50 Years of Television in Australia

While Steve Vizard is flying high on his tonight show, Gina Riley is being recognised for her comedic talents, and a young Peter Andre is discovered on Daryl Somers’ New Faces, but all is not well in TV land. Financial pressures have forced many shows to be cancelled and rumours are rife that one or more networks might be about to fall over.

Steve Vizard, the solicitor-turned-comedian from shows such as The Eleventh Hour and Fast Forward, has single-handedly reinvented the tonight show, with Seven’s Tonight Live the major hit of 1990. If you’ve watched American television lately, you might notice some similarities with The David Letterman Show – down to the coffee cup, a comedic nightly list of Top Tens (in Vizard’s case, sevens), the set and even the band leader called Paul (Grabowski for Vizard, Shaffer for Letterman). But for the majority of Australians, Tonight Live is fresh and new, with big name guests, stunts, live crosses to viewer’s homes and other such gimmicks.

Vizard, who will continue on Fast Forward this year, is a confident, gregarious host who seems to enjoy the show as much as the live audience. ‘It’s actually like having a big toy,’ he told TV Week. ‘Someone lets you into a studio and says, “Well, here it is. Here’s all the cameramen and all the facilities, now you make a show.”’ A national live show, five nights a week, is a tough ask for anybody, but Vizard said his theory was simply to have fun. ‘You’ve got to enjoy just mucking around with it – and I love that. I love mucking around.’

A surprising playmate on the show is the striking young newsreader Jennifer Keyte, who delivers a news update that often struggles to retain its dignity among the nightly mayhem. Not that Keyte minds, having been plucked from Victorian newsreading to a prime national role. Vizard calls her ‘the newsreader with the mostest’, and Keyte is often greeted on the set with wolf whistles and cheering – which never happened to Brian Henderson.

Vizard has been praised by critics for his performance in the first year of the show. Only a few weeks into Tonight Live, TV Week’s Lawrie Masterson enthused: ‘When you’re live to air, there’s nothing between the high wire and potentially fatal impact with terra firma. The difference between doing the two shows [Tonight Live and Fast Forward] is vast, but so far Vizard has maintained a quite spectacular balancing act.’

May: Seven comedy show Fast Forward has uncovered a gem with Gina Riley, the Melbourne comedienne and singer who has an uncanny knack for imitating people. Riley’s merciless satire has seen her portray everybody from Madonna and Sinead O’Connor to Kylie and Dannii Minogue, Paula Abdul and Stevie Nicks.

One of her most popular characters is Kerri-Anne Kennel, an outrageous ribbing of Good Morning Australia’s Kerri-Anne Kennerley. But remarkably, one of Riley’s biggest fans turns out to be Kerri-Anne Kennerley herself, who thinks Gina is hilarious and her impressions ‘terrific’.

February: Aussie actor Peter Phelps has walked out on one of the hottest jobs in US television after his role in the beach drama, Baywatch, appeared to unravel behind the scenes. Phelps left Baywatch at the end of the first season. His exit means the end of cavorting in the surf with bikini-clad former Playmates of the Year, and no more parading in front of massive US audiences.

‘Before Christmas a few of the cast, including me, weren’t happy about the way the scripts were going. I expressed my dismay about everything – which I guess is not what you’re supposed to do in Hollywood when you’ve got a job everybody else wants,’ he told TV Week. Phelps said the writers ignored his suggestions, instead leaning the series towards action–adventure and introducing a new character who suddenly ate up Phelps’s screen time.

Phelps said other Australians hoping to crack Hollywood should learn from his experience. ‘To them [TV executives], you’re just a product and they treat you like crap!’ he said.

Molly gets excited by a new face

July: He may have been beaten in the first series final of Daryl Somers’s New Faces this year, but young singer Peter Andre has turned out to be a winner. The 17-year-old Queenslander has been taken under the wing of New Faces’ judge Molly Meldrum, with the veteran Australian music personality signing Andre to his label, Melodian Records. Established to promote young talent, Melodian Records also has Indecent Obsession and Roxus on its books and Meldrum is confident Peter Andre will be a star to at least match them.

‘Peter impressed us all and he has a unique voice that can be developed,’ Molly told TV Week. ‘We want to get him to Los Angeles where the Janet Jackson style of dance comes from. It will help give him a feel for the style he wants.’

Andre had won his New Faces heat before being narrowly beaten in the final.

> A Waltz through the Hills – children’s series about two English-born, children orphaned in Western Australia

> Ring of Scorpio – mini-series about three Australian women who wind up in a Spanish jail

> Larger than Life and Col’n Carpenter – two new programs from Mark Mitchell and Kim Gyngell

> Come In Spinner – WW2 mini-series starring Kerry Armstrong, Lisa Harrow and Rebecca Gibney

> Skirts – police drama centred around a welfare-based Community Policing Squad (below)

> The Private War of Lucinda Smith – miniseries set in the South Pacific in 1914

In a spectacular turnaround, idiosyncratic newsreader Clive Robertson has gone from being thrashed in the ratings by Graham Kennedy’s Coast to Coast to swapping networks and replacing that show on Nine.

