Unfortunately, the Google News Archives don’t have the 19/8/1987 edition of The Sydney Morning Herald (or the Sunday/Monday editions prior to that date which would also have the Sydney TV guide for 19/8/1987) so I can’t confirm the Sydney airdate for the final episode of Sons & Daughters that way.
Newspapers.com (and probably other outlets like Fairfax’s own online archives) does have the aforementioned papers behind a paywall though, if anyone’s interested in checking that way.
Hello this John Blackman from Telecom Mobilenet.
The correct allocation of analogue channels is as follows:
according to TelevisionAU’s Classic TV listing of the day of the Adelaide channel-swap, Sons and Daughters wasn’t shown on SAS7 on it’s first day. I presume ADS7 screened all episodes before the switch in the same way SAS10 screened multiple episodes of the final season of Prisoner (they were a year behind Melbourne and Sydney which finished the previous year) leading up to that day.
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Thanks. People are saying it was screened in Sydney the same day as Melbourne, 27th December - yet I’ve always been of the impression Sydney showed it some months beforehand.
That’s my understanding too. EDIT: Clearly I’ve been wrong as below states.
Sons And Daughters seemed (coincidentally) to follow a similar pattern to Number 96 in its last year on air.
In both show’s cases, Sydney continued to screen the respective shows at the normal twice a week frequency but Melbourne dropped both shows back to one hour a week which prolonged the final episodes of both series airing in Melbourne by several months.
In Number 96’s case, the final episode aired in August 1977 on Ten in Sydney but did not air on 0 in Melbourne until December that year. The relationship between the Melbourne and Sydney network channels (which at that time were each under separate management) was decidedly frosty towards the end of the 1970s.
I always seemed to recall seeing S&D’s final episode in Melbourne in January 1988. I would have been away for Christmas so would not have seen any episode aired at the end of December but remember seeing the final episode credits roll with a voiceover announcement that a new show Home And Away was coming up the following week.
EDIT: OK… scrub much of the above regarding S&D… it seems the final episode of S&D did in fact air on Channel 7 in Sydney on Sunday 27 December 1987.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=bXVWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=weQDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7339%2C5757218
and in Melbourne on Sunday 10 January 1988, a week before Home And Away’s telemovie debut:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=SIJVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=9pYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2906%2C2462039
This YouTube clip is tagged as being of HSV7 Melbourne on 27 December 1987 but the program line-up in the voice over matches the Sydney line-up linked above, so it must have been from ATN7 instead.
YouTube: CaptainSiCo (any relation to @Si-Co )
fyi - get a free State Library NSW membership and you can get free access to the SMH archives.
If you can’t be arsed doing that, you can just use this link, or log into the site with “SLNSW” as the username and “Fairfax” as the password. I can’t believe the State Library is so lax about displaying their own passwords in plain text when you log in…
http://archives.smh.com.au/fnc_login.php?username=SLNSW&password=Fairfax
TelevisionAU, thanks so much for that info and the links which corroborate it. That video was indeed uploaded by me - I’ll have to do some editing!!
I’ve also been told that the finale aired in Adelaide as a two-hour special on 16th November 87 - if correct, they saw it before Sydney and Melbourne! Perhaps ADS7 were keen to get it out of the way before the affiliation swap with SAS10.
A comment on the YouTube video also suggests Perth burnt it off in a weekday 3.30pm slot (the same slot many ITV regions in the UK chose to screen the programme), and that TVW7 finished the series even before Adelaide. Again, this is unconfirmed.
mubd- thanks also for that info about viewing the the archive!
TVW7 was showing S&D in the mid-afternoon even as late as November 1988. It is unclear if these were first run episodes still or reruns. Would not surprise me if they were still first run eps. Perth was notoriously well behind the east coast in a lot of the soaps. A situation that wasn’t really rectified until after Channel 10 came to the market and the three commercial channels fell closer into line with network scheduling.
I noticed from a late 1986 listing you posted (can’t find it now) that BTQ7 also seemed to be way behind - mentioning Barbara (Cornelia Frances’s character) who had left in early 86.
If TVW were still showing first run episodes in November 1988, parts of the UK may have seen the final episode before Perth viewers!!
That’s very likely. Similar too to Prisoner as Channel 9 Perth dropped the series a year before it finished on the east coast. Quite possible that the series final, which included the dramatic comeuppance for Officer Joan Ferguson, has even now yet to air on free-to-air TV in Perth, although eventual DVD releases and Foxtel reruns have made it available at least.
Oi, spoilers!
Heard iconic voice over artist John Stanton on TV the other night and was wondering has anyone ever made use of him for their news openers?
I was thinking he’d be a great News announcer for Ten’s opening credits, then realised he has done promotional work for Ten before:
40 years ago 20 August 1977 (US time) Voyager 2 was launched (followed a couple of weeks later by Voyager 1). Its mission to explore the outer planets of the Solar System. 12 years later 25 August 1989 it reached the outermost planet Neptune.
