On This Day

That Franky Doyle ad sounds like a political ad: “This woman is a lesbian, a killer and a jail-breaker. And she’ll be at your place if you vote for the other mob.”

and ranking “lesbian” the bigger threat than “killer” and “jail-breaker”. It’s like The Australian was writing Ten’s ad copy.

The BBC-Nine Network collab movie Threads is more in your face than The Day After when it comes to nuclear attacks.

That’s a pretty impressive list of guests, I think its more impressive than who they get for the current-day Logies.

27 February 1979: Prisoner makes its debut in Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. (Sydney’s debut was the night before) The series went on to run for eight years and almost 700 episodes and continues to hold a loyal fan base to this day. The show was re-imagined as Wentworth in 2013 for Foxtel.


27 February 1984: The Nine Network launches its new late night line-up, with Mike Willesee making his return to nightly current affairs – Willesee screening 9.30pm Monday-Thursday – followed by Tonight With Bert Newton at 10pm. The line-up only lasted for the year, with Willesee moved to 6.30pm in 1985, and Tonight With Bert Newton replaced by the prime-time relaunch of The Mike Walsh Show.

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28 February 1975: The last day of black-and-white TV as C-Day marks the official launch of colour TV in Australia at 12.00am 1 March.

Source: Listener in-TV

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2/3/2013 Veteran Nine News reporter Peter Harvey passes away at age 68 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

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christ, 10 years ago

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I remember this happened late in the day and the news bulletins started with the breaking news of his death. If I remember correctly, this also occurred towards the end of Ten News.

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6 March 1983: The three-part mini-series The Dismissal, re-enacting the events around the 1975 constitutional crisis culminating in the dismissal of Gough Whitlam as prime minister, debuts on the Ten Network… except in Adelaide, where SAS10 declined to pick up the series: The Dismissal: 40 years on – Television.AU

atv10_thedismissal

TEN10_TheDismissal

6 March 1994: The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is broadcast on TV for the first time, with a one-hour highlights package on ABC. The special was ABC’s most-watched program in the 1993-94 financial year, recording an audience of 1.452m (5 cities). (Source: ABC Annual Report 1993/1994, PP no. 248 of 1994)

YouTube: ABC Australia

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11 March 1960: ABC’s Adelaide TV station, ABS2, is officially opened.

Source: The Advertiser

11 March 1988: Neighbours star Kylie Minogue makes TV Week Logie Awards history – winning four Logies including the Gold Logie for Most Popular Personality and a Silver Logie for Most Popular Actress. The 19-year-old is the youngest Gold Logie winner. Neighbours was also a big winner on the night, winning Most Popular Drama and Most Popular Program In Victoria and Jason Donovan the Silver Logie for Most Popular Actor.

Bert Newton is inducted into the TV Week Logie Awards Hall of Fame. His speech made the ironic observation that despite such an honour, he hadn’t been on TV for three years and only learned of his sacking from Channel Nine from a TV Week reporter. It must have struck a chord somewhere because he was soon asked to guest host Midday for a week, and then was signed up by Seven to host his own midday variety show.

YouTube: aussiebeachut0

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11/3/2002

  • Seven News Melbourne broadcasts from its Docklands headquarters for the first time. They bring back the previously failed “sport and weather before the first ad break” which was dropped weeks or months later.
  • Also that night, a special episode of The Weakest Link takes place featuring the nine remaining contestants from the 2002 season of The Mole, with the money raised ($14,100) going into that show’s prize kitty and the winner earning an exemption from the following elimination.
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That first set at BCM = :heart_eyes:. They shouldn’t have replaced it for the blue backdrop that was an obvious copy of Nine’s at the time. Hopefully they can bring it back, even flipping the current set 180 degrees and removing the screen would be great.

Unfortunately Nine can’t do it as the Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Perth sets aren’t even on the same floor as the newsroom and the Brisbane set is not close to the newsroom.

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That first set you mentioned - this is where the inconsistency across Seven’s national bulletins arose whereby the Morning News came out of Sydney (and still does, on the east coast at least) while the 4:30 News presented by David Johnston (and later Rebecca Maddern) came out of Melbourne.

This was rectified by 2005-06 when Melbourne flipped around its set and got the twisted metal set that was first introduced in Sydney, with the cameras now being situated where the 2002-05 set formerly was, followed by the 4:30 news moving to Sydney with Samantha Armytage presenting.

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12 March 1976: Norman Gunston and Denise Drysdale win Gold at the TV Week Logie Awards. Gunston was ABC’s first Gold Logie winner since Lorrae Desmond won in 1962, and his Gold win was the first to go to a fictional character rather than the actual actor who played him (Garry McDonald).

Overseas guests at the presentation include Hollywood actor Lee Marvin, Susannah York (in Australia for the film Eliza Fraser), Henry Winkler (Happy Days) and Gordon Jackson (Upstairs Downstairs)




Source: TV Week

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Which I think was (unsurpisingly) the worst amount that had been tallied up on The Weakest Link during that 2001/02 run, just [wiki suggests the lowest on a regular show was $14,800]… under The Mole’s rules, it was rounded up to the nearest thousand for that show’s purposes (so a nice round $15,000… still not exactly close to $100k really :melting_face:).

Correct. As you would know, the premise of The Mole was that one of the contestants was tasked with secretly sabotaging the group’s money-winning efforts without being detected. I’ve seen that episode and the contestants’ performances were nothing short of embarrassing.

From what I can recall, here were some of the questions asked on that episode:

  • “Which sport do the Williams sisters play?” - contestant answered basketball (correct answer was tennis)
  • “In the abbreviation COD, what does the D stand for?” - contestant passed (delivery)
  • “n’t is short for what?” - contestant passed (not)
  • “Dennis Burke was the Chief Minister of the Northern what?” - contestant answered Alliance (Territory)
  • “Name the Australian state capital that ends in the alphabet’s penultimate letter” - contestant answered Canberra (Sydney)
  • “Aristotle Onassis was the husband of Jacqueline who?” - contestant passed (Kennedy)
  • “What does the U stand for in UFO?” - contestant passed (Unidentified)
  • “Budapest is the capital city of which European country?” - contestant answered Greece (Hungary)
  • “Garbo is slang for what?” - contestant passed (garbage)

Full episode here (via Facebook): Redirecting...

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Yeah, hence the “unsurprisingly”. They had also thrown in a cheating test (shown in the next Mole episode) by throwing some prod notes out behind the scenes, that (supposedly) contained the Q&A to the show, which would’ve invalidated the whole lot if anyone looked at it (which they ruled they didn’t). That would’ve been a much less subtle act of sabotage compared to just dragging down the size of the pot itself through gameplay.

Mind you, there were genuine Weakest Link pots that low; wiki suggests there was another regular Seven show that went under $15k, and one of the Nine revival episodes returned even less than that (despite being theoretically worth 2.5x as much).

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Another thing that interests/intrigues me was whether the contestants deliberately got those questions wrong… but that’s the most obvious thing The Mole would do, get a high-value question wrong and break the chain.

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13 March 1972: “Australian television lost its virginity” as Number 96 makes its debut on TEN10, Sydney with the first three episodes together as a movie-length premiere.

ATV0 Melbourne followed the next night, TVQ0 Brisbane the following Monday, and SAS10 Adelaide in April.

The series became hugely popular, topping the ratings in 1973 and 74, winning a string of Logie Awards and turned the struggling 0-10 Network to making a profit. It also popularised soap opera or serial drama for commercial television.

Source: TV Week

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