18 March 1985: Australia’s longest-running scripted series Neighbours was first broadcast on the Seven Network. Although it was successful in Melbourne, it underperformed in Sydney, so was axed. The show was bought by Network Ten which screened it from 20 January 1986 where it became a hit. Neighbours moved to Ten’s digital channel, Eleven on 11 January 2011 (which was later rebranded 10 Peach).
Neighbours is one of Australia’s most successful television exports, sold to over sixty countries around the world. It has been especially successful in the United Kingdom, where it was first screened on 27 October 1986. It moved to the UK’s Channel 5 in 2008 and is still one of the highest rating TV series.
That night, Chris Judd and Ben Cousins went H2H for the first time since their departures from West Coast in 2007. Cousins did his hamstring in the fourth quarter.
Also, on this day in 2006, the Melbourne Commonwealth Games wrapped up with the Closing Ceremony.
That channel commenced broadcasting on that day 11 years ago at 7PM in Melbourne (due to live Richmond-Carlton AFL match at the MCG) and 7:30pm in other cities. The match was delayed in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Stephen QUartermain was the chief caller of that match during that night.
In 2006, 2.736 million people watched the Closing Ceremony of the 2006 Games on Nine, making it the 5th most watched program during that year.
Also in 1999, WIN TV was launched in Regional WA as a dual Nine-TEN affiliate. This resulted in GWN becoming a sole Seven Affiliate. Previously the GWN Network was the sole commercial network in regional areas (Seven, Nine, 10 affiliate).
27 March 1998: Seven Darwin launches on UHF Channel 34. The city’s second commercial channel. The former commercial monopoly, NTD8, continues as a joint Nine-Ten outlet although it had apparently tried to have a joint Seven-Nine affiliation (leaving the new channel as Ten) but it was deemed anti-competitive by the broadcasting authority
Seven Darwin was owned by Telecasters North Queensland, now part of Southern Cross Austereo, and originally operated from TNQ’s Townsville facilities.
Had the new Darwin digital channel been allowed to be a Ten affiliate, there wouldn’t be a debacle on January 1, 2003 when NTD dropped most of Ten programming (except AFL), and shows like Neighbours and Australian Idol would not be lost to the Top End until 2005 when it was picked up by Southern Cross Darwin.
By the same token, if NTD was a joint 7-9 outlet there would inevitably be key shows from either network that would be missed out, too. There’s always going to be collateral damage when trying to squeeze three networks into two channels, as we also saw in Tasmania pre-TDT and even in Perth pre-Ten.
30 March 1972: TEN10’s Telethon '72 in aid of the Royal NSW Institute for Deaf and Blind Children starts and continues into the Easter long weekend. The amount raised will hit the $300,000 mark and TEN cameraman Chris Fraser sets a new world record for non stop filming over 40 hours.
30 March 1989: At midnight tonight, stage one of aggregation comes to Southern NSW, with Prime launching in Wollongong and Canberra, WIN in Canberra and Capital in Wollongong.
Prime’s first program just after midnight is Today (NBC)
WIN’s first program at midnight is a special edition of MTV, live from Canberra.
The second stage, with WIN and Capital extending west, came at the end of the year.
This would be like getting Daryl Somers to host the Logies now wouldn’t it? Such a throwback. Though really, it’d be like Rove hosting based on the dates which is a scary thought.
Channel 7 televised the Games for the first time since 2002. Australia has gone into standard time. The Opening Ceremony did well rating 2 million viewers (metro) with The strongest market being Brisbane. This was much lower than the Melbourne 2006 Games (that was shown on Nine which rated 3.54 million).
13 April 2005 - a blackout at Seven’s Docklands studios knocks out the entire network for about half an hour during an episode of Blue Heelers (or Home and Away in Perth).
Perth viewers got a double episode of H&A the following night while the rest of the country got a double episode of Blue Heelers the following Wednesday.
13 April 1970: ATV0 debuts the 0-10 Network’s first drama series, The Long Arm. It was produced by Ansett Television Films, a sister company to ATV0 owned by Ansett Transport Industries. There was some generous product placement for Ansett brands in the first episode.
ATV0 was forced to dump the series after only 19 episodes after TEN10 in Sydney withdrew its support.
