer’s people over there. We all went over and we recruited staff from all over the place when we got back. Some of our best blokes had been taxi drivers and all sorts of people. The nearest thing was still radio.’
A revue at the Princess Theatre was plundered for talent while those applying for jobs off the street were given wild choices, such as would they like to be an on-air presenter … or PA to new program manager, Colin Fraser, an ex-Herald Chief of Staff? Then again, why choose? Some took on more than one role, like teenager Don Bennetts, who joined as a cameraman and continued as a studio crew member while soon gaining fame as a performer on Hit Parade and Youth Take A Bow. (Bennetts’s fame was assured when he ran his car off an embankment near the Seven transmitter on Mount Dandenong and, on finally scrambling out of the wreck and back up the slope to the road, thrilled to be alive, was greeted by a woman exclaiming, ‘Why, it’s Don Bennetts!’ That made the paper.)
The stations had one obvious source of technical staff. Melbourne Tech (later the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) had shown some foresight by developing television engineering and technician courses over the last few years and graduates poured straight into jobs – as did the lecturers, with Pulse Techniques lecturer Rod Biddle becoming Nine’s chief engineer, among others. In December 1955 engineers from the course were signed by HSV-7 and sent to 3DB because the television station hadn’t even been built yet; an army of workers was trying to convert the site of the old Herald Gravure printing plant in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne. In Bendigo Street, Richmond, an old Heinz factory site was being transformed into GTV-9. In Sydney, the remote Epping site was being readied by ATN-7 and a former dairy in Willoughby was now becoming the home of TCN-9. HSV was relying on employees from equipment provider Marconi to oversee the building of the Mount Dandenong transmitter and all video equipment, while AWA staff supervised the hooking up of audio gear.
It was around Easter 1956 when equipment began to arrive from overseas, including HSV-7’s outside broadcast (OB) van, which amazed everybody with its size. There is beautiful colour footage shot by a pioneer Seven cameraman Robin Clarke that shows the OB van being winched onto the docks and then cruising through the centre of town in 1950s Melbourne
, driven triumphantly under a sunny sky. It was a shining day right up until the van reached the station’s South Melbourne headquarters, and was found to be too big for the garage doorway that had been built for it. Sledgehammers went to work on the bricks. Meanwhile, the studio equipment was delivered in such magnificent wooden packaging that there was competition among staff and management to keep the timber to build high quality shelving.
In July, HSV began to transmit a test pattern and music, so that television set installers had an image to aim for as they began installing sets into actual lounge rooms. These early sets were not like today’s TVs, which can be taken out of the cardboard box and plugged straight into the wall, ready for action, or feature one-touch automatic tuning of all available stations. They had to be individually tuned, and every time a set changed station, more tuning was required. An unexpected win for HSV was that more people started wanting sets because those who had them were enjoying being able to hear popular music beamed into their lounge rooms without DJs and all the other usual interruptions of commercial radio. Even without vision, television was a hit, thanks to popular acts like Crazy Otto and his Piano.
In Melbourne, everybody was focused on one thing – being on air in time for the Olympic Games. Asked if there was a sense of a space race, with a battle between Sydney and Melbourne stations to be first to officially broadcast, one engineer from the time said: ‘No, we never had a sense of that. Sydney might as well have been on the other side of the moon when it came to television. Because there was no cabling, no networking, between the cities, they were not remotely in our thoughts.’
Instead of rivalry, there was sheer excitement. HSV-7 had a grand total of 49 employees when the station went to air. In the months before, the management staff, including secretaries like Judy Macleod, would be invited into the office of Keith Cairns or program manager Colin Fraser when the men returned from buying trips to America.
‘Colin or Keith would say, “Oh, you should see what we’ve got!” and we’d go into their office and they’d put on a film to show us programs like Gunsmoke or I Love Lucy,’ she recalled. ‘It was the first time any of us had ever seen them and we simply couldn’t believe it. We all adored The Mickey Mouse Club. It was the greatest thing we’d ever seen. We walked around the office singing the theme song for days.’
The secretaries also built running jokes as they tried to survive this bizarre new world, bobbing between celebrity auditions and reports to their bosses from the technical staff. ‘We’re going to be a good station because we’ve got a 16-stack vestidual side-band filter on Mount Dandenong,’ they would say to visitors, poker-faced. One day, a man phoned to say he lived on Mount Dandenong, within sight of the new tower, and could he save the expense of buying an aerial for his house by simply pointing a mirror out the window at the giant transmitter? The engineers rolled around on the floor laughing, but how was he to know?
Before long, despite the crazy hours and the magnitude of the collective task, romances bloomed. A state away, Bruce Gyngell would have expected no less, saying years later: ‘I always said if no f***ing went on at a station then it wasn’t going to work. In the first four years I worked every single day. It was so much fun, why would you not want to be there? There was great hands-on enthusiasm, vitality and passion.’
Or as Roger Climpson said to Nine’s Sunday program recently, in a retrospective on the early days: ‘There were some pretty wild days there, yes, and there were some pretty wild parties, I’ll grant you that. Television was almost one huge party. Anybody who was in it was delighted to be in it because it was fun, because you were somebody important if you were in any way associated with television. People’s eyes would hang – “You’re in television? Wow!”’
