Television Comments

Introduction of Television

The Australian broadcasting industry was not quite as backward as it might seem from the late date of the first public television broadcasts in Australia (1956).

In fact, experimental broadcasts began as early as 1929 with the first broadcast licence being issued in 1934. Trial broadcasts were conducted in Brisbane but were curtailed with the outbreak of the Second World War.

Following the War, political wrangling over the type of television system (PAL or NTSC), whether there should be only a government service, only a commercial service or both and what restrictions there should be on the who could hold a broadcast licence, delayed its introduction for over a decade.

The catalyst which finally got television broadcasting off the ground in Australia was the staging of the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956. However, the Games were not the live television event we tend to imagine today. There were no satellite links, fibre optic cables or even co-axial cables linking Melbourne to anywhere else. Even in Melbourne, there were only about 10,000 TV sets. The vast majority of Australians saw the 1956 Olympics on the cinema newsreels, not in TV.

The 1960 and 1964 Olympics were seen on television. (There were over 600,000 TV sets in Australian homes by 1960,) But these were broadcasts of film taken a day or so before and flown to Australia. The first live Olympic broadcast in Australia was of the 1968 Games in Mexico City.

Maverick

from Michael powers

This show had a large cast of regulars and recurring characters, including three brothers and a cousin.  Only Kelly, who came on in the eighth episode, lasted the run of the show, and worked both with Garner and his later replacements Moore and Colbert. Garner was indeed the only original lead but the producers discovered that it took a day and a week to shoot an episode and that they were gradually falling behind, so they came up with the idea of a brother with a separate production crew to rotate with Garner, putting them both together every so often.  Garner was so popular that he felt safe in leaving his contract in order to go into movies, which worked in the wake of a famous court battle. Colbert came in at the end of the next to last year of production and only filmed two episodes, dressed in Garner's outfit and called "Brent" instead of "Bret."  Colbert's remark to the studio heads at the time was, "Put me in a dress and call me Brenda but don't do this to me!"  In the final year, the producers rotated new episodes shot with Kelly with very early episodes featuring Garner or Garner and Kelly.  It's a consistently good series, but some of the shows from the first two or three years are miraculously good, and Garner's performance is widely credited in America with having altered the tone of the late fifties and early sixties.

The Mavis Bramston Show

from Sarah Rasdall

My mum and dad (janette craig and eric rasdall deceased) were part of the creative genius that was the mavis bramston show. weekly they would all gather in our loungeroom with dad at the piano and brainstorm ideas. Mum is NEVER mentioned which really bugs me as she was big in that day. She was Miss NSW, she starred in The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and numerous tv shows and theater productions.I'm trying to preserve the memory of my parents. Please help me by adding them to your site.

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