I grew up in WA, in two different areas. Firstly, in Mandurah, we were in an overlap area between Perth stations and Bunbury stations (it’s still like that now). From vague memory, I believe our channels were like this:
2: ABC
3: GWN
7: Seven
9: Nine
I know when had Ten, but I can’t remember what channel that was on (probably 10). I don’t remember having SBS.
Then we moved to southeast of Bunbury and had the following:
3: GWN
5: ABC (this moved to 11 at one point)
6: WIN (when it turned up, but it was almost unwatchable because we were in a valley)
28: SBS (again, very snowy)
I remember that WIN WA had a dual-affiliate with STW9 and NEW10 back in 1999-2011. When there’s an AFL on TEN, WIN will have to televise this. Unfortunately, there is no Ten Regional WA channel back in 2000s. I don’t know why The Regional WA didn’t have any licence to a 3rd commercial FTA channel in 2000s. Regional WA was dominated by GWN7 and WIN in ratings over abc and sbs in 2000s.
Same as Tasmania, Darwin, Mildura, etc. Not enough population to support a 3rd competitive commercial operator. TDT in Tasmania was the first joint venture 3rd commercial channel and the other markets followed.
An old Sanyo push button TV we had had the following labels on the push buttons:
2, 7, 9, 10, 0, A, B, U
When in Gippsland before aggregation we had: A: ABC B: GLV8 U: VCR
Then when living in Melbourne with the same TV we made use of the 2, 7, 9, 10 and 0 push buttons. 0 was tuned to SBS despite it being on UHF28 by that stage (early 1990s).
I had 0, 2, 7, and 9 from Brisbane plus attempted long distance reception of 3 and 10 from Darling Downs and 6 and 8 from Lismore as well as 10 from Nambour with antenna pointed north.
Replying to an interesting post in a more relevant thread…
While I don’t know that much about New Zealand television, the “Goodnight Kiwi” was the cartoon that TVNZ played at closedown on one (or both) of it’s channels in the days before 24 hour broadcasting…right?
The closest thing Australian television has ever had to that would probably be the classic “mother kangaroo tucking joey to sleep” cartoon that ATN Channel Seven Sydney played at closedown for many years (including for the farewell to analogue TV in December 2013).
I was at LA airport waiting for a flight, and was watching CBS 2. They interrupted Diagnosis Murder a couple of times then abandoned it for continuous live coverage.
Growing up in Albury, the presets were as follows at home (early 2000’s):
1 ABC (ABC being on VHF1 historically in Albury)
2 WIN
3 SC10
4 PRIME (PRIME/AMV4 being on VHF4 historically)
5 SBS
My grandmother had a different order however:
1 ABC
2 PRIME
3 SBS
4 WIN
5 SC10
This was in the order of the channels as they were tuned from Mt Baranduda (i.e. VHF1, VHF11, UHF33, UHF36, UHF39).
The first TV I remember in our family was a Sharp Linytron 51cm set that we had from about 1984 to 1993. It had 8 presets that you could use. From memory we had ours as the following…
1 ABC
2 Seven
3 Nine
4 Ten
5 SBS (VHF0)
My family bought the TV when we were living in Melbourne. When we moved back to Sydney in 1985, there was clearly no need to retune the TV. We lost SBS when they switched off Channel 0 and SBS didn’t make an appearance much later on until the antenna was replaced with one of those combined VHF/UHF ones. When we got our first VCR in late 1986, the number 8 preset was allocated the for it. It left 6 and 7 as the spare presets and these were used later on for WIN and Capital (again from memory).
Do any stations still show a “Goodnight Girls and Boys” sequence in the early evening? TVW7 used to show Fat Cat at 7.30 after H&A, even after playout moved to Melbourne, but I assume accelerated flow and the lack of proper junctions between shows these days makes things like this difficult to schedule.
Have been a little obsessed with the late, great Jessica Savitch on Youtube this week.
For those not in the know, she lived quite a life in the 70’s & 80’s and was the template for female news anchors everywhere. She died tragically too young, but lives forever on Youtube:
and even a TV movie about her life, starring Sela Ward:
I forgot about this anniversary last month when The Late Show turned 25. I made this short video for the 20th, with iconic skits - ABC Still number 4, I Feel Like Dickhead Tonight and a Shit Scared segment.
Where are they now? Most of the team are working in TV even if not in front of the cameras which is an amazing achievement.