A report of that encounter was the lead story on the (recently re-named) Ten Eyewitness News Brisbane that night and included live images from 4,500,000 km away, surely some sort of record! Extremely rare for a pure science based story to headline a TV bulletin.
The planets would literally have to be aligned for the live images, with Australia the receiving station from Neptune at the time of the cross.
Here’s an example of ATV10 Melbourne, 1987, featuring Roy Hampson:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1wk2rp3i9s
Ten didn’t really vary from that PRG layout for most of the 1980s. Although I seem to recall that for a lot of the time only daytime programs got the titles shown while prime time shows just had the logo. (or possibly the other way around… memory not great in that regard!)
It didn’t really change until the late stages of the “X” logo where they found a smaller, slightly stylised font. But then they changed to 10 TV Australia and the old '80s text was back again with just the white “10” logo. They finally found some colour for the logo in 1990 and I think found a nicer font but I can’t remember.
And here’s one of ATV0 circa 1975 (essentially the same as what they were still doing a decade later?)
Source: Australian TV Archive
I am just reminded too that when TV Week (and later other guides) started putting G-Codes in their TV listings they dictated certain channel settings. Generally, ABC was assigned to 2, Seven to 7, Nine to 9, Ten to 10 and SBS to 28. Simple enough. Very straightforward. But regional stations would get various weird numbers that didn’t really align to anything. I don’t remember them specifically. I’d have to find a regional TV Week from that area to see what it had listed.
So at first there were the rotary dials where you would dial in the frequency assigned to your area. ABC would be 2, Channel 7 would be 7 and so on.
Then when push button tuning came in around the mid to late 70s, people usually just set the buttons to tune in conjunction with the order of the TV channels or perhaps in the order of the ones they watched the most (kind of like radio presets).
Then you had the mid 80s - mid 90s era where TVs and VCRs had either digital LED/VFD program number readouts or digital on screen displays. One thing that should be said is that these program numbers that were displayed on the readouts were not linked to a frequency or channel in any way, and you had to manually program each program number to go with the frequency you wanted. So it was up to the viewer or TV service person setting it up to actually tune the TV in properly.
There was no need to actually associate the program number on the TV with the actual channel number, but people did it just because they were familiar with the channel numbers.
It made accessing the channels via the remote more intuitive, and you could read the corresponding number off the LED/VFD/on screen display, and it would instantly make sense to anyone using the TV.
On these sets, it was no more difficult to tune them into the logical program numbers than it was to just set the first 5 consecutive program numbers into the TV like what would have been done in the UK, and it provided a great deal of benefit in terms of ease of use.
In regional areas, a lot of transmitters were converted to UHF and so a lot of people made their program numbers to correspond with the old channel numbers they were familiar with, even though they were actually tuned to the UHF transmitters. So for example, WIN in Wollongong was originally referred to as Channel 4 in the early days. Then they moved to Channel 59 in the late 80s. People kept WIN on the program number 4, but retuned so that program 4 was associated with the channel 59 frequency.
I’d imagine when aggregation came around in regional areas, many people would have set the aggregated stations to correspond with the metropolitan network numbers as well.
So then we come to the late 1990s where most TVs and VCRs sold had begun to incorporate proper on-screen displays. Almost all of these TVs had some sort of auto-tuning function which many, if not most people used. This almost never associated the appropriate program number with the channel number - it just tuned in a TV channel (say ABC channel 2), stored it as program 1, and then searched for the next one (say Channel 7), stored it as program 2 and so on. Annoying for OCD types like myself.
It’s only if it particularly bothered the viewer that they could choose to go through the menu and meticulously set it up so that Channel 7 would be accessed by pressing ‘7’ on the remote (which I always did myself).
Here’s a nice TV ad which should kind of explain how some of the different tuning systems worked:
My family’s TV was usually set as the following:
2: ABC Sydney
4: WIN Wollongong
5: SC10 Wollongong
6: Prime Wollongong
7: Channel 7 Sydney
9: Channel 9 Sydney
10: Channel 10 Sydney
28: SBS
31: Whatever community TV station was operating at the time
The first TV I remember (a Sharp) was annoying because you couldn’t tune in Channel 10 or SBS quickly from the remote. You had to go to Channel 9 and go up a channel. Yes, there was one of those double digit entry buttons but that would have required three button presses instead of two.
Then the next TV (a Palsonic) was one which allowed you to enter two digits in quick succession and it would take you there. Much nicer.
Back in my days, I used to have a TEAC Analog TV. Some Analog TV sets differ from time to time.
1 - ABC perth
2 - ABC Perth
4 - SBS
7 - Channel 7 Perth
9 - Channel 9 Perth
10 Channel 10 Perth
28 - SBS
Newsflash from 31 August 1997 and a special Ten bulletin
