“Pickel Me Grandmother!”
RIP Ross
I was a kid when it had it’s heyday but I became a fan of Kingswood Country when they were showing them at 3pm weekdays in the early 90s
Speaking of it getting reruns. Sadly you don’t see it as much anymore. Often shows like that got used I think mainly to fill a hole in the schedule. Another example that comes to mind is Nine putting on reruns of All Together Now at 5:30am before Today would really kick off the day
With Bathurst happening this weekend, here’s TV Week’s preview of Seven’s 1981 coverage of the race, including the list of stations taking the coverage:
Some full and partial bulletins i’ve uploaded.
ABC News NSW 2001:
Prime Local News Wollongong 6th December 1999
National Nine News Sydney 2nd December 2002
It was always interesting to see what innovation had been developed for each year’s coverage at Bathurst. The first was to have one fixed camera inside one car. To get the signal from the camera, required the helicopter to fly above the car during the lap, during which there were no helicopter views.
I think that next there was a second car with a camera. IIRC during one of these races one of the camera cars crashed out quite early so things didn’t work out so well that year. Subsequently there were cars with fixed cameras showing different views. Eventually there was a camera than could be remotely controlled to move, so the driver was seen, panning across to the view through the windscreen and even through the back window. We all thought it was amazing at the time.
Interesting…
It wasn’t considered racism at the time, thankfully shows like Kingswood Country and All In The Family from even earlier on could not be produced today. but to say good riddance to a gentleman of the industry that stared in a great show of the time is most definitely NOT necessary.
I agree. While you probably wouldn’t see a show with content like that seen in Kingswood Country on our screens today (Australian TV and indeed Australian society as a whole was very different back in the Early '80s to what it is now), it certainly was one of the more successful sitcoms Australian TV has ever seen.
Besides, Ross Higgins was more than just Ted Bullpitt. How about the commercials he voiced/featured in, with one of the most iconic characters in Australian TV advertising of all time being one of such roles! 
Lex Marinos on Ross Higgins and Kingswood Country. Marinos, whose character was often the target of Bullpitt’s ravings, was not offended.
[quote]“He was the complete antithesis to Ted Bullpitt,” he said.
“He would get so embarrassed about some of the things he had to say and do that he would apologise before, during and after he was saying them.”
…
“It started to show that not all Australians were from Anglo Celtic backgrounds,” he said.
"It exposed sexism, religious bigotry and racism that were firmly held attitudes by many Australians at the time.[/quote]
[quote=“ShadowDan, post:741, topic:137”] Good riddance to this bloke for putting Australia on the map with the show’s stupid racism…
[/quote]
Charming. You do realise he was an actor playing a fictional character and a parody at that. (Higgins himself declared at the time that he was not like the character, and owned a car made in Japan)
And Australia was hardly alone in portraying casual racism in popular culture at that time.
“Someone Should Blow Anti-Australia Up!” R.I.P. Ross Higgins.
“I only did it because the others were doing it” is not a defence. The rest is fine though.
I rather thought that being a sexist, bigot, racist who was also a religious intolerant was the point of the Ted Bullpitt character and why people laughed at it.
There are plenty of examples over the years and even today in comedies. Just look at the 2 biggest US comedies. Modern Family constantly plays on the Colombian background of Gloria who is from the murder capital of the world and can we have another call centre joke around Raj Koothrappali on Big Bang anyone?
I noticed in the list of stations carrying that year’s Bathurst, noticed the local channel serving Bathurst CBN8/CWN6 (Midstate Television) did not carry the race live, while the other station in the Midstate network MTN9 screened it live. According to the Australian Women’s Weekly TV Guide CBN had an hour of highlights at 5pm. What would have been the reason for that? Also unusual that NTD8 Darwin did not show it live either opting for a week’s delayed telecast.
My recollection is that the race wasn’t live on Bathurst television to encourage locals to go to it.
I think that was due to the ABC having full time access to the only microwave link to Darwin and thus NTD8 was not in a position to broadcast it live and could only settle for a replay later on.
It wasn’t until 1982 before a link allowed NTD8 a direct connection to other states and which then also allowed them to launch a proper news service, sourcing interstate news from QTQ9 and then BTQ7.
No but clearly we were in less enlightened times back in 1980. By the time Bullpitt was revived in 1997 that style of humour had obviously become less than favourable although the later show still managed 2 seasons.