The canvas at the old media area was a throwback to the pioneering days of when networks would cover either live final quarters or early replays. Sound proof booths were just a dream in those days. But it was certainly behind the times in the 1980’s.
This week in 1967:
Source: TV Week (South Australia edition)
Of course the show essentially came back in a different form as Adventure Island on ABC
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Quick off-topic question which probably demonstrates how little I read newspapers/how little the younger generation knows about newspapers:
why is there a # at the end of that article?
According to Wikipedia, John Michael-Howson wanted to produce the show in color for overseas sales, but management balked due to the added cost.
Many publications have a notation that indicates the end of an article ie does not continue on another column or page. Different ones have used different things - it might be a mini logo or just a square so I’m just guessing that is what # means in this case.
Ah ok, yeah okay I’ve seen that in magazines like TIME, but never in a newspaper before.
It was from TV Week.
Some content from a Seven Nightly News Melbourne bulletin from August 18, 1990 with Dixie Marshall reading sport.
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Wonder if they’re regretting that.Could’ve made that back
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3 June in 1984 that Melbournians turned on their TVs to find this:
had changed to 
It didn’t come with any fanfare or change to presentation. Just a straight logo swap from the old “10”. And the station ID was kept the same but changed to include a “flip” to the new logo at the end. (This version below was post-Olympic Games, up until the Games in July-August there were the Olympic rings at the bottom of the logo as well)
YouTube: Yowiew2
The Herald had published a brief article the night before to indicate that a change for Ten was coming. Largely explained the change as bringing ATV10 Melbourne into line with TEN10 Sydney and alleviating the need to have to re-badge promotional material sent down from Sydney.
EDIT: Just changed the date above. Now I’m reminded it was Sunday 3 June 1984, not Monday 4th.
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I still like ATV10’s 1980 logo.
from the Age on Thursday April 16, 1987 after Fairfax acquired HSV7 and gutted local production and began networking from Sydney, this ad appeared in their Green Guide
All the above points raised eventually became true, although:
- We still have Melbourne-produced TV programmes, some nationally screened such as Family Feud, Melbourne’s Highway Patrol, AFL football, some only screened in Victoria such as the Royal Children’s Hospital Good Friday Appeal, the Moomba Parade, the City of Melbourne New Years Eve Fireworks, A Movable Feast, VFL Football, Melbourne Weekender, Vasili’s Garden, Postcards, and a few others. Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth have similar locally produced programming for their respective markets.
- In the short term cheap imports replaced some Australian programmes but not all. By the late 2000s Australian content (most of it made in Sydney) have dominated prime time programming and imported shows were usually shunted to late night slots, sub-channels or Foxtel.
- The Royal Childrens Hospital Good Friday Appeal is still today an important part of Melbourne TV and HSV7 still runs it each year on Good Friday.
1987 was the beginning of networking for Australian TV where schedules were almost identical for each state.
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HSV/GTV used to make a big deal of programs that were made in Melbourne in the promos for them, did other cities do likewise or was that just an oddity down here?
To a certain extent it was already happening between Melbourne and Sydney, particularly by Nine and Ten to a lesser extent, and the ABC was programmed mostly nationally from 1986 thanks to the satellite. And of course SBS had always been 100% networked nationally.
Brisbane and Adelaide still took a while to really fall into a proper network schedule and Perth took longer again as legacy programming deals were left to run their course.
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At the same time a lot of the local programming these days (at least the Brisbane shows) are almost time buys from tourism outlets, so the fears of locality being destroyed came true. That said aggregation was a real killer for local TV in the purest sense despite claims to the contrary that Governments always like to spin but that was another story.
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This 7 Brisbane promo comes to mind
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A few years ago when 3DB successor Mix 101.1 dropped its involvement with the appeal 3AW took over as the radio partner. And HWT (via the Herald Sun, and before 1987 the now-defunct racing paper The Sporting Globe) is still a partner today.
An off-air recording of Cabaret from the night Channel 0/28 opened.
Youtuber: Conniptions886.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN9Umw2pFBY
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Cabaret wasn’t scheduled to debut on opening night. I think from memory it first went to air in around mid-November, a few weeks after the channel opened. It was originally conceived as a talent quest but Bruce Gyngell made a last-minute change to instead make it a regular variety show. It was reported that he went cold on the idea of introducing a competitive element between different cultures. (Had he not seen the Eurovision Song Contest before?)
Interesting too to see Graham on Channel 0 after he famously declared that he would “never appear on 0 again” two years earlier. Of course, that comment was in the context of ATV Channel 0 after its poor overall performance affected his own Blankety Blanks, and he had a very public falling out with the channel. And SBS of course just happened to take up that channel later.
And seeing that Cabaret shiny logo spinning around does remind me a lot of this:
YouTube: Gary86
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Television AU would know something about this, why was Shepparton offered a commercial television licence on its own in the first place? Remember in 1959 Shepparton’s population was only 9,000 and cities that could have got a licence such as Albury and Geelong missed out in the first round that year. In my opinion Shepparton and the Goulburn Valley would have been better served by a Border North East station based in Albury, we could have got a translator of the slick and professional AMV4 but instead we got yokel quality, looks like it was made in someone’s basement GMV6 instead. Shepparton getting its own station would be like Horsham, Hamilton and Warrnambool all getting their own TV stations instead of being lumped with translators of BTV6 Ballarat. And Geelong could have got a station of its own (frequencies were allocated, I’m sure local media and businessmen would have put in a bid) but I’m sure the Melbourne stations would have wanted none of that.
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