50 Years of Television in Australia

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50 Years of Television in Australia Page 15

by Nick Place


  But the IMT carnage wasn’t all human. A segment called ‘The Golden Shot’, which saw two viewers instructing blindfolded cameramen to fire a crossbow mounted on their cameras at a golden figure nine, was introduced in February to replace ‘The Big Wheel’.

  Incredibly, it made a cult figure out of Eric ‘The Bolt’, a Nine technician responsible for loading and looking after the Golden Shot equipment. He even had his own 300-strong fan club, but that couldn’t save the segment, which was axed late in the year.

  Kamahl: I’m no sex symbol

  May: Ceylonese singer Kamahl says he is baffled as to why the label ‘sex symbol’ has been bestowed upon him.

  ‘I have always thought that sex symbols are usually very frigid, unresponsive people,’ he said. ‘And that is not me at all.’ Kamahl’s wife, Sahodra, is equally bemused by the title.

  ‘I was once called a modest sex symbol, and my wife laughed herself silly for a week,’ Kamahl retold. ‘She thought it was a joke on both scores: I am not sexy, nor am I modest.’

  Attracting attention on the corner

  May: Marking a return to its controversial heyday, Four Corners has refused to apologise for a segment that was denounced in the House of Representatives as faked and misleading. Minister for the Army Andrew Peacock spoke out against a sequence showing bastardisation of cadets – young men being forced to do push-ups and taking showers with their clothes on – because some of the ‘cadets’ shown were not, in fact, cadets. Four Corners admitted it was a re-enactment but refused to concede any ground as it was a factual and legitimate report on proven allegations.

  Other reports on the program have recently led to the busting of an abortion racket in Sydney and a promise to improve conditions at an Aboriginal settlement in Queensland.

  Networks love evil, says Showcase star

  February: Gordon Boyd and Hector Crawford have announced that, ‘by mutual agreement’, Boyd will no longer be the host of Showcase, despite a five-year contract. What isn’t clear is whether the move came as a result of Boyd’s recent scathing attack on Australian television networks, when he said they were only interested in evil because it rates better.

  Fuming after the rejection of two ideas by the commercial networks, Boyd vowed to refuse to appear on any television show other than Showcase as a personal protest about the networks’ values, or lack thereof.

  ‘Television is now more powerful than Jesus Christ and The Beatles put together and can be used either for good or evil,’ he told TV Week, claiming the networks had a ‘complete lack of responsibility in not encouraging something worthwhile because it doesn’t rate well’.

  Boyd had proposed he host a five-minute program, free of charge, for all networks, promoting ‘some of the good things in life’. He also costed a chat show to be screened from Sydney’s Wayside Chapel, but the networks passed.

  ON DEBUT

  > Around the Bush – wildlife series

  > Dateline 70 – topical affairs program hosted by Barry McQueen

  > Rolf’s Walkabout – Rolf Harris and his family discover Australia

  > The Long Arm – police series

  > The Inventors – looks at new inventions and inventors

  > Johnny Farnham – pop music and cartoons

  > View from Beyond – comedy series

  > Dynasty – ABC drama series starring John Tate and Ron Graham

  > Penthouse Club – variety show

  > Wanted – as in Australia’s most …

  > The Weekend Starts Here – variety hosted by Jimmy Hannan

  > Showtime – variety show

  > Mrs Finnegan – comedy series

  > Phoenix Five – children’s space adventure series

  > Search for a Star – talent show

  > Would you Believe? – light-hearted panel show

  > Temptation – quiz show

  > The Acid Test – talent quest for actors

  > Australia A-Z – sketch comedy series

  > Birds in Paradise – comedy series And from overseas comes:

  > Des O’Connor Show – British variety show

  > Doctor in the House – comedy series

  > Callan – espionage drama series

  > On the Buses – UK comedy series

  > The Brady Bunch – family sitcom

  > Please Sir – British comedy series

  > Johnny Cash – country and western series

  > The Governor and J.J. – comedy series

  > Not Only – But Also – comedy with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

  > The Partridge Family – sitcom

  Networks struggle to go solo with cop shows

  August: Crawfords made it look so easy: Homicide, Hunter, Division 4. So who could blame the Nine and 0-10 networks for thinking they’d be able to produce a winning police drama in-house?

