She started on soapie Richmond Hill.
Yes, they had it there between August 1989 & May 1990. This was to allow Prime to air Seven Nightly News live at 6pm, in which it had changed its timeslot from 6:30pm to 6pm at that point. I believe Wollongong had their local bulletin at 5:45pm during that time as well.
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well yes, but that wasn’t the reason … Orange and Wagga were still airing local news at 6 and 7 News on delay at 6.30pm … the two reasons why we tried the 15-minutes at 5.45 was that the local news on Prime in Wollongong and Canberra were rating asterisks and we needed to save money … in order to do it, I had to ask 7 if we could air Home and Away ahead of them at 5.15 and also if they could provide us with a tape dub to do it …
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Here’s a partial episode of Hey Hey Its Saturday which was themed for the 30th anniversary of TV in 1986. There are some vintage idents featured going into and out of ad breaks.
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Did Prime ever air a 1 hour bulletin into Wollongong? I remember they had a one hour bulletin in Canberra to compete with Capital. They even poached Geoff I think he’s name was who was the nightly news presenter on CTC7 for years. He presented with Melissa Doyle for a time around 1995, not sure how long it was a 1 hour news but then it was cut to 30 minutes with Seven News Sydney on delay at 6:30 until it was axed around 2001 from memory.
CTC7 ran Neighbours at 5:30 Into Canberra earlier then it was shown in the other capitals for years as the local Canberra news was shown at 6. Obviously they recorded it off a satellite feed as the episodes were pretty much in sync with the other capitals. I was a regular watcher of Neighbours at that time.
It’s to my understanding that the hour long “Prime 6 O’Clock News” ran in Canberra from March to November of 1993. Yes, Prime poached Geoff Hiscock & news director Ken Begg from Capital.
Back in 2013, our very own @TelevisionAU published a great article which detailed the battle for 6pm news supremacy in Canberra two decades earlier:
(https://televisionau.com/2013/07/flashback-to-canberras-other-leadership-battle.html)
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Geoff Hiscock.
My memory is a little hazy and hopefully someone can confirm, but I seem to recall a brief experiment where CTC News was moved to 5pm to align with the network and then quickly shunted it back to 6 after some backlash.
When Southern Cross axed the local bulletin in 2001 it was airing at 6pm. From then on it was the Sydney news at 5pm, The Simpsons (@Sifon) and Neighbours from 6.
Weird thing is that I can definitely recall Neighbours at 5.30, before the local news. but not the Simpsons at 5.00
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Yes, it occurred from Monday 20th January until Friday 28th February 1992. The news returned to the 6pm slot on Monday 2nd March 1992, and remained there until it was axed in November 2001.
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The Simpson’s was on at 5 then Neighbours at 5:30pm
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Did Wollongong ever follow Canberra with a 1 hour bulletin?
… a little bit of history to set the pattern … the single biggest driver of Hawke’s aggregation policy was to get Packer’s 9 news into Canberra … Capital even got an injunction against the federal government stopping it from going ahead for a few months at the start of 1989 … as a result, all WIN had to do was establish a workmanlike local news ahead of the TCN9 national bulletin and they would sweep the opposition away … Prime also decided to put a local news into Canberra, but Roger Climpson’s 7 National News, which was running second in Sydney, was not going to do the same job … in the event, John Bok and his team, which included the likes of Sandra Sully and Angelos Frangopoulos, did their best, but nobody watched, so it was dropped … at the time it finished it was rating asterisks and the program I replaced it with, Get Smart, rated 7s … despite that, one person at Prime had a burning desire to compete with WIN in Canberra and so hatched the plot to steal Hiscock and Begg - at enormous expense - to come over to Prime … when I was asked what I thought of the idea, I referenced the failure of the defection of Mike Higgins from BTQ7 to TVQ0 and said I didn’t think it would work, but it went ahead anyway …
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What a great find! The current number is used today
Sandra Sully was a Prime Canberra? Never knew that
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yep she and I worked together at BTQ7 and when I moved to Wollongong to set up Prime she gave me a call and asked if there were any opportunities … I put her on to John Bok and she joined Prime Canberra at the start …
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What the hell was Top 40 Television anyway?
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“Cherry picking” the most popular shows from the commercial metro networks pre-aggregation.
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… actually it was a bit more than that … it was a marketing campaign that went to the viewing public and asked them what programs they wanted to see … of course the reality is exactly as you say and they, of course, “picked” “the most popular shows”, but the campaign was successful as it gave the viewer the impression that they had some sort of “ownership” of the programming … we even had Bruce Gyngell launch it with “Good evening and welcome to Top 40 Television” 
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Would’ve been funnier if they had in vision announcers making announcements like it was a top 40 station.
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… funny you should mention that … as part of the new image we hired three young ladies to be evening hosts … just like in the old days … we did an open audition call and literally hundreds turned up including a Sydney actress by the name of Gennie Nevison who had recently landed in Oz from the UK … when I asked her what work she’d done she casually mentioned that she had been in Minder as Terry’s (Dennis Waterman) girlfriend !
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Now that would’ve been a coup.
I know some stations did IVC - I think SES8 and RTS5a did at one stage.
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