This is from the debut of The Saturday Night Show on ATV10, Melbourne, just a week after the channel had launched from Channel 0. There’s also an ad break including a promo for Prisoner, featuring a young Sigrid Thornton.
The Saturday Night Show was basically Channel 10 taking over from where The Penthouse Club/Saturday Night Live had wound up on Seven, with a variety show interspersed with live coverage of the trots. I think the phrase “Only in Australia” would be apt here!
Hosts are Michael Williamson and Annette Allison. Mike was a former sports commentator at HSV7 and co-hosted Penthouse Club for Seven for about 7 or 8 years. Annette had been newsreader at ATV0 until the close of 1979 but was also co-host of morning show Everyday (which later became Good Morning Melbourne).
While hosting this show was a familiar role for Mike I’m not sure Annette was quite one to replicate the charisma or popularity of her Penthouse Club predecessor, comedian Mary Hardy.
The Saturday Night Show lasted just a couple of weeks and the Saturday night trots wouldn’t get back on TV until Channel 31 over a decade later
Sketch from The Late Show featuring Helen Wellings (at the time presenter of The Investigators), Amanda Keller (presenter of Beyond 2000), Margaret Pomeranz (The Movie Show) and Ann Sanders (Australia’s Most Wanted):
In honour of Ken Sutcliffe I’m going to trundle through the WWOS archives a bit tonight starting with the 1987 Australian Grand Prix hosted by Mike Gibson, co-hosted with Jackie Stewart and Ian Chappell. Pit reports from Darrell Eastlake and Alan Jones. Commentary by Murray Walker and Jackie Stewart.
I’m pretty sure that for a period of time during the 1980s, the Channel Nine cricket theme & opening graphics were actually used for all of Nine’s Wide World of Sports!
This is an example of the opener used to sports broadcast by Nine in the early 1980s. There is also a short promo at the start for the Hottest Cricket in 100 summers for the England tour of Australia in 1982-83. I think this was recorded in early September 1982.
Former professional wrestler Mario Milano has died, aged 81. He was one of the stars of the Nine Network’s World Championship Wrestling back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Despite her many journalistic and professional achievements she will probably be best remembered by many as the interviewer in the Omo commercials:
YouTube: Conniptions886
Although that ad is from the 1970s I seem to recall she was still doing Omo ads as late as the 1980s.
(EDIT: Actually on second thoughts I think I might have confused Anne Deveson with Sue Smith who was the ex-ACA reporter who used to do ads for Pears shampoo. I remember she used to stare harshly to the camera while going through supermarket aisles and mocking the rival shampoo brands… “oh and those questionable cheapies… you think they were laundry detergent!”. But I digress)
She also worked on current affairs program Seven Days in the 1960s. This was part of a story she did on lesbian relationships. Pretty groundbreaking stuff for the 1960s…
Yes. Final episode aired in Melbourne on 11 December 1986 and later in other states…
But SAS10 Adelaide was so far behind in episodes that they were still screening the series a year later and had to air the final episodes over consecutive nights in December to get them all aired before SAS went from Channel 10 to become Channel 7.
And in Perth where there was no Channel 10, STW9 which had the rights to the show had dropped it from the schedule well before the final episode, so Perth viewers never got to see the end of the series… probably not until the DVD came out years later.
Apparently, TVQ0 had also dropped Prisoner before its finale? But I don’t know that for certain.
I remember watching the final episode on Ten Sydney. It was scheduled very late at night and I fell asleep part way through. Woke up just at the end when the Freak was being escorted into Wentworth. Having been a fan for so long I was very annoyed with myself. I didn’t see the last episode in full until about twenty years later when I rented the DVD from a video store.
I was never allowed to watch Prisoner as a kid. Mum didn’t approve of shows making heroes out of criminals (then she became a fan of Underbelly… go figure). But then when 10 started late night reruns in about 1989 i got into watching it from episode 1. I dropped out of watching/taping the (4am!) reruns after a while but came back to see the finale… probably about 1994?
