50 Years of Television in Australia

by Nick Place

Being such an all rounder, is it any surprise his first single ‘This Is the Outback’, co-written and sung by Lee Kernaghan, hit the top of the country music charts? Or that he made this year’s Cleo magazine Top 50 most eligible bachelors?

  At this stage, there’s only one thing missing from his résumé: a successful career as a large-than-life Aussie adventurer … in the US. And perhaps a film with a glamorous model, or his own theme park.

  Chopper strikes again

  May: If it was possible to have a more disastrous start to a new TV show, Lisbeth Gorr (aka Elle McFeast) can’t imagine it. ‘The Chopper situation blew me away,’ Gorr said, referring to a drunken interview with celebrity crim Mark ‘Chopper’ Read on her McFeast Live debut.

  The fallout was very public. Communications Minister Senator Richard Alston was appalled by the program, publicly rebuking the ABC for broadcasting it. Future guests – Kerri-Anne Kennerley, Sam Newman – dropped out.

  For his part, Read was apologetic and confessed that he was as ‘drunk as a skunk’. He was also sorry for laughing at a poem about killing a man. ‘You get a bloke with silver teeth, no ears, six foot two with a number one crewcut and I think they were a little bit afraid to tell me to stop drinking.’

  With smaller controversies following the Read interview, McFeast Live never recovered, raising questions about what Gorr would do next. ‘… I’m 33, for heaven’s sake,’ she told The Age. ‘It’s a good year for crucifixion. But I will be back.’

  SBS scores again with World Cup

  June: Australian soccer fans will again watch the world’s biggest sporting event, the World Cup, on SBS this year.

  Les Murray and a 36-strong team of presenters, cameramen and technicians will bring the action to viewers from a host studio in Paris. Alongside Murray will be a team of experts headed by Johnny Warren, a man synonymous with soccer in Australia and former Socceroo captain.

  It also marks the third successive World Cup that SBS has brought to Australians after winning the rights for the 1990 event. While that’s reason enough for some to rejoice, there’s one question hovering over this year’s event: how long will the commercial networks leave SBS to host this hugely popular and very lucrative event alone?

  ON DEBUT

  > Sunday Afternoon with Andrea Stretton – reprises the familiar arts show series

  > Search for Treasure Island – the story of various groups of children living on a deserted Pacific island

  > The Games – satirises the politics of making the Sydney 2000 Olympics

  > Denise – Denise Drysdale, arguably Australia’s favourite and most successful barrel girl, gets her own show

  > Live and Kicking – AFL show hosted by Jason Dunstall and Doug Hawkins

  > Something Stupid – more sketch comedy with Magda Szubanski, Gina Riley, Marg Downey and Jane Turner

  > Now You See It – game show with Scott McRae

  > The Russell Gilbert Show – the popular Hey Hey, It’s Saturday comedian is given his own show

  > Changing Rooms – two friends redecorate a room in each other’s home

  > Stingers – drama series on undercover cops

  > Battle of the Sexes – boys versus girls game show

  > Totally Full Frontal – brings back the popular sketch comedy series Full Frontal

  > Uncensored with Jana Wendt – big-budget interview and current affairs series on the ABC

  > Up Close and Personal with Ray Martin – interview series with Ray Martin chatting with famous folks

  > Alchemy – alternative music and musicians from around the globe

  > Breakers – drama series set at picturesque Bondi beach

  > E! News – latest celebrity gossip

  > Fast Tracks – the story of a Sydney high school that educates future sports stars

  > Now You See It – kids game show where teams from competing schools try to find words in grids of letters

  Conversation starters

  October: If it had been proposed by anyone else, there’s a good chance The Panel would never have made it to TV. But turning unlikely ideas into successful TV is a speciality of the D-Generation, and being the D-Generation buys you goodwill with TV execs.

  Now that this shambolic chat-a-thon has proved itself a success, it would be easy to forget its rather rocky beginnings. Shortly after The Panel debuted, Ross Warneke wrote, ‘The Panel does not have much of a future.’ He wasn’t alone in his appraisal.