  Nine led the way with a show called The Link Men, which followed a unique group of Sydney police who carry out special investigations and link up evidence. But critics and audiences were unimpressed, claiming it suffered from muddled direction, acting and scripting.

  One of the lead actors, Bruce Montague, called for viewers to get behind the show. ‘Give the series a go,’ he pleaded. ‘I do not think I am being bumptious when I predict The Link Men will become the top crime series in Australia.’

  But his words fell on deaf ears with both audiences and network executives, and the series was axed in March after just 12 episodes.

  The premature demise of The Link Men didn’t deter the 0-10 Network from having a stab at their own in-house police drama, The Long Arm. It premiered in April, but didn’t create headlines until June, when network executives censored an episode due to excessive violence.

  It contained some visually sickening scenes of a Vietnam veteran on a killing rampage in a quiet Melbourne park, and needed to be toned down considerably before it had any chance of screening.

  An ATV-0 spokesperson said the episode was censored as the network wanted to avoid gaining a reputation for violence, particularly with its slogan at the time: ‘make love – not revolution’.

  But not even all that extra publicity could save the show from being axed. With the final episode going to air last week, it looks like 0-10 might be back on the phone to Hector after all.

  TV networks on borrowed time:Gyngell

  February: The first man of Australian TV, Bruce Gyngell, has predicted that mass TV will soon be as outdated as the dinosaur.

  Now head of the Seven network, Mr Gyngell said within 10 years Australians would have a choice of 75 computer-selected programs at any one time. Viewers will be able to dial into a distribution centre, which will transmit to their set any program, upon their request.

  Reporting on Mr Gyngell’s remarkable claims, Newsday’s John Pinkney said the new technology would be a boon for viewers who dislike having to wait a week for the next episode of their favourite serial, and would also mean that stations would be obliged to offer top-quality movies all the time.

  Coroner not Spellbound

  April: Martin St James, the star of Perth TV’s popular hypnotism show, Spellbound, may have to fly back to England to give evidence to a coroner relating to two people who died after one of his shows more than a year ago. The couple, a 28-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman, died of carbon monoxide poisoning after leaving their car heater on in a garage, shortly after attending a St James hypnotism stage show in 1968.

  ‘I had nothing to do with the unfortunate deaths of these two people,’ St James declared, adding that the coroner’s report had already had an effect on his bookings both in Australia and overseas. St James said he remembered the couple, having told the man under hypnosis that he was the Frankenstein monster while the girl was to be a stripper.

  King of Pop, king of kids

  King of Pop Johnny Farnham showed he could have a future in TV when he hosted a 10-hour children’s marathon in September. Seven’s Ideal Fun Day was the first kids’ program of such magnitude staged on Austr
alian television. The show included cartoons, games, live music and sports stars – all before a studio audience of more than 2000 kids, most of them underprivileged.

  Church at loggerheads with TV

  March: The controversial BBC play, Son of Man, which screened recently on the ABC, has elicited a chorus of protests and a particularly scathing attack in NSW parliament.

  Dramatising the last days of Christ’s life, the play portrayed the son of God as a very ordinary, slightly disreputable, badly clothed ‘hippie’ type who happens to have a message – and dies for it. Liberal MLA Mr John Jackett spoke out after the screening, claiming that sacrilege had been perpetrated on a national medium of communication, with Christ presented as a ‘blithering idiot’.

  This controversy follows an incident in February when Beauty and the Beast compere John Laws launched what was described as ‘an unprecedented attack on the Church’, stating that ‘priests will do anything for money’.

