50 Years of Television in Australia

by Nick Place

  Despite all this, the Prime Minister was gracious about the mishaps, declaring the station to be ‘a triumph for technicians’. Mr Menzies even felt moved to point out to the 150 guests in the studio, and the wider viewing audience, that the average person had no idea how much work was required to put an Australian TV station on the air.

  The hard work was being rewarded by viewer numbers at HSV. More than 200,000 people were reported to have seen the opening night, and over the following week reports came in from country centres confirming that the station could be seen in towns like Hamilton, Colac, Morwell, Lorne and Alexandra. Seven celebrated by unveiling Australia’s first broadcast talent quest, Stairway to the Stars, and possibly our first weather girl, with Mrs Brenda Sender, ‘wife of a city businessman’, being chosen from several applicants to tell viewers the weather news at 7.10 pm and 9.40 pm every Friday evening, starting in mid-November. Seven also launched the ambitious Wedding Day, where, in the opening show, radio personality John Stuart, with actor Carl Bleazby acting as master of ceremonies, interviewed newly-weds George and Diane Footit, who then took part in a quasi-reception and contested for prizes, such as a portable radio or a knitting machine. The show ended with the couple, having changed into ‘going away’ clothes, being waved goodbye as they departed on their honeymoon.

  Clearly, there was already a need for the steadying influence of the ABC in Melbourne. Within a couple of weeks, ABV-2 was transmitting a test pattern in time for the Games. The official opening of the government station was set for Monday 19 November, with a half-hour opening ceremony featuring the usual dignitaries and politicians, to be followed by a selection from the intended regular programming. The Frankie Lane Show featured Frankie singing alone and with guests, and was followed by the Mitchell Boys Choir, which had appeared in a couple of Bing Crosby films, including White Christmas, and then Fabian of Scotland Yard. An extended feature, This is the ABC, introducing viewers to the humorous as well as the serious moments in a day in the life of the national broadcaster, was to be followed by a live variety show, Seeing Stars, hosted by Peggy Brooks, just back from overseas, and finally a documentary on World War II, just to finish on the up. The Victorian manager of ABV-2, Ewan Chapple, explained to Listener In-TV that the station was not attempting to dazzle with spectacle on the opening night, instead looking to emphasise the various activities of the ABC and its need to cater for all sections of the community. So presumably no burning studios there.

  All this was before Melbourne’s TV pioneers had attempted to cover an Olympic Games. Only a few days into the world’s biggest sporting event, which even the International Olympic Committee didn’t really want them to cover because they thought TV equipment would get in the way of spectators, HSV’s rookie technicians knew they were up against it. The station had three cameras for outside broadcasts – massive, awkward boxes weighing roughly 80 kilograms each. There were up to 300 metres of cables per camera, each up to 70 metres long, and thick with brass connections at both ends; lots more weight to be lugged by the HSV team of six. There were also the microwave links, which were like satellite dishes two metres in diameter and felt like they weighed a tonne. All of this equipment, every last piece of it, had to be set up from scratch in time for the morning start of the athletic events at the MCG. The moment the athletics finished, it had to be packed up entirely, and driven to the State Swimming Centre on Swan Street, behind a police escort. It then had to be re-set for the swimming, which would finish around 10.30 pm. The technicians had to pack up and take everything back to the station, finishing at about 1.30 am, and be back by 5 am, ready for a new day.

  Every third day, each member of the team would be given a ‘rest’ day, working only 15 hours in the Dorcas St studio crew, so that no heavy lifting was required, but the strain was telling. One technician who lived in Mount Martha, an impossible drive away under the circumstances, took to sleeping on a couch from one of the studio sets, with a piano cover to keep him warm. The first crew member in each morning would wander into the studio, kick him awake and, after staggering off for a shower, he was ready to head to the MCG to start all over again.

  There wasn’t much room for error, which is why, a few days in, as they packed up at the MCG, they were mortified to watch one of the microwave bearers sail off the top of the MCG grandstand, landing heavily on an ABC truck. ‘That made us check whether we had public risk insurance,’ Keith Cairns chuckled in memory, but for the engineers, losing the station’s no-claim-bonus was the last thing on their minds.