As the Olympics loomed, Astor was selling TV sets so quickly that people would pick them up from the factory’s back door, without bothering with a box or other packaging. These TVs cost three times the average monthly wage. Shops offered deals where people could trade in a piano for a TV receiver. The hype was building and by the time television actually went to air, there were an estimated 5000 sets in Australia tuning in. In Melbourne, 26 per cent of homes had a set, compared to only 12 per cent of Sydney homes, probably because the Games were in Melbourne. This was not including all the shopfront window sets that saw crowds gather to stare at this new phenomenon.
In Sydney, Bruce Gyngell was back in town after his big American adventure, which had included being lectured in television production at Columbia University by Mike Dann and Pat Weaver, later to father an actress daughter called Sigourney. Gyngell and his fellow Packer workmates also worked at WEWS TV, the non-union station in Ohio, which meant they could be, and were, thrown into everything, from cameraman to floor manager to editing. Gyngell was supposed to head to London for more research but at the last minute received a typical Packer telegram: ‘The Poms don’t know how to do it, cancel the trip.’ Packer had discovered that the first British attempts at commercial TV had reportedly made losses in the vicinity of £4 million.
Gyngell came back to Australia but was still thirsty for knowledge. ‘We [TCN] weren’t on air until September so I went to see Packer about going to KGMB in Honolulu for more experience, and he said, “This is not a travel department,” so I offered to pay for myself to go. Packer said “We’ll pay you and give you money for an allowance.” I went there for eight months, got more experience there, also at a non-union station, and learnt about splicing, presentation, worked on a cooking show, commercials … I learnt more in that period than previously. I experienced practical problems like if the copy was late or a guest hasn’t turned up. A month before TV went to air, I returned.’
After Nine’s debut on 16 September 1956, with Gyngell jammed into the storeroom, ATN-7 set 2 December as its launch date. On that afternoon, a massive thunderstorm swept through Sydney. The roof of Seven’s only operational studio, Studio B, couldn’t cope and rain leaked onto the lighting console, which promptly died. As VIP guests prepared to wade through thick mud in the car park, to witness the opening night of this historic TV event, the actors and musicians were rehearsing by the light of car headlights shone into the studio as technicians frantically tried to revive the flooded console.
Yet ATN made it to air, its mishaps becoming just another of the many seat-of-the-pants stories from that crazy first year of television.
The opening night of HSV-7 – at what other time than 7 pm on Sunday 4 November – featured a welcome from Studio 2, soon to become the home of the news, The Hit Parade and other smaller shows, because yet again the larger Studio 1 wasn’t ready. Eric Pearce greeted viewers across Melbourne by smoking a pipe, and then a ballerina appeared to dance on his desk. It was heady stuff.
Luckily, the opening broadcast then crossed to an outside broadcast ‘with a star-studded show’ direct from the Tivoli Theatre, in Bourke Street. Young comedians like Gordon Chater and Barry Humphries were listed in the program but only in the wake of larger acts, such as Richard Hearne – AKA ‘Mr Pastry’, the star of Tivoli’s Olympic Follies – who performed his simply hilarious act, ‘The Lancers’.
Seven’s engineers had already worked out why the new medium was better than radio, hardly able to believe that they were laying cables and checking equipment while half-naked showgirls ran to and from the stage for a fortnight leading up to the big night. That might be why everybody backstage was too distracted to notice the effect of the heat of the studio lights on a fishbowl, which was an arty centrepiece of the opening. Life-saving cold water was added moments before HSV went to air, narrowly avoiding the network launching with a shot of a bowl of dead fish.
But the audience loved it. ‘This will do me,’ ran the headline in The Argus after HSV’s opening night, while the Age reported that the unanimous verdict of viewers of that first night was ‘It’s wonderful!’ – despite the picture disappearing for several minutes when Seven threw from the studio to the Tivoli. In the streets of the city and suburbs, large crowds of
those who hadn’t been able to afford a TV receiver in time for the opening gathered in front of store windows, huddled to watch the magic. Nearly 300 people had to be turned away from the packed Prahran Town Hall where more than a dozen TV sets had been lined up on the stage, 1500 people craning their necks for a better view.
In the days to follow, getting a picture to air on Seven was nothing but an adventure. A children’s show producer got over-excited one day and brought an elephant, with disastrous results, while that show’s host managed to set fire to the studio no less than three times, setting off the sprinkler system, live on air. Three times! Meanwhile, Seven’s studio crew miscalculated how much dry ice would be needed for a big stage number, resulting in Melbourne TV’s first screening of a musical fog.
At least they were in better shape than Sydney’s Australian Broadcasting Commission station, ABN-2, which lurched to air on Monday 5 November, the day after HSV got going, but with technical hitches all over the place. During the first speech, by ABC chairman Sir Richard Boyer, the picture kept switching randomly to those sitting to the side, waiting their turn to speak. Because the studio lights were so bright, the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, and Senator McKenna had their eyes closed, giving the appearance that the Australian Prime Minister had fallen asleep in his first-ever appearance on television. When Sir Richard had finished and sat down, the camera promptly flicked off Sir Robert at the podium to the ABC head, eyes clamped shut against the glare and seemingly dozing through Menzies’s historic welcoming speech.
Things didn’t get better later when a technician walked in and out of shot, and then, during ABN’s first attempt at a news bulletin, another unexpected camera switch filmed a crew member’s back and then the host of the opening ceremony, Michael Charlton, who was surprised to find himself on air while smoking a cigarette after his performance. ‘You’ve caught us on the hop a bit,’ he said, before grabbing some headphones so he could talk to the news director. Finally, the news resumed.