50 Years of Television in Australia

by Nick Place

  Edited by Nick Place & Michael Roberts

  Published in 2006

  by Hardie Grant Books

  85 High Street

  Prahran, Victoria 3181, Australia

  www.hardiegrant.com.au

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Copyright © Nick Place and Michael Roberts 2006

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available from the National Library of Australia.

  Edited by Kerry Biram

  Cover and text design by Phil Campbell

  Typeset by Phil Campbell and Lisa Stothers

  Printed and bound in China by SNP Leefung

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  The birth of television

  1950s

  1960s

  1970s

  1980s

  1990s

  2000s

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Photography credits

  FEATURES

  Sidekicks and barrel girls

  TV Week Logie Awards

  Cop shows

  Quiz shows

  Science TV

  Weather presenters

  Variety shows

  Current affairs

  Commercials

  Music shows

  Regional TV

  Sitcoms

  Talent quests

  Soapies

  Live sport

  Arts

  Mini-series

  Medical shows

  TV in print

  Comedy

  Singing budgies

  Australian TV sold to the world

  Lifestyle shows

  Taboos

  Documentaries

  Game shows

  Nature shows

  Ratings

  Kids TV

  Cooking shows

  News

  Reality TV

  Sports panel shows

  Flops

  The birth of television

  Bruce Gyngell during his ‘staged’ welcome-to-television address.

  Let’s start on 13 July 1956, in Bell’s Hotel, Woolloomooloo, just near Sydney Harbour. A group of drinkers are gathered around the bar and it would be fair to say they are in a world of wonder that transcends even the alcoholic content of their glasses. These bar flies are watching the first-ever television test transmission in Australian history, as Channel 9, Sydney, experimentally flaps its broadcasting wings.

  Three days later, in Melbourne, HSV-7 technicians would cheer as the first-ever signal successfully found its way from the South Melbourne station to Seven’s Mount Dandenong receiver and back. Dick Jones was enjoying his first day as a techo in TV and wondered what all the fuss was about. Shortly after, images of a child standing at the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance would be successfully screened. These technical baby steps all took place less than four months before three Melbourne start-ups planned to cover an Olympic Games.

  You have to remember that this was only 27 years after audiences had heard Al Jolson singing in The Jazz Singer and marvelled at sound being added to motion pictures at the theatre. In other words, iPods were a long way away. In 1956, there was no such thing as videotape. If you wanted to tape something, you had to point a 16 mm camera at a blue image of the TV screen received directly from the studio camera. Sound was recorded separately, and had to be matched to the video later.

  This is why there is no original footage of the day Australian television began. Bruce Gyngell was the man who famously said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to television’ at 6.30 pm on TCN-9 on 16 September 1956. He had enough sense of theatre to secretly recreate the moment three years later, when there was a way of filming it for history, but the real thing was transmitted to a few thousand television sets around Sydney, and then disappeared into the ether.

  An early Channel 7 Outside Broadcast (OB) van.

  If we could see that historic moment, the first thing we might wonder is why it’s shot at such a strange angle. That was because the Nine studios were still under construction (these were only the beginning of regular, freely available test transmissions – the official launch of the station was still more than a month away) and were not ready for the big night, so Gyngell was forced to deliver his line from an engineering storeroom so small the massive camera could barely fit inside the door. Nine was so desperate to be ‘first’ that such incidentals as a lack of studios simply could not get in the way.

  All of which is a long way from mid-1954, poolside at the home of Consolidated Press newspaper tycoon Frank Packer. If ever you wanted a pure display of what makes a media mogul tick, then this is the date to revisit.

  After a long and weighty Royal Commission into all matters to do with this newfangled idea of television, which had started on 23 February 1953 and ran for the rest of that year with evidence hearings in most states, Prime Minister Robert Menzies finally announced that bids would be taken for two commercial licences to run stations in Melbourne and Sydney, alongside the government’s own intended service, a television version of the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

  Around this time, a young radio broadcaster, 24-year-old Bruce Gyngell, was lounging in the sunshine, enjoying a pool party at the home of his mate, Clyde Packer, son of Frank.

  ‘Frank Packer came up to me and said, “Oh, you’re that announcer fellow, aren’t you? I’m applying for a television licence, which I’ll probably get, so maybe I’ll need people with radio experience,”’ Gyngell recalled in an interview years later. Two things stand out in that remembered conversation. Frank’s casual confidence – ‘which I’ll probably get’ – and the fact that his immediate reaction was that he’d need some radio talent.

  More than seven years before TV officially began, the Shell Company sponsored several demonstrations of the new medium in Australia.

  Those involved in the start-up of Packer’s television company never had any doubt about their employer’s motivation. It was not so much about being a visionary – of Frank Packer somehow seeing the glorious and profitable television empire just waiting to unfold. It was about pure fear that television might somehow eat into the company’s newspaper profits. So, better to keep the enemy close.

