TV Magazines (not TV Week)

Bring back What’s on Weekly

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Or TV Times, TV Guide, TV Hits, TV Star, TV Scene, TV-Radio Extra, TV News, Television Preview and there may have been a few other failed ones which I don’t recall.

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O/T but TV Scene in Victoria went for 62 years, not exactly a failure but ultimately a victim of changing media

I remember TV Star, that one came and went very quickly. Was a spin off or maybe a replacement of trash mag Star Enquirer.

Yes, TV Star was a replacement for Star Enquirer and they tried to mix the worst of gossip magazines and a TV guide.

I remember looking through issues of those trashy mags at the newsagents and thinking “What the Hell?” but never actually bought them. Now all the women’s magazines are like this. :joy:

TV Star wasn’t as trashy as Star Enquirer but it was a poor man’s TV Week. Don’t think it even lasted a year? I have a couple of issues only rescued from it’s brief publication.

Some issues do appear on ebay occasionally

I’d be curious to see what it was like. I have kept some copies of TV Week since the 1980s and some of the content is just hilarious today.

I wish I had kept a few of TV Week/TV Times from the late 70s which I selectively bought with my pocket money, back then.

I had kept a few TV Weeks during the 1980s, mostly because I’d inevitably use them for pictures for school projects etc, so while some of them still remain they are fairly well butchered. I used to keep the mags too because I used to do mock schedules… gosh if only I had a forum back then to publish them. I wish I’d kept some of them too I reckon they’d be hilarious now.

In the early 80s I had managed to rescue a single copy of TV Week from 1978 that had got mixed up in mum’s cupboard of old Womens Weeklies and for years and years that was my only 1970s magazine. I treasured it but it too became a victim of some school research vandalism!

I didn’t start collecting the magazines in earnest until the 1990s

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My collection started when I found a mint condition copy of TV Week that had been thrown out with hard rubbish at the retirement village across the road. It was a “special edition” from the previous year’s Logie Awards night.

So my obsession started from there and I have kept the one or two special Logie Awards editions from every year after that. I’m pretty sure I have every year.

Also had quite a few other copies with TV shows I loved on the cover but in a moment of madness and frustration, I chucked thrm all out when my study had been overrun by old magazines.

See, I also had quite a few TV Times, TV Guide, TV Soap, Smash Hits, Countdown, Rolling Stone, Spunky (remember that music mag?)… Also, had a few imports from America like Us Weekly (before it became gossipy), Soap Opera Digest, Entertainment Weekly and What’s on Television. Also s lot of imported Pop Pix and Smash Hits from Britain in the 80s before the local edition was launched.

Then there were early editions of FHM, Ralph and Max, before I got better :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: and started buying GQ and Men’s Style.

I stuck mostly to TV magazines although i have a wrinkled copy of Countdown magazine here from 1989. I used to buy Smash Hits very occasionally and Who Weekly when it was new and not a trashy celeb mag that it is now.

I used to hang onto country editions of TV Week from going away at Christmas as it was always a novelty to see a country listing, so a lot of the issues i kept particularly from the early 80s were December/January issues. Used to do the same too with TV World and TV Day magazines which were inserts into the Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day respectively.

Yes, in the early days of Who were quite good and I bought it most weeks at one stage. I remember quite a few other guys bought it too in those days but when it went gossipy, they gave up.

Did they ever try out a TV guide in WhoWeekly as well or was it just highlights?

They did for a short while. Victoria and Tasmania was combined into the same listings

Yeah. I thought so. The TV guide must have been one of those ventures that didn’t last very long.

I think they also had a strong affiliation with America’s Entertainment Weekly where they carried some of their big stories and a section titled “Entertainment Weekly”. Which made sense since they had the same owners as People, which is Who Weekly’s counterpart.

This was all prior to trashy gossip mag stage. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Anyone have any articles etc. that could post of Who Weekly, I don’t recall it ever being anything that gossip.

They used to have plenty of articles about newsworthy or interesting people without resorting to vacuous trash. A lot of it was syndicated content from sister magazine People in the US but there was heaps of local stories too

Yes. It seemed to carry more actual interviews and stories about people in the news during that week.

Not the sort fake news stories you get today that are apparently attributed to a “close friend” or “reliable source”.

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Here is a sample of the TV listing from May 1998 with Victoria, Tasmania and South East SA combined:

And less than 12 months later, April 1999, it has been reformatted to just a metro guide, no mention of regionals:

And it appears that by 2000 the TV guide was gone completely

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The version from 1998 was a tight squeeze. I was remembering that highlights format from 1999 which didn’t look as bad but was very brief.

Thanks for that.

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Following on from some special editions of TV Week, it looks like Who Weekly is joining them with some of their own special editions. I wonder if this is the influence of Emma Nolan who was the editor of TV Week.

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As long as it doesn’t become another Home And Away love fest :wink:

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Not actually a television magazine, this is the guide in the Fairfax throwaway Canberra Chronicle also known as The Queanbeyan Age over the border.

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