29 July 1981: The wedding of HRH Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer dominates the day, with live coverage on ABC, Seven, Nine and Ten networks. In Sydney and Melbourne, Nine’s coverage easily out-rated the other three networks even though they were all basically showing the same vision just with their own commentaries. In both cities, ABC was the distant 2nd place with 3rd and 4th a battle between Seven and Ten. SBS Channel 0/28 barely rated one per cent on the night with its foreign language films the only alternative to the other networks.
There were some exceptions to the saturation coverage. ADS7 in Adelaide opted instead to show a John Wayne movie as an alternative, with a delayed broadcast of the royal wedding the following afternoon. Although it offered the only alternative, ADS7 ranked last in the Adelaide ratings that night.
1 August 1964: “Melbourne is ATV Channel 0” as Melbourne’s third commercial channel is officially opened with the variety program This Is It! hosted by Ray Taylor.
1 August 1971: ATV0 broadcasts the first episode of “TV Mass”. It would go on to become Mass For You At Home which continues in production 50 years later, though no longer at ATV. It is now produced by the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong.
3 August 2012 - After 2.5 years, morning talk show The Circle went to air for the final time on Channel 10. This came when Network 10 axed this popular talk show due to financial difficulties.
On this day 20 years ago (10th August 2001), The Glass House premiered on ABC, initially airing on Friday nights at 8pm.
Hosted by Wil Anderson, Corinne Grant & Dave Hughes, The Glass House remained on air until 29th November 2006, when it had been axed by the ABC, in which its move may have been politically motivated.
11 August 2020: On this day just 1 year ago, Channel Ten made the shock announcement that their Brisbane bulletin would merge with their Sydney one, and their Adelaide bulletin would merge with their Melbourne one. Other changes include moving their Perth bulletin moving to Sydney, the majority of the Studio 10 presenters being made redundant, along with their Sydney and Melbourne weather presenters.
So many talented people were let go, including Natarsha Belling, Monika Kos, Mike Larkan and Georgina Lewis.
11 August 1977: The 1218th and final episode of Number 96 goes to air in Sydney. With ATV0 cutting the show down to one episode a week, Melbourne viewers did not see the final episode until December.
13 August 1978: Busy (and expensive) day for ABC. At 1.50am (AEST) it had live coverage from Rome of the funeral of Pope Paul VI. Then at 6.00am it crossed to Canada for the Closing Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. There was a repeat of the Pope’s funeral at 8.30pm and highlights from the Commonwealth Games at 10.50pm.
13 August 1984: The Men’s Marathon and Closing Ceremony of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles wraps up Network Ten’s coverage with live coverage ending at 4.00pm AEST and the last day’s review/highlights at 9.30pm to midnight.
In Perth, the second week and closing ceremony of the Olympics was on STW9, after the opening ceremony and first week of competition were on TVW7.
20/8/2012 Seven News relaunches new graphics, only 18 months (or so) after the previous relaunch. From what I could remember, there was criticism of them being nearly identical to that of Nine News’ graphics at the time.
A new set is also unveiled in Melbourne; it is a model of the same set Sydney received in February 2011.
21 August 1959: The cover date of the first Melbourne edition of TV News-Times. The magazine had existed for over a year in Sydney already but had its origins in 1958 as two separate magazines TV News and TV Times that had merged prior to expanding into Melbourne.
TV News-Times’ founding Melbourne editor was journalist Desmond Zwar, whose son is actor and writer Adam Zwar.
TV News-Times soon shortened its name to TV Times and continued publication until it was amalgamated into TV Week in 1980.
