The old NSW Lotteries “History” page (which thankfully can still be accessed via the Wayback Machine on archive.org) suggests that Saturday Lotto was introduced to NSW in December 2000, but the rest sounds about right.
That would be right. I was thinking it was introduced when the extra ball (45) was introduced to all lotto games. There must’ve been a period of time in NSW when Saturday lotto was 6 from 45 and Monday and Wednesday was 6 from 44.
I tend to play the games with the best odds so take notice when they change things. Rarely play Oz Lotto or Powerball because of the astronomical odds. Did purchase a ticket for tonight’s 40 million draw when I went down to the shop earlier and noticed they were changing the game yet again making it a lot harder to win. I think this’ll be my last ticket in that game.
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Sydney viewers therefore spared the chit chat of John Deeks and Debbie Phin on a Saturday night 
YouTube: oldtvhistory
We used to get Deeks on the Oz Lotto draws. Never heard of Debbie Phin.
Most of these lottery games have been nationalised under “The Lott” but NSW still doesn’t have Super 66 and I think Lotto Strike is only played in NSW.
The Super 69 joke they used to do on Hey Hey during Chooklotto was totally lost on me until I visited a Tattslotto outlet in the ACT during the mid 1990s.
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Tatts has pulled the Victorian Lotto branded games from the ACT, it seemed to happen a couple of years ago but I can’t be sure when it was, so only NSW Lotto branded games are available. As you point out, it all has the same name - The Lott.
When Nine in Sydney was still showing the Saturday Lotto draw, I seem to recall that Prime via Seven in Canberra had the draw but WIN via Nine has it in the rest of Southern NSW.
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HSV7 weekend weather girl in the 70s and 80s and later promoted to weeknights when Fairfax “revamped” the news. (Mal Walden wasn’t the only one dumped by Fairfax)
And as mentioned John Deeks sidekick on Saturday lotto
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That was strange seeing both brands co-existing in the ACT, sometimes within a block of each other. Must’ve been a nightmare for the retailers having people come in and insist on having their winning Tatts branded tickets redeemed in a NSW Lotteries outlet. It’s bad enough in northern NSW watching Keno operators try to explain to dumb Queenslanders why they can’t check tickets bought across the border or play the .50cent games in this state.
I recall Prime in southern NSW letting the Tatts draws slip through on a couple of occasions.
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The Lotto kiosk at the Tuggeranong Hyperdome, and I think the one at the Canberra Centre, sold both NSW and Tatts lotteries, as did some other outlets. There used to be a Tattslotto outlet at Oaks Estate in the ACT about 10 metres from the NSW border near Queanbeyan railway station. It’s long gone, but seemed to be popular before NSW joined the Lotto Block and started getting the big jackpots.
Sorry … gone way off topic.
I know the old QTV studios in Cairns was in Earlvile and on the Bruce Hwy but where is it and is the building still there and what is in there now
Thanks in advance
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They are still there but they are now a car dealer.
I remember staying up until the wee hours of the morning as a kid during the school holidays around 2006-2007, watching these post-midnight quiz shows on the CRT TV in my bedroom.
Quite a few of the calls were from children around my age at the time calling in. It was quite obvious that they were underage, with their extremely high pitched voices. The hosts would get suspicious and ask how old they were, and they would either say “I’m 12” or whatever and they’d get cut off with the host saying “sorry you need to be 18 to play” before the host reminded viewers that they had to be 18+ to play, or the kid at the other end would lie and say “yes I’m 18” even though it was clear that they weren’t, and the host would push on and ask for their answer, with an obvious troubled look on their face. There was a surprisingly high number of those calls, which I reckon was probably because it was during the school holidays.
The way that they found out that someone called into the wrong show is hilarious! Someone really would have had to spend a lot of time watching these shows to spot that.
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Such a weird TV fad… lasted barely 2 years all up. Surprised the networks haven’t tried them again (especially on the various infomercial channels) considering they could air them live these days nationwide without any issues.
Also the fact that Hotdog’s show was filmed in SCTen’s studios in Canberra using the old State Focus set was even more puzzling at the time.
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There are other TV “fads” which I wish had disappeared that quickly …
“Reality” TV, infomercials and watermarks to name a few,
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqJhbz1jeA Remember Edwin Maher and his famous weird pointer on ABC here in Melbourne
Robert Sangster was good friends with John Kennerley who married a Kerri-Anne. John acutually started the Lotto in NSW I belive
A report from the Sunday program from around March 1989 regarding the introduction of aggregation into Canberra.
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“Television has long been considered as a license to print money”
Oh how naive they were back in the late 80s.
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Great story.
For anyone interested in reading those Letters to the Editor in full (Re, Capital’s coverage of the Olympics and Bathurst 1000 in 1988), Trove’s archive of The Canberra Times has it covered: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/102013611/11021569
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Does anyone have a video of this? Snapped from that video above.
Even the ‘Prime Nightly News’ name isn’t something I’ve seen before. The ATN version of that package is one of my favourites - there’s a good video of it here.
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9.30
REPORTER: What happens if you end up number three? What do you do? Do you pull out or what?
BRUCE GORDON: Jump off the bridge.
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