  ‘We were standing there, looking at the damage and bemoaning how we were going to possibly get it to work again, when an ABC guy in a dustcoat appeared at the top of the stairs and said: “Excuse me, but I’m from the ABC and your link just hit our truck and I have to make a report,”’ Ron Place remembered. The bearer’s actual dish was buckled, the wave-guideline, which was crucial, was bent, and the heavy diecast box was completely battered. Where the cable actually connected was completely severed. Assistant chief engineer Lyle Lloyd headed off to The Herald’s machine shop with the whole mess and reappeared the next morning with the bearer fixed and ready for action. Nobody could believe it. ‘To work, the wave-guide part of it had to be repaired to something like 2- to 3-thousandths of an inch and they’d done it,’ Place said. ‘The funniest thing was that the link itself had always struggled to meet the Control Board’s specifications; it had always been our dodgiest link. After that miraculous overnight repair job, it was one of our best.’

  GTV-9 and ABV-2 were working just as hard to cover the Games, although viewer figures came through that suggested 97 per cent of Melbourne TV sets were watching the Olympics on Seven. Keith Cairns was so chuffed that he arrived at the MCG during the evening bump-out during the second week of the Games and suggested adding extra venues to the telecast. Utterly exhausted, the technicians were not polite in their response, prompting an attempted inspirational talk from Cairns about the importance of what they were all doing, the greatness of their achievements and so on.

  But they weren’t the only ones doing it tough. On the Wednesday night, on the eve of the opening ceremony, a lonely figure had sat in the new Olympic Stand of the MCG, quietly sobbing, and the Games hadn’t even begun.

  In years to come, Alf Potter would become Seven’s directing guru of all outside broadcasts, through the Olympics as well as covering the football, golf and anything else. But on this day, he was a scared former 3DB radio producer who realised he was so far out of his depth that there was no land in sight.

  ‘I went there by myself; I didn’t have anybody with me and the other two stations had about a dozen people there,’ he said in an interview before he died. ‘The ABC, they had two BBC producers and an American producer with all the assistants because they knew how to do it. We didn’t. At Nine they were a bit the same. They had two Americans and they had assistants and all that sort of thing, and there is me in the stand, all on me bloody own. I thought, “Jesus, what have I let myself in for? What am I doing here?” Because I really didn’t know and didn’t realise what I had got myself into. I actually broke down. I howled. I was approaching middle age, and I was pretty tough because I had been in radio for a hell of a long time, but I sat in the MCG stand, in the new stand, and shed tears because … just because of the pressure. It was enormous pressure. Nobody had taught me, because I hadn’t been overseas. I had to say to one of the fellers that had been overseas – the assistant chief engineer at that stage – “How do you get from one camera to another?” and he said, “Well, in America they call ‘standby camera 1, ready 1, take 1’, and that’s the way you do it.” And that’s the way I learnt.’

  Once the cameras started rolling, Potter became a legend for simply creating his own rules and, in the process, accidentally-on-purpose creating an entirely original Australian way of covering sport.

  ‘Three cameras is all we had,’ he recalled. ‘No mini things or anything like that, no hand-held cameras, of course, and very archaic
zoom lenses. We had a 40-inch and a 25-inch fixed lens that I used to put on the same turret, which wasn’t done. When Peter Coates came out and we were doing drama together, I was tracking in the studio with a 17-inch lens and he said, “What are you doing?” and I said, “Tracking in.” He said, “You can’t do that. That’s a 17-inch lens.” I said, “Yeah?” He said, “Well, you can’t do it; it’s not done,’’ and I said, “Have a look at the bloody picture. What’s the matter with it?” He said, “Nothing,” and I said, “Well, I’m doing it!” So, you know, it was innocence abroad.’

