General TV History

They only telecast one game a week on the Sunday (plus the season/league opener). Nine showed all the finals in BOTH competitions, including the GF.

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Did ATV10 use the Graeme Hughes/Ian Maurice call of that GF?

43 years ago today we got our first proper colour test patterns

Source: The Australian Women’s Weekly

Source: The Age

Testing of colour programming started on 19 October

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*COLOUR

THIS IS NOT AMERICA!!!

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Only Seven, Nine and 0-10 used the American spelling.

most commercial media in Australia used “color” spelling.

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Strange how it’s changed back.

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apparently it was a cost saving measure to not type the “u”.

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Isn’t that just an urban myth?

The spelling variation goes back to uncertainties in the 17th and 18th centuries. Scholars wanted to use -or for Latin derived words and -our for French, but it wasn’t clear where some words came from so spelling became arbitrary.

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The U took up too much bandwidth apparently :grin:

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Didn’t the use of “color” have something to do with promotional material produced in the US being adapted for use by Australian networks? I’m sure that was a reason given when this was discussed in the past.

The Victorian Education Dept encouraged the use of color (and all other -or spellings) in schools from about 1910 so it was widely used at least in Victoria.

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Yes it’s been discussed here a few times - TV Week was a common offender.

Can’t believe no one has posted this - an 9-8 Television mid-80s Xmas tape!

Warning: contains lots of naughty words, naughty lady bits and early Fergo, Kyile Gillies and Rodney Rude…also, if you are of Indigenous descent, and are aware of what the man in the middle of the NEN-9/ECN-8 logo represented, you might be offended by it.

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As someone who attended Victorian state schools in the 1970s and 1980s I can’t say that was my experience at all from what I can recall

That may have been part of the reason, although it was a spelling protocol adopted in other mediums too, such as this article from The Age on the start of colour test patterns

TV Times, being essentially published by the ABC, stuck usually to the “colour” spelling.

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Now that Jamie is back on 4MMM, time to get his old Wombat colleagues on to discuss the rude bits.

They had a lot of time in Tamworth and Port to compile them, looks like a wild place, or they did their best to make it lively. Male dominated workplace?

Yes, “color” (and honor etc) was indeed taught in Victorian state schools until the 1970s/80s.

It was also used in Australian newspapers and many magazines from the 1800s until about 1990 when someone arked up about it being “American”. Especially as the -our spelling was taught in NSW schools. So Fairfax and News Corp decided to go with -our across the board.

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I’d say it was phased out by the time i started school because that wasn’t something we were taught.

Interesting point about publications as even browsing Google news archive there seems to have been some variation between using “-or” or “-our”, across both SMH and The Age. Editorial might have preferred one version over another but advertisers would skip between both.

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They had a lot of time in Tamworth and Port to compile them, looks like a wild place, or they did their best to make it lively. Male dominated workplace?

According to that video, it was a 3 year effort…either there were no resources or time allocated yearly to do this, or they were really really busy.

And yes, it must’ve been a male dominated workplace. Judging by the amount of naked ladies on the tape…:crazy_face: Funnily enough, I did casual work at one of the local schools, and there were pictures of Jennifer Hawkins in a staffroom…:joy:

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