Good question!!! It was a dial TV but 100% no UHF dial so perhaps it was maybe from late 70’s? I don’t even think the resport was that old. I would understand VHF only antenna but that wasn’t the issue. Coming from Brisbane, this was my first time watching regional TV since aggregation started so I was dissapointed to only get QTV. My aunt also lived in Cairns so I had to tune her second TV to WIN & Sunshine. She never even upgraded her band 3 antenna to a combo with UHF so she put up with ordinary UHF reception until she moved in 2000!
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My grandparents lived at Miami on the Gold Coast and always had the crappiest TV reception - sometimes near unwatchable. Low-set house with tall mast. I recall my grandfather in around 1985 purchasing a VHF/UHF combo antenna (no idea why - it was SBS first started as well and the first time I had seen one since SBS in brisbane only started mid-1985 along with the Gold Coast). He installed it himself. So basically, he should have purchased UHF only but was thinking he would pick up Brisbane as well with it as a back up. Yeah, bad choice - worse than ever. Finally in late 1986 they got an antenna installer in and bingo - perfect reception. It was also the first time I watched NRTV during daylight saving so was amazed to be able to watch TCN9 News on relay at 5pm weekends (delayed 5.30pm weekdays) and NRTV News at 5 on weekdays as well as other netwoked shows one hour earlier.
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TVs were a lot more expensive in real terms back then, and UHF had only really just started in many regional areas.
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And hotels have never been great at maintaining, let alone spending money upgrading, their TV equipment (just look at how many hadn’t bothered retuning TVs for ages after WIN & SCA had their affiliation swap only a few years ago now).
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Did BTQ-7 use both “We’re Doing it for You” and “Supercharged!” in 1981 or was the latter used during the summer?
Both.
Continuing the questions about Seven Nightly News in the 1990s, do we know exactly when in September 1997 this Sydney set and graphics package was launched?
If I’m not mistaken, the old 1994-97 graphics were still used during the Princess Diana funeral coverage. That would’ve been September 6, while the almost complete bulletin from TheTvGuru3 is obviously from the 21st.
Also, was Neil Brooks presenting Sport on weeknights by this point in time or was he only doing weekends? I get that Ross Symonds and Adam Digby would’ve been the regular weekend presenters for news (until joining Ann Sanders on weeknights in Early 1998) and weather (Brian Bury did weeknight forecasts for Seven Sydney from January 1997 to October 1998) respectively though.
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The BBC comedy series, The Goodies, was broadcast repeatedly on the ABC in Australia throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The ABC in each state had their own copies of the shows to broadcast and, as a result, didn’t always synchronise up with each other, so the episode you would see on the day would depend on which state you were watching the broadcast from. Episodes were also often shown out of order, or would be skipped entirely, especially when some states had local sports to show while others didn’t.
Sometime between the years 1978 and 1981, ABC TV in Sydney (known as channel 2 at the time) broadcast a series of The Goodies episodes which included a handful of black and white transmissions. One of these black and white episodes was the original 1971 edition of Kitten Kong. It was followed 2 or 3 weeks later by a colour broadcast of the 1972 Montreux, Silver Rose, Special edition of Kitten Kong, which had quite a few changes made to it from the original. How do I know this? My big brother had one of the first commercially available home video recorders. A clunky Betacord model, which I used to record The Goodies episodes as they were broadcast from Monday to Thursday for a short run through each year over a two year period.
The first (or possibly the second) batch of recordings, which happened sometime during my high school years from 1978 to 1981 included both versions of the Kitten Kong episodes but on separate video tapes, which allowed me to watch both episodes scene by scene to see what the differences were, with one of the main differences being the musical number. In the black and white broadcast of the original version, Bill Oddie sang a duet with a sheep. In the colour Montreux edition, two dogs sang a duet with each other instead. There were quite a few other differences, but I won’t go into detail here.
How the Sydney branch of the ABC even had the original version of Kitten Kong to broadcast is a bit of a mystery. Their acquisition records show that they declined it in favour of the Montreux edition when they first purchased the rights to show the series in Australia before we had colour television, and when it came time to repurchase the series in colour, there were 5 episodes missing from the collection thanks to the BBC wiping the original tapes to reuse for other productions. One of these missing episodes being the original version of Kitten Kong.