  In Sydney, without the Olympic pressure, Gyngell and Nine were having a ball. ‘In the early days I was director of programming and read weekend news to save overtime for Chuck Faulkner,’ Gyngell said. ‘I also logged transmission on weekends in handwriting and copied it [on a Gestetner machine] – we had no staff – and presented the game show, Name That Tune, sponsored by the Women’s Weekly. We were only on air until 4 November for a couple of hours a night, closed down at 9.30 pm, and news was only 15 minutes initially.’

  On 2 December, ATN-7 joined them on air and the battle to be ‘first’ was on in earnest. The day after its waterlogged launch, ATN unveiled what they claimed was Australia’s first tonight show, as Keith Walshe presented Sydney Tonight. Seven also claimed to have screened the first nightly current affairs show, with Howard Craven’s At Seven on 7, that day. Presumably, Captain Fortune was the first children’s program, and featured a man with a bad beard presiding over a bunch of puppets and nervous-looking kids. Over the first 12 months of television broadcasting, Seven would also claim the first breakfast show, as Ray Taylor presented Today, Del Cartwright’s Your Home as the first ‘women’s program’, and then there was the first quiz show, The Price is Right, the first soapie, Autumn Affair, and the first live musical on camera, Pardon Miss Wescott.

  Of course, Gyngell and his crew weren’t sitting on their hands. The 24-year-old program director had had his moment in history and had followed it up by introducing his own work, Australia’s first documentary for television – about Australian television.

  ‘I did a 30-minute program called This Is Television which showed the former dairy where Nine [Sydney] is now, the tower being built and showed what a camera, control room looks like – a basic textbook on TV. I narrated and produced it with Mike Ramsden. Few people had seen TV at that stage,’ he said.

  ‘We planned that after my introduction, Chuck Faulkner would present the opening night. I opened with “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to television.” At Columbia [University], I learned to be succinct, and after thinking about it, I finally came up with that phrase. Then at 6.30 pm, we planned for This Is Television to run, followed by Johnny O’Connor Presents, and then Campfire Favourites, which was coming live from St David’s Hall in Surry Hills, a church hall we set up to do live TV from.

  ‘On the Saturday night before the first transmission, we found we couldn’t go between the Nine studios and the church hall without a “rollover” all the time. We had a “sync pulse” generator problem so we needed someone to do the live bits between transmission, which is how I ended up hosting.’

  Of the programming that would follow over the coming months, Gyngell was disarmingly honest. ‘Everything we did was new and exciting, and some was probably dreadful but there was an enormous enthusiasm; we were all young. Melbourne had a show called Your Hit Parade, which [featured] salesmen miming Elvis Presley, a bizarre program. We ran it at Nine on Thursday and it rated well. On Saturday afternoons I just played music over test patterns, but radio complained, so I created a show called TV Disc Jockey. We just played records to a visual of a record going around and around. Phillips offered us some records, Col Joye’s band came in to play live, then people came into the studio to dance – it built up. When John Godsen went on holidays in 1957, I asked Brian Henderson in to do TV Disc Jockey. Henderson was better than Godsen; the show soon became Bandstand which moved to 6.30 pm each night. All our sixties music stars came out of Bandstand.’

  The original TV licences came with the handicap that stations could only spend a maximum of £25,000 per year on overseas content; this was a meagre amount that only succeeded in having already-hardened US television executives stare at the Australian negotiators. Gyngell bartered to receive his first three years’ worth of allowance in one hit so that he could bargain with longer term contracts for shows, while Cairns said eventually Packer and the HWT teamed to pool their resources and buy better shows, for HSV-7 and TCN-9.

  ‘Back then, the Herald & Weekly Times and ACP had a relationship with Roy Disney, through books and comics in their newspapers, which is why we could buy the Disneyland show,’ Gyngell said. ‘It ran at 7.30 on Mondays, followed by I Love Lucy, so the first six weeks on air was a miscellany of programming.

  Nine Melbourne didn’t go to air for another six weeks, and they didn’t have enough programs, so we ran odd programs and English plays. In those days people would watch anything. By January we had Disneyland and I Love Lucy. Schaeffer pens sponsored I Love Lucy and wanted a live ad. Brian Henderson had a radio show called When A Girl Marries at the time, and I asked him to do a commercial for the pens and he got paid £4 for the night.’