  It says a lot about politicians, then and now, that the introduction of television came only after a Canberra-based Royal Commission had fussed and worried over the issue. Professor G.W. Paton, vice-chancellor of Melbourne University, was the chairman, while other members included Mr R.G. Osborne, chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board, Colin Bednall, then a newspaper executive (and later a central figure at GTV-9), and Mrs Maude Foxton, President of the Western Australian branch of the Country Women’s Association. Throughout 1953, they listened to 122 witnesses and eventually turned out a 251-page report.

  Who knows what the alleged ‘witnesses’ actually had to say, though. Speak to anybody involved in those heady days of discovery and onward into the later fifties and the overriding theme is that nobody had a clue what television was about. In fact, like a sportsman with bad technique, those attempting to drive the new medium had to first lose the bad habit of believing it would be ‘radio with pictures’ before they could truly understand what they were trying to create.

  Technically, television had been a long time coming. The concept of electromagnetism, which would eventually lead to transmitting images, had been unveiled in 1831,
with a breakthrough in 1862 when Abbe Giovanna Caselli actually sent an image through wires. By 1876, a Boston civil servant, George Carey, was drawing sketches for what he called a ‘selenium camera’ and Eugene Goldstein was talking about ‘cathode rays’. Not content with inventing the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, along with Thomas Edison, spent time in the 1880s examining the idea of using light to transmit sound, by which he envisaged images could be sent via his new device.

  The massive World’s Fair in Paris in 1900 is remembered for many reasons. It brought the world’s attention to the spectacular Eiffel Tower, and it was held in conjunction with the newly revived Olympic Games, although the whole Olympic–World’s Fair tie-in was so shambolic that many competitors had no idea they’d actually won an Olympic medal. Australians were mostly interested in the victory of one of our swimmers, Frederick Lane, in the Olympic swimming obstacle race held in the Seine, with our boy proving fastest at climbing over water-based hurdles and diving under a boat over the 200-metre course. He’d already won the 200-metre freestyle that morning, swimming downstream. With such heady stuff going on, it was easy to overlook the bunch of turn-of-the-century geeks gathered elsewhere in Paris for the First International Congress of Electricity. It was even easier to miss the moment when a Russian scientist in attendance, Constantin Perskyi, used a new word for the idea of transmitting images. He called it ‘television’.

  In the first decade of the 20th century, scientists split into two camps – those working on mechanical television, using rotating discs, and those exploring electronic television, chasing the cathode ray dream. In 1924 and 1925, America’s Charles Jenkins and Scotland’s John Logie Baird both showed rudimentary versions of mechanical TV, with Baird breaking new ground by transmitting moving silhouettes. By 1926, he was managing to transmit 30 lines of resolution at five frames per second.

  On 9 April 1927, television became a reality with the first long-distance display, by Bell Telephone and the US Department of Commerce, of an image transmitted between Washington DC and New York. Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, was not about to underplay the achievement. ‘Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history,’ he said. ‘Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.’

  Some of the pioneers were now thinking about how to use all this technology. In 1928, Charles Jenkins applied for, and received, the world’s first-ever TV licence, ‘W3XK’. Within two years Jenkins had made more history by beaming the world’s first television commercial. The rest, as they say, is history.

  For Australians, all they got to hear of this was little more than a few in-brief paragraphs in the occasional newspaper. Television was underway in the United Kingdom in the late 1930s but the British Broadcasting Commission had made a slow start, so not many Australians making the long trip across the world to the Old Country would have actually come into contact with the new medium. It was more likely that Australians might have seen the miracle of moving pictures in a small box in the United States, where the take-up was faster after network television began in July 1941. It would take until 1963 for the combined rest of the world to have more television sets than America.

  Nevertheless, in Australia, TV was coming. By the start of 1953, when regular television broadcasts were unveiled in Japan, Australians would have heard of television being available everywhere from the USSR (1946), Canada (1947) and France (1949) to Mexico (1950), Brazil, Argentina, Holland (all 1951), Germany, Italy, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela (1952). In the life of the Australian Royal Commission, television had also been introduced in the Philippines, Switzerland and Belgium. Poland and Finland were getting ready to flick the switch. Being a late bloomer, Australia was able to learn from the mistakes of other countries, with the Royal Commission presumably noting the 1954 UNESCO Report that found television was struggling badly in Holland, Denmark, Germany and Italy because years of ‘experimental’ broadcasts had dampened the desire of consumers to bother to buy a set. The verdict was that Australia would do better to follow Canada’s example, test the technology in secret and then land, fully formed and ready to dazzle its public.

  So, it wasn’t really a matter of if we’d get TV. The politicians were just nervous about what television might do if allowed to mutate without official legislation to control the monster.

