Was the first time an election was aired on TV in Australia.
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It wasn’t
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The first election that was broadcast on TV was back in 1958
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2 December 1956: Sydney’s second commercial station ATN7 is officially opened. The lead up to the opening was under a cloud, literally, when a massive storm washed over Sydney and took out power in Epping during the afternoon. Power did not get restored until about an hour before airtime, just in time to allow the studio cameras the required 45 minutes or so to warm up.
Source: The Sun-Herald
Former staff from Sydney’s early TV days usually gather for a reunion at around the time of ATN7’s anniversary but it appears due to covid that it was cancelled this year.
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5 December 1957: The cover date of the first edition of TV-Radio Week. The magazine was initially circulated only in Melbourne but extended to a Sydney edition in 1958. The name changed to TV Week also during 1958 and later that year Melbourne readers were invited to vote for their favourite TV stars and shows in the inaugural TV Week Awards, later to become the Logie Awards.
Source: TV Week
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5/12/2003 Ross Symonds and Ann Sanders present their final Seven News Sydney bulletin together before they are replaced by Ian Ross the following Monday. The rest, as they say, is history.
5/12/2008 Heather Foord presents her final regular bulletin of Nine News Queensland, having announced she would step down to spend more time with her family. She is replaced by Melissa Downes.
On both of these instances, the bulletins in question had just lost all 40 weeks in their respective markets.
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Poaching Ian Ross from Nine was a masterstroke. Roscoe continued to present the news until his retirement in 2009
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Seven Brisbane did the same in 2006 (when its news ratings were dire), not only picking up another ex-Today newsreader in Sharyn Ghidella (who had replaced Ross on the show at the end of 2001 IIRC) but also picking up weatherman John Schluter, who had left QTQ just short of his 25th anniversary at the network.
The results were instant - in 2007, Seven News overtook Nine News as the top-rating bulletin in Brisbane, winning 33 (or 35) weeks and then clean-sweeping 2008 and 2009.
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Didn’t they lure him out of retirement?
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If I remember correctly, he was working on and off at Nine in between finishing up with Today in 2001 and joining Seven in December 2003. I recall him working on Nine’s coverage of the 2002-03 summer bushfires while he also presented Nightline at least once in that period. So I would like to think that he was “semi-retired” at this point.
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8 December 1979: HSV7 televises the first Super 66 draw. The new lottery is a companion to the Tattslotto lottery, initially drawn at 8.25pm ahead of the Tattslotto draw at 9.30pm. Eventually the two lotteries are combined into a single segment.
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9 December 1961: GLV10 Gippsland opens as Australia’s first country TV station. The opening night special includes appearances by national TV personalities Horrie Dargie, Bobby Limb, Happy Hammond and Johnny Chester. Later in the evening, GLV crosses to a direct relay of ABC’s coverage of the federal election.
Source: TV Times
Source: TV Week
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According to TelevisionAU’s article on GLV’s history, Don Ewart’s microphone wasn’t switched on, so the first words ever spoken on the station weren’t heard by anyone outside the studio.
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10 December 1980: The US adaptation of the Australian series Number 96 debuts on NBC. It does not go well.
Source: TV Guide (US)
10 December 2013: The transition to digital television is completed with the last analogue signals switched off.
HSV7 ran a five-minute tribute before flicking off its analogue signal
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11 December 1986: The 692nd and final episode of Prisoner airs on ATV10, Melbourne. I don’t have airdates for other states as screening schedules were different in each city, but it appears that in Adelaide, SAS10 was over 12 months behind and showed a rush of episodes in December 1987 to have the series wound up before its switchover to SAS7.
Source: TV Week
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15 December 1988: The final episode of Grundy-produced soap Richmond Hill airs on Network Ten. The series was reported to being “one of the highest-rating programs ever to be axed”.
The axing was attributed to cost cutting following Ten’s Olympic Games coverage but at the same time, Ten had commissioned a new series, E Street.
Source: TV Week
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Sept 25, 1998 Newsbreak - Longford Gas Explosion. Channel 7 - YouTube September 25, 1998 the Esso Longford disaster where the refinery exploded leaving Victorians without gas for 2 weeks this is my first clear news memory as a 6 year old, (though i have flashes of Diana’s death from the year before)
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18 December 1962: ABC launches its Canberra station, ABC3. The station was the first in the ABC’s next stage of the roll out of the national television service — with 32 other stations to be launched in major regional centres across the country over the following four years.
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Always wanted to ask, why didn’t they use channel 2 in Canberra?
Surely there wouldn’t have been any interference from other channels around.
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This would be due to the fact that Channel 2 had already been allocated for RVN, which its main transmitter is located at Mt Ulandra (near Cootamundra). Its signal got into Canberra quite well, in which a fair number of Canberrans watched it as an alternative to the local CTC7, provided that they had a VHF antenna pointed towards Cootamundra.
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