I didn’t mind when Richard Stubbs hosted on Fridays.
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Other hosts included Agro, Ronnie Corbett, Ben Elton, Paula Yates, Bob Geldof, Glenn Robbins, and John Singleton.
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Not sure if I remember this correctly or whether I just imagined it, but I think one night they even had Kerri-Anne as a guest host even though she was still with Channel Ten at the time?
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Both were mid evening shows.
Tonight Live was shown after 10.30pm, so was a genuine late night show.
Australia hasn’t really had the same late night TV culture that the US has, where The Tonight Show doesn’t even start until 11.30pm. And then they have even more shows after midnight.
Traditionally we’ve normally had variety shows like this at 9.30 or 10.00. Tonight Live pushed the genre an hour later but it was really just a continuation of the tonight show genre that we were familiar with here.
Incidentally, Ten’s attempt to also do a 10.30 variety show (Late Night Australia) also failed to catch on.
I think the horse has bolted now in developing anything post-10.30. Networks are so focused on news + 7.30 reality shows that anything else barely gets a look in. Even the ABC has made changes this year to move 9.30 content (Q&A) to 8.30 because it’s no longer justifying the expense in making TV for a later timeslot.
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My favourite graphics for Sunrise from that era. The next graphics package was a downgrade.
Also Monique Wright began her short stint as weather presenter on the same day.
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First season of Rove on 9 was 11pm.
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They also got Jen Keyte to guest host. It needs to be a comic, it was a joke.
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Why though?
IMT had heaps of guest hosts and a lot of them were not known as comedians. Entertainers, singers, etc. definitely. But there were others too.
Father Michael King, who later presided over Mass For You At Home, had earlier been a guest host on IMT.
Mike Walsh used to also have various guest hosts from various fields. Memory fails me now but I think he even had a politician guest host for a week at one point. They don’t necessarily have to be comedians to be good TV or good entertainment.
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If memory serves me correct even Mr Charisma himself John Howard guest hosted Midday in the 80s.
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Courtesy Malcolm Farnsworth.
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Because an old hat variety show isn’t a modern talk show. A comedy heavy talk show relies on the host being very fast and funny to move it along, to anchor comedy segments and make interviews funny. It’s a comedy show that features a lot of talk.
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30/01/2006
The Nine Network relaunches with a new logo consisting of the numerical 9 in a blue box. Rumours had been going around for months of a logo change and it was leaked to MediaSpy two days before the official launch at 5:59am on Monday 30 January 2006. As a result of the relaunch, WIN and NBN unveil new logos. The relaunch also saw some new shows debut for the network, most of which were axed not long afterwards.
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Am I right in remembering it was universally panned on MS? I recall comments suggesting the removal of the dots was akin to McDonalds ditching the Golden Arches from their logo.
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Yes, I do remember MediaSpy going into absolute meltdown at the time over it. It even made it onto talkback radio as well. Nine even towed a huge Nine logo on a flag by a helicopter over Sydney that morning. And as we all know, that rebranding exercise was a complete flop with the dots coming back fully in 2008.
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Pretty much the only “successful” part of Nine’s 30/1/2006 relaunch was to bring in Tracy Grimshaw as the new host of A Current Affair?
Just about everything else was a failure though. I think Nine realised reasonably quickly that they made a major branding mistake by dropping the dots, because they were phased back in during 2007 (first via the animated cube logo, later through print ads and the WWOS watermark on the Summer of Cricket) before the full return in 2008.
The Dots were visible on one side of the Nine Cube in 2007 until the full relaunch to flying discs in summer 2007/08. Saw the Nine dots on WWOS branding during the cricket that summer.
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31 January 1983: GTV9 debuts the new Grundy-produced cop drama Waterloo Station. The series debuted in Sydney the night before.
From what I gather it was sort of a Sydney-based turn at what Cop Shop had done for Crawfords/Seven but with an emphasis on freshly-graduated police officers.
Like with so many Nine dramas to follow over the coming years, Waterloo Station was a dud and was soon axed with its unaired episodes becoming summer non-ratings filler. Nine also gave it a daytime re-run a few years later as a replacement for The Midday Show.
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Channel Nine really had a lot of dud soaps didn’t they?