Twelve months ago, Robertson’s Newsworld on Seven was being hammered by Kennedy’s eccentric rival news service. Coast to Coast won fans across the country for its irreverent approach, where the news of the day was almost always lost in a stream of jokes, one-liners and offbeat items. It was a winning formula and proved far too hot for Robertson’s Newsworld. He took five months off after his show was axed, but then switched to Nine and is now preparing to front The World Tonight.

The new show will be a virtual replacement for Coast to Coast, which itself died quickly after Kennedy’s sudden departure. His replacement, Terry Willesee, struggled to work out whether he should try to somehow produce as many anecdotes and jokes as The King used to regularly drop on the show, or just get on with the news.

Poor John Mangos looked even more at sea, as he tried to change gears from Kennedy’s giggling sidekick to his old role as a serious newsreader. And comedienne Gretel Killeen walked after only two weeks on the show.

Kennedy’s reasons for leaving the show were shrouded in mystery and rumour, as is often the case with The King. There were reports that Kennedy had asked for a substantial pay rise that he didn’t get, that he had taken six months off for health reasons and that he has been drained by a court case battle with his former manager, Harry M. Miller.

There is now talk that Kennedy might be back on air before the end of the year with Graham Kennedy’s Funniest Home Video Show.

Embassy to continue despite Asian tensions

December: The high quality but controversial ABC drama, Embassy, is to record a second series, despite the diplomatic tensions with Asia sparked by the first series.

Set in the Australian Embassy in Ragaan, a fictional south-east Asian country, the series eventually forced the Prime Minister, Mr Hawke, to personally assure Malaysia that it was fictonal and not making fun of that country. Malaysia had suspended trade talks and cancelled any official visits between the two countries, as a protest to the perceived slight Embassy was delivering.

August: The Aussie girl who said no to a date with Tom Cruise in an ad for Australian lamb, Naomi Watts, is joining the cast of Hey Dad! as Belinda, the new girlfriend of Simon. This represents a big break for the 21-year-old former model, who previously had a small role in Return to Eden.

Watts will also be up on the big screen soon, alongside former modelling pal Nicole Kidman in Flirting, and hopes to gain international exposure through her appearance in the latest Craig McLachlan and Check 1-2 video clip, Amanda.

‘We were shooting the video at five o’clock on this freezing cold morning. It was done on the beach and we were in the water cuddling as the waves rolled in,’ she said. ‘We look passionately in love. Actually we were freezing our butts off – it was very difficult for both of us.’

December: Australian television is in its most parlous financial state since the medium began in 1956. With networks Ten and Seven now in receivership and Nine recently bought back from Alan Bond by Kerry Packer for a fraction of the price Bond paid for it only a couple of years ago, there is a real danger of a network, or networks, falling over.

The fallout from the networks’ financial plight is affecting all levels of the industry, with estimates that up to 1000 have lost their jobs over the past 12 months.

Things are particularly bad at Ten. The station often runs a bad third in the ratings and there’s not much production money around to stop the slide. In fact, in one week late last year, Ten axed Perfect Match, Body and Soul, Ford Superquiz, Australia’s Most Wanted and several news bulletins as the money ran out.

Wild about Mild?

The team that produced Mother and Son have created a zany new sitcom called Howard – The Mild Colonial Boy, to premiere on the ABC.

Set in 1878, Howard Kelly is a butcher’s apprentice and dedicated socialist in Ballarat. He wants to form an animal liberation society, but because he’s poor decides to follow the example of his famous cousin Ned and turn to crime. So Howard becomes Captain Leadlight, Australia’s least-known and most socially aware bushranger.

With a set-up like that, how could the show fail?

> Tina Turner’s Simply the Best highlights the official 1990 NSW Rugby League commercials.

> Dannii Minogue announces she is leaving Home and Away to pursue her singing career.

> Pat McDonald, who played Dorrie Evans in Number 96 and Fiona Thompson on Sons and Daughters, dies from cancer.

> It’s reported that a $20 million deal for hundreds of Home and Away episodes to be screened in Britain over the next few years saved the soap from getting the chop.

> Craig McLachlan and Rachel Friend become engaged, after meeting on the set of Neighbours. Fellow Neighbours stars Stefan Dennis and Gayle Blakeney also become a couple in real life.

> Singer Brian Mannix from The Uncanny X Men makes a guest appearance on Skirts, appearing as a drunk.

> A third Daddo brother, Lochie, hosts the ABC’s Countdown Revolution. His brother Andrew was dropped from hosting the series a year earlier.

> Rebecca Gibney wins an AFI Award for Best Actress in a mini-series for Come In Spinner.