Nevertheless, ABC Sydney did have a black and white copy of the original episode, which is how I managed to record both versions and review them both scene by scene to study the differences between the two editions. Unfortunately, I had no knowledge about wiped episodes at the time, and ended up recording over it a few years later.
When Channel 7 purchased the rights to The Goodies in the 1980s, the ABC had to hand all of their copies of the show over, and the person who was sorting through the newly acquired episodes was very much aware of the wiped and presumed lost episodes, so when he came across 4 of them in glorious black and white amongst all the other colour episodes, he promptly notified the BBC and had them returned for archiving. Unfortunately, the black and white copy of Kitten Kong wasn’t included in the handover from the ABC to Channel 7 and it now remains the only episode to remain lost. Why it wasn’t included in the handover is just as much of a mystery as to how the ABC in Sydney had a copy of it to begin with.
Now, I remember when I was recording the episodes, the TV guide I was using at the time did mention when upcoming episodes were in black and white, and which episode was supposed to be shown for each day. Was it the TV times? Was it TV week? Was it a daily newspaper TV listing? Was it a weekly newspaper TV listing? I don’t remember. It was about 40 years ago and not a detail I’ve committed to memory.
So does anyone have any old TV guide listings which show the individual episode names of The Goodies broadcasts via ABC Sydney between 1978 and 1981? For most years it was broadcast at the 6pm time slot, but it did get bumped up to a 6:25pm slot for one year, which saw some of the normally heavily censored episodes shown without the censor cuts, even though they weren’t legally suitable for viewing uncut until about 8pm each night. There were some very enthusiastic discussions at school the next day when the pilot episode was shown with the picture of the topless women included for the first time in our hormone infused teenage memories of the show.
It would therefore be nice to get a confirmation of the black and white, original version of the Kitten Kong episode being broadcast, seeing as I seem to be the only person on the planet who has any memory of it ever being shown in Australia. It’s possible it was shown in other states as well, but I can only vouch for the Sydney broadcast. As previously mentioned, the original was shown first, in black and white, then 2 or 3 weeks later the Montreux edition was shown in full colour. Or maybe you even remember seeing these episodes both being shown within the space of a few weeks of each other. Surely there are others who remember it happening that way?
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Did ATV10 only do the Movie Festival thing in February '82?
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Is the Black Mass sequence from Number 96 still around or was it wiped?
Wiped. Of the 584 black and white episodes made, only 19 remain.
The 16 “most memorable” of those 19 episodes were released on the DVD Number 96: The Beginning And The Bomb
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Not sure if this is the right thread for this question…
Wondered why with the naming conventions for analogue channels how the A suffix for Channels 5A and 9A came about eg. why wasn’t 5A named Channel 6 and subsequently 9A would have been known as Channel 11.
The planners obviously left sufficient space in between 5-6 and 9-10 for this to occur, and there was less demand for spectrum back then.
Which means the metro commercials should have been known as 8, 10 and 12 (not 7, 9 and 10).
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There wasn’t a channel 9a until late in analogue days. The gap between 9 and 10 was 6MHz not a full channel separation. With digital the center frequencies were adjusted to produce a full 7MHz channel.
I think that the original number scheme was just 1-10 so when it became apparent that there weren’t enough channels, 0, 5a and 11 were added without disrupting existing allocations. 5a was not just in a gap between 5 and 6 - it was in a chasm - the space was 73 MHz (enough for 10 TV channels!)
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So theoretically we could have seen 5a, 5b, 5c etc?
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Other parts of that spectrum were allocated for other uses; so it wan’t all vacant. 108 - 136 is the “Air Band” for various aeronautical uses. Then there were things like two way communication of various sorts.
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Do you have idea how ABC would interrupt normal programming from state capitals for sport stuff to the regionals, #myfriend? (i.e. standby slide, announcement, …)
They don’t. Everything is done at the state level, at least nowadays it is.
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I’m talking about the 1980s and early 90s, #myfriends
Rewatching the classic “More Of The Same” parody of the Freeview announcement ad, I think the “You can watch sports you’ve never heard of, news you can’t understand” line is referring to One HD and the SBS World News Channel respectively.
Prime and GWN in the mid to late 90’s did the “This is where we live” ident and how different regional cities were covered as there quite a few cities I remember seeing on Prime?