Brisbane were also networking from midnight to dawn from the late 80’s on 7 & 10 from around 1988. It was weird seeing 7 Sydney news promos and I wondered why they would play them to a national audience? Sunshine Television in Wide Bay (owned also by Skase) was also taking a 7 Sydney feed overnight from 1988 - I think the first regional station in Australia to broadcast 24/7 if I’m not mistaken. Nine never did and still had a few local adverts such as Ribbetts and Carleton Upholstery to keep them going. Here is an example taken from TEN Brisbane in 1994 with Sydney adverts (alhtough there is a JB-HiFi advert with Melbourne locations as well). Interestingly that Seven and TEN Brisbane never had the capacity to broadcast adverts/promos in stereo until at least 1995 so hearing promos in stereo before then was different.
Second half of this video has footage (no audio) of Michael Jackson’s 1985 visit to Perth for the Telethon which included a concert (he didn’t perform of course):
I wanted to create an off-shoot thread for this (maybe admins can if suitable) but I wanted to find out what the ‘holy grail’ of Australian TV recordings would be?
Those things that are significant to Australian TV history (but is not able to be found) or things that people just haven’t been able to find since broadcast.
I’m curious as someone who has a lot of tapes and I know a lot of others that do, and it may be helpful if we ever come across them.
I know one of the major ones would be recordings of Australia’s Naughtiest Home Videos in each state. I know that Melbourne and maybe Sydney is online already.
For stuff in my lifetime, I’d love to see some of the extremely early digital TV stuff - either the tests before the official launch date, or some insights into the early multi-view content.
There’s some somewhat early screenshots, but I get the impression of that as a time where the networks were throwing stuff at the wall to see what might work, going out to tiny numbers of households that could actually receive them.
Basically, we have the “welcome to television” clip^, but digital kinda started in fits and spurts before it was mainstream - there’s so little documented of that era.
^well a recreation of it, I suppose maybe that’s the canonical answer, but that’s boring.
