At least in Melbourne, the news on that day was cut to 20 minutes, to show the St Kilda v Brisbane match in full.
I think the news of Diana’s death started to come in before the Essendon vs Adelaide game was to start, at 1.40pm. That match was to start at 2.10pm. Mitchell likely came on with the news flash, but the bigger issue for Seven was while they were airing a movie in Melbourne, they were airing the Essendon vs Adelaide game everywhere else.
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Here in America, Saturday Night Live on NBC was cut short, while at the same time, the ABC affiliate had to halt their late night movie before it reached even the half-way mark. that shows you how big a story it was in America.
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Why would they show an ARL final? i thought Darwin was a AFL state.
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Darwin gets the best of both worlds.
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Yes, for some reason, Nine’s Darwin programming has always been historically aligned with Sydney.
Even from 2002-2006 when Nine had the rights to both Friday night AFL and NRL, the NRL game would still be shown first.
I have a feeling there is a technical or logistical reason for that, not sure what though.
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Not quite sure where to ask this, so I’ll put it here. Before the era of multichannels, and viewers generally received only five (or less) analogue FTA channels, what was the norm for storing these channels on the TV set (once sets had progresses past turning the VHF/UHF dial like a radio!)
Would you generally programme it so if you pressed 7 on your remote you got Channel Seven, pressed 9 for Channel Nine, 2 for ABC etc (and in regional markets pressed 4 for NBN, 8 for NTD in Darwin etc)? Or just randomly store the channels on buttons 1 to 5 or so?
Someone asked this question on another forum I visit, and it got me wondering too. I was brought up in the UK, so we tended to programme BBC1 on 1, BBC2 on 2, ITV on 3, C4 on 4 etc (once UHF became the norm). Some people seemed to think Australia had ten TV channels when hearing about Channel Seven, Channel Ten etc!!)
In Newcastle, we had
SBS on 1
NBN on 3
ABC on 5
And when Prime and NRTV arrived, we put Prime on 2 and NRTV on 4.
We put Prime on 2 because my Dad remarked that “2 is a Prime number”.
Like many locals, we associated NBN and ABC with 3 and 5 as
- With the old rotary dial, that’s the number you had to turn the knob to to watch it
- NBN was also branded as “Channel 3” in its early days
- ABC was on Channel 5 before it moved to 5A.
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Many TVs or VCRs purchased were pre-tuned to the VHF frequencies for 2, 7, 9 and 10 with SBS varying (sometimes 12, sometimes 4…) with the auto-fine tune feature taking care of any slight difference in actual broadcast frequency.
If you did a re-tune or lived outside a main metro area, the tuner would store the stations in order of frequency or broadcast channel number - so in metro areas ABC would end up on 1, 10 would end up on 4 etc. On the Gold Coast where the channels were 46 (10), 49 (2), 52 (7), 55 (8) etc, channel 10 would be on 1, 2 on 2 etc.
However, all tuners would allow manual tuning so you could put channels on any suitable pre-set - ABC on 2, 7 and 10 on appropriate numbers or you could also put 10 on 1 and SBS on 3.
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We used to have:
2 - SBS (not sure why 2 was picked for them) and only after aggregation in 1994.
3 - ABC (as they were on VHF3)
6 - TasTV/WIN (after aggregation, 6 because in Hobart they were TVT6)
9 - Southern Cross (TNT9)
Interesting that ABC and SBS have flipped channels for us and Southern Cross is where WIN would have been and 9 is now associated with TDT instead. This would have been most how most houses in Northern Tasmania were set up.
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We were boring - all channels were in order starting with 1 for the ABC and 5 for SBS. The VCR was Ch6 
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Our first push button TV (back in 1977!) just had 6 unlabelled buttons so we just assigned them in order 0, 2, 7, 9, 10 and a spare which later became 28. Channel 0 then became the VCR channel when we finally got a vcr.
I later added a portable set that had 16 presets. Just had 2,7,9,10 plus 1 for SBS and because the set sometimes went with me to the country i added local ABC (Shepparton VHF 3 later UHF 40) to 3, Prime (Shep. UHF 43) to 4, Southern Cross (Shep. 46) to 5, Vic TV (Shep. 6) to 6 and Southern Cross (Bendigo 8) to 8. I’m guessing Channel 31 went to 11 but I can’t recall.
Any subsequent sets or VCRs I’d try to stick to 2,7,9,10,28,31 and then once i went to digital (2002) it didn’t really matter anymore 
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When we got our first programmable TV in 1996, I remember the guys who installed our TV duplicated some of the channels over several presets. From memory we had in Wollongong:
1: VCR
2, 5: ABC
3: SBS
4, 8, 9: WIN
6, 7: Prime
10: Ten.
I have strong memories of the ABC being locally referred to as Channel 5, which would imply that it had been on VHF 5 (or 5A?) before it switched frequencies to UHF.
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Wollongong had ABC on Channel 5A
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Yes, the ABC in the Illawarra was transmitting on VHF 5A from when it launched in 1963 until it moved to UHF in the late 1980s.
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Where to place the “new” channels was an interesting issue for those of us who received Sydney stations when aggregation started. I decided WIN would remain in its traditional place on 4 (so as not to confuse the parents), Prime went on 6 and Capital went on 8. I pre-tuned both upstairs and downstairs televisions to those settings the day the channel placeholders started to be broadcast. They stayed that way until my father got his first digital television and I informed him I couldn’t tune his channels to where they had always been. I remember my grandparents having a different set up. I daresay most households did until digital standardised it.
I had a portable National brand television with eight channel push buttons in my childhood bedroom up until digital started. I can’t remember how I had the channels arranged on that set.
When my parents tried Austar in the late 1990s you could arrange the channel list to suit yourself.
I have an early childhood memory of playing around with the tuner on the family’s first push button colour television and losing all the preset stations. I think I may have been trying to get NBN 3 because I’d seen it listed in the newspaper. Mum had to get the neighbour to come in and fix it before my father came home and killed me for wrecking a very expensive item that was being paid for with hire purchase.
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I think either myself or my brother had mucked up the fine tuning on our grandparents TV that saw SBS (channel 0) displaying only in black and white. All other channels were fine. They insisted that their friendly local TV repairman would have to rectify it but they never watched SBS enough to warrant getting anyone in to fix it. And even though the set had a UHF dial they didn’t have a proper antenna so SBS was soon gone from their TV anyway when 0 went off air
The Essendon vs Adelaide game was actually at Princes Park.
I grew up in WA, in two different areas. Firstly, in Mandurah, we were in an overlap area between Perth stations and Bunbury stations (it’s still like that now). From vague memory, I believe our channels were like this:
2: ABC
3: GWN
7: Seven
9: Nine
I know when had Ten, but I can’t remember what channel that was on (probably 10). I don’t remember having SBS.
Then we moved to southeast of Bunbury and had the following:
3: GWN
5: ABC (this moved to 11 at one point)
6: WIN (when it turned up, but it was almost unwatchable because we were in a valley)
28: SBS (again, very snowy)
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I remember that WIN WA had a dual-affiliate with STW9 and NEW10 back in 1999-2011. When there’s an AFL on TEN, WIN will have to televise this. Unfortunately, there is no Ten Regional WA channel back in 2000s. I don’t know why The Regional WA didn’t have any licence to a 3rd commercial FTA channel in 2000s. Regional WA was dominated by GWN7 and WIN in ratings over abc and sbs in 2000s.