  Going out on a Limb for local production

  October: Industry stalwart Bobby Limb has long been a campaigner for increased local production and this year has endeavoured to push the cause to the forefront of network agendas. In August, he asked Prime Minister Gorton to intervene in the employment crisis now facing Australian TV, with local shows being axed and no residuals being paid, and in September he addressed a meeting in Sydney, encouraging 800 TV personalities to fight for increased Australian content.

  Later, Limb spoke out against Seven’s call for a public mandate before going ahead with full-scale production on its comedy series, View From Beyond. He believed Seven’s managing director Bruce Gyngell was being unfair in essentially demanding ‘an instant hit’, especially when past experiences have shown that it takes several episodes for characters in a comedy series to be effectively established.

  MEMORIES

  > Former world boxing champion Lionel Rose embarks on a country and western TV singing career, after popular appearances on HSV-7’s Club Show and the Mike Walsh Show.

  > Barry Humphries becomes the second Australian (after Rolf Harris) to have his own series on BBC TV. The series is titled The Barry Humphries Scandals – A Thoroughly Nice Show.

  > New arrangement with the VFL means that Melbourne TV stations will be showing replays an hour later this year. This gives fans a chance to get home from the footy to watch the whole match all over again.

  > ‘The Big Wheel’, a highlight of IMT since its inception 13 years ago, is dropped from the show.

  > Barry Crocker has been given the honour of being allowed to use Graham Kennedy’s palatial dressing room when he’s in Melbourne.

  It is usually only opened up to international stars.

  > The Logies are shown on prime time TV for the first time, and it’s the first time that Graham Kennedy goes home empty-handed.

  > Also on the Logies, there is no award for Best Australian Comedy because the judges felt no show had reached the necessary standard.

  > An ABC team stripped naked three times to make a Chequerboard episode in a nudist camp.

  > Secretary of the Victorian Police Association has come out saying that police shows like Homicide and Division 4 are making petty criminals harder to catch.

  > The ABC’s new documentary series A Big Country explores every corner of Australia.

  > Gold Logies: Barry Crocker and Maggie Tabberer.

  > Special Gold Logies: Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin for providing TV’s greatest moment with the telecast of their walk on the moon.

  WEATHER PRESENTERS

  You can’t trust just anybody to tell you whether or not you should carry an umbrella tomorrow, so it’s no wonder that those who present the TV weather have become a small cult of personalities, as much about entertainment as their ability to spin a long-range forecast.

  Grey skies are gonna clear up

  It all started back in 1952 with a meteorologist named Percy Saltzman – the first English-speaking weatherman to grace a television screen, in his case a Canadian one. His only props were a blackboard and a stick of chalk, which he would toss into the air in a small closing flourish, a gesture that was packed with clues about the future direction of weather on television. Fifty years later, Australia has a long history of weather people who were also entertainers.

  Indeed, weather reports have been a constant feature of Australian TV since we first switched it on. In its earliest days – by the end of 1956, in fact – the ABC had meteorologists presenting the weather in Sydney and Melbourne from the local meteorological office. After putting their own presenters through a crash course in meteorology, the commercial stations followed suit.

  Mike Bailey has delivered thousands of forecasts over the years, for both the ABC and Channel 7. Clocking up 30 years as a weatherman in 2004, Bailey’s presentation style has been as straight as a weathervane. ‘You’ve got to be careful with the entertaining side of it because, for a lot of people, the weather is not a joke, so if you turn it into a circus, you lose half your audience’, he told The Australian in 2005.

  Like the ABC’s Alan Wilkie before him, Bailey believed the weather was a serious business and people didn’t need to be – and indeed didn’t want to be – distracted by gimmicks. It’s a style that has been honoured in more recent years by Melbourne’s Rob Gell and Channel Seven’s David Brown, whose stations made much of their meteorological ‘credentials’. But Australian TV history is full of weather people who have worked differently. And that’s putting it mildly.