  ‘It’s not a bad idea,’ he conceded. ‘Gather a gaggle of comics and specialist commentators around a table and let them loose on the news desk. So far, so good.’

  But … ‘Tom Gleisner is no chat show host … Watching seven people crammed around a tiny desk in a poorly lit studio chattering aimlessly for an hour is boring … As it stands, The Panel makes all of those ethnic chat shows on Channel 31 look good.’

  But just as they did with Frontline, Gleisner, Sitch, Cilauro, Kennedy and co turned The Panel into the comedy hit of the year. It has even been reported that young people are using it to get their weekly current affairs fix – be damned with the boring old news!

  ‘If every show was like The Panel, I’d agree it wouldn’t be good,’ Tom Gleisner said. ‘But most shows aren’t like that. They’re heavily pre-produced. I think there’s room on television for something as loose and under-prepared as The Panel.’

  Room indeed. Watched by more than a million viewers a week, and delivering an incredible 60 to 80 per cent of the lucrative 16 to 39-year-old demographic, it’s no surprise that Ten has asked The Panel back next year.

  Wiggling towards superstardom

  July: They’ve released gold and platinum records. They’ve made videos and sold them by the kindergarten load. There’s been a movie and there are hundreds of performances a year. And now The Wiggles are on TV.

  As one of Australia’s most popular kids’ entertainers, you can bet they’ll have no shortage of little ones tuning in for their brightly coloured adventures. You can expect to see Greg, Murray, Jeff and Anthony joined by Dorothy the Dinosaur, Henry the Octopus and Wags the Dog, and thankfully, at this stage, no cockroaches.

  Is this the death of daytime TV?

  November: If it sounds dramatic, it is. Daytime TV is dead. When or if it is revived is anyone’s guess. But what we know for sure is that when people turn on their TVs next week, some time around the middle of the day, there will be no Ray Martin or Kerri-Anne Kennerley there to greet them.

  Daytime TV has been around since the medium hit this country. But the midday slot was a bit of a nothing zone until Mike Walsh changed things around in 1973. That’s when his Mike Walsh Show began on Channel 10, and it was so successful that Nine brought both Walsh and the show across in 1977.

  When Walsh left to have his ill-fated stab at night-time variety in 1985, the show was re-named the Midday Show (and soon after that, just Midday) and Ray Martin took over the chair until 1993. Derryn Hinch, Tracy Grimshaw and David Reyne all had stints before Kerri-Anne took over in 1996.

  In all, there have been around 5000 episodes of the show. But daytime audiences have shown that their preferences now lie elsewhere, and after 25 years, who could argue that the format might need a rest?

  Stretching the boundaries of comedy

  July: With a mixture of sketch-based comedy, interviews with bewildered studio guests and merciless send-ups of sitcoms, politicians and infotainment programs, Shaun Micallef has delivered one of 1998’s best new shows, The Micallef Program.

  ‘Not since Gunston and maybe The Late Show have I genuinely laughed at anything like I do with Micallef,’ Andrew Denton told The Eye. ‘It’s black humour and I really like black humour. But you know what I really like about Micallef’s humour most? It’s just stupid. I have a motto: “Fortune follows the stupid.”’

  But fans, fear not. Despite the critical praise, this isn’t the sort of material that will readily find a home in the homogenised world of commercial TV. Too edgy, too angry, too oblique and always
prepared to go too far, Micallef will be back next year to do it all again in season two.

  Long-time Channel 9 newsreader in Melbourne, Brian Naylor, has retired. Naylor started out on Channel 7 as a children’s show host and later hosted youth musical talent shows before transferring to the news desk and becoming one of the most respected newsreaders in the business.

  MEMORIES

  > Mary Kostakidis celebrates her 10th anniversary as the face of SBS World News.

  > Through a quirk of mathematics, TV Week celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Logie Awards. They were first announced in 1958 and presented in 1959.

  > Home and Away celebrates 10 years of drama in Summer Bay.

  > Roy and HG change the name of Club Buggery to The Channel Nine Show with Roy and HG after persistent reports the pair would be taking the show to Channel 9.

  > John Laws launches Foxtel show Laws, described as ‘the man to watch for the issues that matter’.

