The stock music bed in that Channel 4 ID sounds very similar to the one used by GWN as an intro to one of their rural news programs in the 1980s. Trying to find it online.
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An interview with comedian and former TV presenter Tania Lacy appears in Good Weekend magazine, inside The Age and SMH today. Tania appeared on shows like Countdown, Countdown Revolution and The Factory in the late 1980s and 1990s.
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Don’t mean to be insensitive but I recall Bruce Paige’s final day presenting Nine News Queensland in 2009 being a major news day with Michael Jackson’s passing being the main headline.
Courtesy: LJ R
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Monday 14 Feb 1977
The date ABHN-5 (ABC TV Newcastle) changed to Channel 5A… there didn’t seem to be a whole lot about in the Newcastle Herald.. I guess for most, all it meant was turning the rotary channel knob on the TV around one more position (as push button TVs I think were still a few years away ??), though some on the fringes might require a different antenna.
25 Jan 1977
And the day after (15 Feb 1977)
From a personal note, I don’t recall this happening at all (so back then, I never knew it was once on Channel 5), but I did have relatives who kept calling it “Channel 5” into the 1990s … I had always wondered why they did that, but I thought it was either a convenience thing or maybe due to the newer push button/electronic tuning TVs often only a ‘5’ button and no ‘5A’ button.
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Sunday 18 July 1976 marked the start of continuous 24 hour transmissions (no more close downs) on both TCN9 and GTV 9.
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They mention ABWN4 in the article. Did they mean WIN4 or ABWN5A? Both of which were receivable in Newcastle.
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Fun fact - the old ABHN-5 tube transmitter ended up with a Community Radio Station in Bendigo (Central Victorian Gospel Radio), which used the FM Audio section to transmit on 104.7 MHz from Mt Alexander in the 1980s and 90s (it was not a full-time license, until it became 105.1 in Bendigo City around 15 years ago iirc - using solid state equipt then).
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Yeah, I’m not sure if they meant WIN-4 or ABWN-5A, as it might be possible that the latter might have been on a slight offset to ABHN-5A to reduce interference and probably wouldn’t be in sync. I’ll see if I can check that out tomorrow.
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we got ours in 1977 (maybe 78?). We were the first people I knew to have a push-button TV. It seemed very modern. My grandparents were early adopters to colour so their sets were rotary dials.
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Our main TV was a rotary dial until 1988! Then we got very modern with a Sony Trinitron 59cm TV with stereo reception and full function remote!
We had a 2nd smaller 34cm Toshiba colour TV that was push button, which we got in 1985.
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We got our colour TV in 1976 and it was pushbutton, however, some friends of my parents got a pushbutton colour TV in 1975. Basically, when colour TV was introduced, the lower end colour TVs had a rotary dial while the mid tier ones had pushbuttons and the higher end ones had pushbuttons and a remote control. Of the Philips colour TV sets available in their 1976 brochure only one had a rotary dial channel tuner. I remember portable TVs also tending to have rotary dials but I don’t know if that’s because I only saw low end ones. This was in 1975 when lots of local stores seemed to sell colour TVs, maybe even ones that didn’t normally sell TVs. Even Coles New World supermarket had one on display and I believe it was on sale.
Not so.
During the Olympics (July 18 - August 2 1976) channel 9 did broadcast 24 hours a day but afterwards GTV9 did close overnight at least on Sunday morning for a week or two. I remember seeing this in archived newspaper TV guides. However, by August 15 they were 24 hours a day.
There may have been other times when GTV9 closed down, e.g. Christmas and/or Good Friday for a year or two after that, but not sure.
There were also times when GTV 9 Melbourne had were required to broadcast for limited hours as a result of electricity strikes (i.e. industrial action). The last one of these was on July 22 1981 when TV stations could only broadcast for two hours that evening. In previous electricity strikes they could broadcast for 8 hours a day weekdays and longer on weekends. I assumed they closed down on those days when they weren’t on air as it would have saved power but not 100% sure.
There was also a power crisis in 1982 shortly after the state election due to equipment problems, but I don’t remember if TV transmission times were restricted that time.
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Kind of miss that. Or when they would show a rerun of a classic TV Show. Unlike today where it is badically all infomercials
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There was another date sometime around 1984ish where there was meant to be another restriction to 6-8pm but this was given a last minute reprieve to be 4-11pm. It is unclear then if GTV then resumed at midnight or stayed off air until morning.
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A few relatives had Thorn Colour TV’s bought in the mid-1970s with rotary VHF (clicker) and UHF (continuous) tuner dials. They still worked well into the 1990s and early-2000s - very solid units.
Our Philips Colour TV built in 1979 had push-button. Rotary was pretty dead by the early 1980s on new TVs IIRC.
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My parents got a 48cm “Healing” TV in 1978 with rotary VHF dial and the UHF dial below. It had a standard pal socket, the 2 screws for ribbon cable and from memory, another 2 screws for UHF reception. Very strange set-up. As kids, we had no idea what the UHF dial was for until of course, SBS came along in 1985. The TV did them well until 1993 and it was still working fine at that point. My grandparents on the Gold Coast bought a PYE TV around 1980 with only 6 push button pre-sets. Great sound although the picture was awful with the old set-up VHF signal from Brisbane. Finally, in 1986 they got a UHF antenna installed and the TV looked magic for years to come.
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I’m sure this has been posted here before, but gosh it’s great reading about NBN3 and its inception.
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When I stayed in a Mildura hotel in the early 80’s, the TV was rather unusual. It had a VHF & UHF dial, but there was no U on the VHF dial. instead there was a channel 5/U. To watch UHF channels, you had to tune to VHF channel 5, then somehow, the UHF dial’s channel numbers would light up (the selected VHF channel was already lit up) and you could tune the UHF band. Not sure how it worked out whether you wanted to watch channel 5 or UHF as the UHF dial wouldn’t light up straight away, but it would light up sometimes and I could never figure out how to make it do so. I was only 11 at the time.
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my grandparents’ old colour set had similar. It was a “General” brand TV and IIRC it had Channel 11/U on the dial. I never knew how it worked as at the time they only watched VHF channels and didn’t have a UHF antenna (for Channel 28) so they never watched SBS. I wonder now if there was a hidden switch somehow that decided whether that dial position was to act as 11 or U?
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