  Perhaps the most notable graduate from the class-clown school of weather presentation was Brian Bury, who enjoyed a nine-year stint on the Today show during the 1980s. He delivered the weather with a five-minute comic performance, from behind sizable glasses, while wearing an array of the world’s worst bow ties – and audiences loved it. When he was dumped in 1991, he was replaced by Monte Dwyer, whose resumé doesn’t carry the words ‘trained’ or ‘meteorologist’ anywhere. You will, however, find the words ‘graduated’ and ‘drama school’. Ever the entertainer, Dwyer is reported to have rapped the weather, sung the weather, race-called it and even mimed it. In keeping with the entertainment philosophy underpinning the Today show’s weather, actor Steven Jacobs later stepped into Monte’s old job.

  But not all weather presenters have been actors looking for a new career. Real-life super-geek Karl Kruszelnicki held down the job on Today from 1991 to 1992. In Melbourne, the ABC’s Edwin Maher was a trained meteorologist who walked the line between quirky and serious and became a crowd favourite in the process. Once, he read the news standing on his head (because he lost a bet). Another time he poured a glass of water over himself. Having retired in 1999, he is perhaps best remembered for his array of pointers, many of them made by viewers hoping to advertise community events.

  Weather on Australian TV hasn’t always been a boys’ club, however – especially during the ‘glam’ years of the 1970s. Jackie McDonald, better known for her work as Daryl Somers’ ditzy sidekick on Hey Hey It’s Saturday, also presented the weather for Nine in Brisbane. AFI award-winning actress Kerry Armstrong began her career as a weather reader on Nine, and newsreader Anne Sanders started off in Adelaide with low troughs and fast-approaching cold fronts. TV stations in the 1970s often went for glamour in their weather presenters, a trend that saw names like Delvene Delaney and former Miss Australia Michelle Downs standing in front of weather charts (and usually posing for ridiculous promo shots). Rosemary Margan, GTV-9’s longest-serving weather woman, achieved legendary status with a more prosaic claim to fame: by writing the temperatures backwards in black Texta on a screen, so the writing appeared the right way on TV!

  Whatever their preferred style of delivery, it seems there has been something out there for everyone. Viewers with a serious interest in the weather have been able to tune in to a no-frills report from SBS and the ABC, or switch across to the Weather Channel on pay TV for wall-to-wall coverage. For the rest of us, well, we can watch a comedic performance with an exotic backdr
op that squarely places a polished silver lining over any dark clouds.

  From the blackboard to the blue screen and beyond

  Weather patterns have only marginally changed since the advent of television, but the way they are presented has altered dramatically:

  > 1950s – ABC weather reporter Bob Crowder stood in front of a four-sided drum, which was flipped over to reveal weather maps.

  > 1960s – Rosemary Margan delivered her Channel Nine forecast beside her ‘magic’ perspex screen, on which she would write temperatures backwards in black Texta.

  > 1970s – Chroma key technology saw presenters standing in front of blank screens onto which maps were electronically transmitted.

  > 1980s – A computerised graphical weather system was introduced. The graphics could include satellite images, as well as charts showing forecast rainfall and pressure.

  > 1990s – New background maps were created, showing topographical definition and more natural shading on the land. Time lapse photography showed us the day’s weather in a few seconds, and the seven-day forecast helped us plan our weekends from work on Monday morning.

  > 2000s – Animated 3-D graphics now paint a clearer, more detailed picture of the weather and fly-around images replicate global weather patterns. We can even see the snow falling, the rain dropping, the sun shining and clouds moving across the animated sky. Then again, you could look out the window …

  1971

  Former 3XY radio announcer Johnny Young has a surprise hit with a kids’ talent program called Young Talent Time, while another children’s show begins quietly on Saturday mornings. Meanwhile, the big kids settle down to enjoy A Current Affair and Matlock Police – though one network decides to leave programming decisions to its viewers.

 

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