ABC TV – One Year On

On a certain Friday in March 1960 ABC TV began broadcasting in South Australia for the first time. Having begun with official ceremonies, American comedy and Westerns, documentaries, locally produced music programs and one solitary English drama, how much had a day’s broadcast changed one year on?

Although the station’s actual birthday was 11 March 1960, the same day in 1961 fell on a Saturday. Rather than compare a weekend’s viewing with a weekday’s, let’s take a look at the closest corresponding Friday’s programs from 10 March 1961.

The first thing to notice is that the hours of broadcast have dramatically increased. Instead of that initial 7pm start the listing begins at 12, albeit with 2 hours of test pattern. This was followed at 2pm by Woman’s World, an Australian produced variety show hosted by one Mary Rossi. Mary was a bit of a legend. In 1961 she had been hosting the show for four years when she took a ‘temporary retirement’ to have her 7^th child.[1] By 1968 she had 10 children![2]

At 2.30 a 20 minute For Schools program focussed on sculptors, before another nearly 2 hours of test pattern and music. Then two programs for children filled the time between 4.45 and 6pm – Kindergarten Playtime and Children’s TV Club. Kindergarten Playtime was an Australian produced children’s program that had started in 1959.[3] It is said to be the first Australian TV program aimed at pre-schoolers and is a pre-cursor to the better known, and still running, Play School which nearly every Australian child grew up with since 1966.

The ABC Children’s TV Club[4] was the television version of the popular Children’s Hour on ABC radio that ran from 1954 right through until the early 1970s. That radio show had begun life as The Argonauts Club which first broadcast in 1933! From what I can discover this variety show for children presented a number of cartoons and other programs during its run. Felix the Cat and The Shari Lewis Show were both shown in the early 60s, but what on earth The Peep (Peep) Show that is listed on this particular Friday is, I have no idea.

At 6pm the kids’ stuff slides into family viewing with Glencannon[5], a British produced sitcom about the crew of an old cargo ship, the Inchcliffe Castle. Thomas Mitchell starred as the ship’s chief engineer, Colin Glencannon. Movie buffs would recognise Mitchell from a huge number of classic American films including Lost Horizon, Stagecoach, Gone With the Wind and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. The show co-starred Patrick Allen, a very well-known face and voice from decades of British television and film, as Bosun Hughes. The episode listed for ABS2 on this day is ‘Hair of the Dog’ which appears to be the show’s first episode.[6] The archival status of this show is a little unclear, however, eight episodes were found in a private collection by Film is Fabulous in 2025. After FiF sold the prints for the collector, some of those episodes were screened in the UK by the archive TV channel Talking Pictures TV.

At 6.30pm the next show to air is a fascinating piece of TV history. The Adventures of Long John Silver starred Robert Newton reprising his role from the 1950 Disney produced movie of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Four years after the Disney film, American producer Robert Kaufman[7] brought Newton back to film a sequel to Treasure Island titled Long John Silver. It was filmed in colour in Australia in 1954. Kaufman then went on to film 25 episodes of The Adventures of Long John Silver in Australia and also in colour. Yes, believe it or not, colour television was being made in Australia two years before this country even had its first television channel!

The live broadcast Sports Spotlight followed at 6.55 before the News, a newsreel and Weather brought us to 7.30pm and comedy with Where’s Raymond? This American sitcom, starring dancer Ray Bolger, was already old in 1961 having first aired in the US in 1953.[8]

Drama came at 8pm with Stage Seven, a half hour American anthology series that was produced between 1955 and 1956. This week’s episode, Debt to a Stranger, starred Gene Barry, Phyllis Coates and Victor Milan, and concerned a US Border patrolman hiding an illegal Mexican immigrant from a ruthless rancher. Clearly not a lot has changed in US / Mexico relations in the last 60 years.

The ABC produced current affairs program Open Hearing then ran for 30mins until Mystery is My Business, starring Hugh Marlow as writer and private detective Ellery Queen, aired at 9pm. This was the third TV series following the exploits of Ellery Queen and it wouldn’t be the last. The best remembered series is from 1975. It starred Jim Hutton and was made by the same producers who later created Columbo.

More sport aired at 9.30 with World Championship Golf and then the evening’s entertainment was rounded out by a documentary about the Australian Black Swan and a last newsreel before station close at 10.40pm.

One year on from the start of ABC TV broadcasting in SA and the day’s viewing has had several surprises. A very healthy amount of locally produced programs, an American colour series filmed in Australia, three other American shows, and only one lonely British sitcom. This unexpected dominance of the ABC by US produced television clearly doesn’t last forever. My early memories of the ABC, starting somewhere in the early to mid 1970s, are of almost exclusively British shows. The question yet to be answered in my research is when, and how far, did that pendulum swing? 

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