  > Harold ‘Happy’ Hammond dies aged 81 at Rosebud Hospital.

  > Mini-series Day of the Roses lauded for its depiction of the Granville train disaster.

  > Good News Week with Paul McDermott, Julie McCrossin and Mikey Robbins launches a weekend edition, aptly titled Good News Weekend.

  > Amanda Keller and Andrew Denton combine on House from Hell, where contestants are promised $5000 if they can live together for three weeks.

  > Channel 2 re-invents Race Around the World with Race Around the Corner, in which teens gather stories from their local neighbourhood.

  > All Saints appears, taking viewers into Ward 17 of the All Saints Western and General Hospital in Sydney.

  > Wheel of Fortune gets a celebrity makeover for a brief two-week run.

  > Gold Logie: Lisa McCune

  > Most Popular Program: Blue Heelers

  > Hall of Fame: Graham Kennedy

  NATURE SHOWS

  With Australia’s unique landscape and curious wildlife, it was logical that television would unearth a host of characters eccentric and knowledgeable enough to bring nature into our lounge rooms.

  Our wide brown land

  There’s nothing like a cute, furry animal to draw in the viewers, or a house-crushing tornado, or the velvety turn of phrase from David Attenborough as the great naturalist explains the intricacies of a stick insect in the throes of passion.

  For raw mass appeal, the ‘aww’ factor of cute animals and ‘wow’ factor of Mother Nature have always been reliable audience dragnets. This has been especially so in Australia where, despite our predominantly urbanised population, there remains an overriding sense of connection with – and ownership of – our vast bush-and-sand interior and unique wildlife.

  The ABC has led the way in producing nature and biology programs with a local angle. By 1963 the broadcaster was making Australian Wildlife – a five-part series devised by the naturalist Graham Pizzey, featuring penguins, possums, seals, platypus, ant-eaters, water birds and the Mallee – and a few years later followed up with Around the Bush (1968), a series of 10- to15-minute fillers. In 1969 the ABC Special Projects Division produced a series of programs on Melbourne bird painter and naturalist Robin Hill. Called Bush Quest, the program eventually spawned the nature series Wild Australia in the early 1970s.

  By that time, commercial networks were also starting to get in on the act. Channel Nine had Australiana and Nature Walkabout, which screened on and off throughout the second half of the sixties, usually at odd hours in the morning, while Seven followed with Shell’s Australia in the early 1970s, which won a Logie for best documentary series in 1973.

  That was a seminal year for Australian nature production, because it saw the birth of the ABC’s Natural History Unit. Initially the unit largely focused on local nature issues, but its scope quickly spread to the far reaches of the globe, with particular attention paid to Australia’s neighbours in Papua New Guinea, South-East Asia and Antarctica. Its work has since won international renown.

  The 1970s marked a change in direction, though, from a focus on cute, furry animals to a more widespread examination of the Australian landscape.

  Arguably the most iconic of Aussie doco-makers in this regard are the Leyland brothers. After producing their first documentaries, Down the Darling and Wheels across the Wilderness in the 1960s, the pair became regulars on our screens with their own series, Ask the Leyland Brothers. Its memorable jingle (Sing along: ‘Travelling all over the countryside. Ask the Leylands, ask the Leylands …’) aired on Channel Nine from 1976 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1984. The team briefly switched to Channel Seven for a show called The Leyland Brothers’ Great Outdoors.

  The Leylands weren’t the only pioneers of the ‘quintessential Aussie bloke exploring the outback’ formula. Rolf Harris did it earlier with his prime-time Walkabout (1970) series on the ABC, featuring his family travelling around in four-wheel drives with naturalists Vincent Serventy and Harry Butler.

  Expert bushman Jack Absolom made several snapshot documentaries for commercial channels in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while Harry Butler’s own series, In the Wild (1978–79), resulted in many a parody, thanks to his unique presenting style and high-waisted shorts. Butler’s programs were enormously popular, and in 1979 he was anointed Australian of the Year.

  But Australia’s a big brown land and there’s plenty of room for doco crews. Alby Mangels headed for the outback in his four-wheel drive, accompanied by assistants who often turned out to be blonde and buxom, and the so-called ‘long-lost third Leyland brother’, Les Hiddins, became better known as Bush Tucker Man.