  At ATN-7, there were more scenes of bravado and seat-of-pants performance. Chris Beard was a young writer on the Captain Fortune show, and would go on to be on Revue 61. But his first day at ATN saw him thrown into dual roles.

  ‘I started as a booth announcer and host of Smalltime on the same day,’ he wrote in an ATN book celebrating the early years. ‘Newsreader Charles Cousens introduced me to the booth and told me he’d come back to help me from time to time. I never saw him again! I had to learn it all from scratch. I’d introduce Smalltime from the booth, then run upstairs to the studio.’

  He would have bumped into plenty of talent in the corridors. Bob Dyer was preparing to move his quiz show Pick-a-Box from radio to television, debuting in 1957. Other early ATN stars included Howard Craven, Del Cartwright and Brian Wright. At Nine, Brian Henderson was now becoming established as the king of Bandstand, while others like Roger Climpson, Bobby Limb and his wife, Dawn, were on their way to TV fame.

  In Melbourne, 70-year-old comedian Syd Hollister could be found at HSV-7, no doubt unfussed by this new world. Syd had been an early star on radio in the twenties, then performed on Australia’s first ‘talkie’ film, Spur of the Moment, in 1930, and had now found a gig on The Happy Gang, later to be called Sunnyside Up. Who knows, if Syd had hung around, he might have been an internet star.

  Meanwhile, Don Bennetts was doing less and less camerawork and more and more celebrity interviews, while Eric Pearce read the news, Bert Newton, Brian Naylor and Danny Webb proved to be popular young hosts and the dashing John D’Arcy crooned to the camera. Hit Parade beauty Bernadette Russell raised eyebrows by taking the first genuine bubble bath in Victorian TV history, with Seven staff building a complete bathroom, with plumbing, in the studio for the occasion.

  At GTV-9, general manager Colin Bednall and senior producer Norm Spencer saw a bug-eyed kid from radio 3UZ reading donations on a Red Cross telethon. The kid seemed to have a spark, a strange charisma that, along with his lightning mouth, made him stand out. On something approaching a whim, Bednall and Spencer asked Graham Kennedy if he’d like to host a planned variety show, In Melbourne Tonight. They offered serious money, too – £10 per show, five nights a week. He said yes.

  For those lucky enough to have been among the pioneers – those who had created television out of thin air – the sense of achievement began to sink in. Somebody in Melbourne had the idea to organise an exclusive Television Ball at a swanky dance club in St Kilda. Glamorous on-air stars, behind-the-scenes staff and hangers-on from all three networks, GTV, HSV and ABV, turned out in their best ball gowns and black tie to share the triumph. On the dance floor, wannabe stars busted their biggest moves, desperately hoping to be discovered by the executives in the room, wanting badly to belong.<
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  Towards the end of the night, the orchestra broke into the Mickey Mouse Club theme song and a ballroom full of people who knew they were at the cutting edge of the greatest adventure in media erupted. As one, they sang, ‘Em Eye See, Kay Ee Why …’ They sang as though there was no tomorrow, which couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, they sang as you can only sing when you know, deep down, that you own tomorrow.

  Australian television was on air.

  THE PIONEERS

  From a technical point of view, most of Australia’s early TV workers were working with the unknown – almost making it up as they went along. But they displayed great ingenuity, a remarkable capacity to learn and, in the end, achieved great things. These photographs, taken by a number of different behind-the-scenes crewmembers at HSV-7 in Melbourne in the mid-to-late 1950s, give a rare insight into life behind the cameras in those pioneering days.

  Harold Aspinall at the Teletheatre audio desk.

  The camera control room at Seven in the station’s early days.

  Inside Channel 7’s first outside broadcast van, being commissioned in 1956.

  The men behind the camera were rarely seen, but their work was vital.

  A peek inside a production studio at Channel 7, with Doug Elliott doing a live ad.

  Peter Gorman in the original Control Room 2 at Channel 7, operating a direct switching vision mixer.