  ‘TV safeguard for children advised,’ screeched the headline of The Sun-Herald on Sunday 9 May 1954, announcing the Commission’s findings. Nobody was turning to the newspaper’s much-vaunted ‘8 pages of comics’ before they’d read this story.

  ‘The Television Royal Commission’s report, issued in Canberra yesterday, advises the appointment of special committees to watch the interests of children’s and religious television programmes,’ the article began. ‘It says censorship of Australian “live” programmes would be impracticable, but that there should be some power to ban material likely to cause offence.’

  Straight away, the commissioners were announcing their concern over content, and also that advertising would need to be controlled so that it did not become excessive. Has a group of public servants ever been so astute, so quickly?

  Monday’s papers couldn’t care less about such detail as protecting the eyes and minds of children. The Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial cut straight to the chase with the headline: ‘Begin TV here without delay, says report’.

  The Royal Commission had recommended that national and commercial stations be established in Sydney and then Melbourne, with a warning that the ABC shouldn’t aim for success at the expense of its existing radio obligations. The report advocated further expansion into the other capital cities as more funds became available. Overall, the Royal Commission had estimated the cost of setting up an ABC television station in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Newcastle and seven regional centres at about £4,515,900, including operating costs until 1959.

  The commercial stations were expected to cost at least £250,000 and possibly as much as £500,000 each to establish. From the start, the Royal Commission believed there should be competition, with two licences in the two major capitals, and it was clear that any TV stations must have the overriding aim ‘to provide programmes that will raise standards of public taste’. Clearly, nobody at this stage had foreseen Big Brother or Chains of Love.

  The report also suggested that a television receiver, to become known as a TV set, was likely to cost £150, but may become cheaper over time. However, the papers went straight to the manufacturers, who declared that they hoped to be selling units for £20 less than that. Companies like Astor, Kriesler, STC and Philips began preparing.

  Estimates of when television could be up and running ranged from little more than 12 months away, to two years. Sydney had a head start because of the licence rollout, but Melbourne had the Olympic Games, starting in mid-November 1956, as an obvious target.

  Keith Cairns, a former chief of staff for Melbourne’s Sun News-Pictorial, and more recently a newspaper executive, was in London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953 when Menzies had first announced plans to explore television in Australia. Cairns was immediately commissioned with the task of exploring television in London, as the Herald & Weekly Times began preparing its licence bid.

  But Cairns was quickly frustrated. ‘Britain had the BBC,’ Cairns said, in an interview not long before he died. ‘Commercial TV didn’t start there until a few years later, so there wasn’t much I could pick up in London. There was only the BBC and we wanted a commercial operation, which is what we very much were. Anyway, the BBC wasn’t noticeably co-operative. They weren’t too keen on helping some bloke from the sticks.’

  By the time the bidders lined up, there were a handful in each city. In Sydney, one licence went to Amalgamated Television Services Pty Ltd, formed by Fairfax, radio stations 2UE and 2GB, Macquarie Broadcasting Services, the Sydney Sun and a few other partners. It would become ATN
-7.

  The other licence went to Television Corporation Limited (TCN-9), which was a joint venture between Consolidated Press, London’s Daily Mail newspaper, Philips, Paramount Film, radio stations 2SM and 2KY and others, including a promised number of shares left open for the public to buy. All anybody really needed to know was that TCN-9 was controlled by Frank Packer. That was certainly all that young Bruce Gyngell needed to hear. He was no longer working on his suntan.

  ‘The moment the announcement was made that Television Corporation got the licence, I naively wrote to four US TV networks, plus Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Stanford universities, saying we’d been granted the first commercial TV licence in Australia and asking what training they could offer us,’ he told ScreenSound. ‘I was a very bold 24-year-old typing with two fingers. I only received one reply from Sylvester L. Weaver Jnr, the president of NBC. Later I realised it was owned by RCA who thought they could sell equipment to us, but Philips was already part of Television Corporation, so that was covered.

  ‘I wrote to Frank Packer reminding him of the first conversation at Clyde’s party saying, “On February the 14th, you mentioned you were applying for a licence, I know you must be busy … etc, etc,” explaining that I had made arrangements and could go to NBC, could study at Columbia University, I had organised a student visa and had a round-the-world ticket, which I had already organised, so could I go? His secretary called and said yes, and can you take Alec Baz and Mike Ramsden in New York [AAP correspondent to the White House at the time] with you.’

  Cairns had also looked to America. He had found a media company which was remarkably similar in size and existing media properties to the Herald & Weekly Times, which went into the Australian TV battle already boasting Melbourne’s top-rating radio station, 3DB, and its newspaper power, including the afternoon broadsheet, The Herald, with its sales of 440,000, and the morning tabloid, The Sun, which had a circulation of about 400,000.