  As each khaki-clad ‘Outback Jack’ iteration greeted us with knee in dirt and cup of eucalypt-leaf tea in hand, so too did ecological and biological credentials become second banana to outright ockerism. Audiences couldn’t get enough of the likes of Troy Dann, whose dashing exploits on his Outback Adventures series became internationally famous. Comedian Glenn Robbins was even finally moved to take the mickey out of the entire genre with his spectacular parody, Russell Coight’s All Aussie Adventures.

  But even he could not achieve more fame or notoriety than The Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin. Aside from being the first documentarian to sell action figures of himself, and gain international headlines for appearing to dangle his own son in front of the jaws of a croc (he said the camera angle was deceptive), Irwin has given the revered documentary art of ‘getting close to the subject’ a whole new meaning.

  Tricks of the trade

  Not everything is as it seems in the world of nature documentaries. Sometimes nature needs a little helping hand, as these popular industry rumours demonstrate:

  > Need a pregnant polar bear to give birth in her winter den? No need to go to the Arctic, just film one at a Belgian zoo.

  > Got footage of a glacier but no sound? No problem. Sugar and water can sound just like grinding ice. Jungle foliage sounds? Crumple sound tape. Tiger crunching some bones? Cow femur in a vice.

  > Need a wolf to get its paw caught in a trap? Try a stuffed paw from the taxidermist and a close-up shot.

  > Need to show suicidal Nordic lemmings but can’t find any? Fly to Canada, capture some of the local variety and push them off a ledge. Ta-daa! Lemming sacrifice.

  > Empty log? Run to the nearest reptile park, grab a docile lizard and throw it in. Hey presto, your outback hero has serendipitously come across the log home of a wild lizard in its natural habitat.

  > The word on the nature doco street is that potentially lethal encounters with wild crocodiles and other savage creatures are less dangerous when said creatures are drugged out of their brains.

  1999

  Television certainly did its part to celebrate the century that we were about to leave behind. Alongside trips down memory lane, we also saw a couple of million-dollar quiz shows duke it out for survival right before our eyes, and a Saturday favourite leave our screens forever.

  100 years in the making

  What better way to farewell the Millennium than with a telev
ision series looking back over the 20th century?

  In the countdown to next century (though when that actually starts is still up for debate), we’re going to be treated to all sorts of strolls down memory lane, kicking off with Our Century on Nine, a 26-part series made in conjunction with Film Australia that took 30 people 75,000 hours to complete.

  ‘If it is a history lesson, we’ve failed. But if it is a lesson about where we’ve come from and what makes us tick and what has made us a fairly unique mob of people, then that’s what it’s supposed to be about.’

  While Ray Martin is guiding us through instalments as diverse as ‘The Great Aussie Dream’, ‘Getting Our Gear Off’ and ‘Record Breakers’, Barry Humphries will be treating us to a view of Australian history seen through the eyes of his own characters on the ABC. Over four episodes, Dame Edna, Sir Les and others will give us a tour of the second half of the century.

  But will viewers have ‘history fatigue’ when Channel Seven’s This Fabulous Century arrives mid-year? Host Peter Luck says no, and hopes there’s enough nostalgia to go around. His track record is also reassuring. The original series of This Fabulous Century, screened in, um, 1979, outrated 60 Minutes on a Sunday night during its run.

  Luck points out things have changed since that first series was filmed, citing the time he put Phar Lap’s heart in the boot of his car to take it from Canberra to Sydney to be photographed. ‘Now you can’t even put a strong light on it,’ he says.

  By the time New Year’s Eve arrives, TV itself will be making the history. Joining with 60 national broadcasters from around the world, the ABC will bring 26 hours of live, trans-global millennium celebrations to Australian viewers. Billed as the ‘largest, most ambitious TV event in history’, 2000 Today expects to reach a billion viewers, from the Great Wall of China to the Temple of Teotihuacan in Mexico. Ambitious? Yes. And people might just be hung over enough on New Year’s Day 2000 to watch some of it.