Welcome to Just the One Channel. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Gary. I’m a writer, editor, historian and actor with more hobbies and interests than are good for me. I have a deep fascination with the history of television and what I think of as Archive TV. That interest, like me, had its beginnings in a country South Australian town where for the first 11 years of my life we had literally one television channel, ABS Channel 2. This was a government run television channel produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the Australian equivalent to the British BBC or Canada’s CBC. ABS2 began in Adelaide, capital city of South Australia, in March 1960 and was the third ABC TV channel to launch in Australia after Sydney, New South Wales and Melbourne, Victoria.
While there was no relay station in those early days to boost reception as far out of Adelaide as my home town, the fruit growing town of Loxton around 256km East of the capital, my Dad constructed a huge tower on our orange block that raised the TV aerial high enough to catch the capital city broadcasts of ABC TV and occasionally the two original commercial stations, NWS9 and ADS7. In 1971 the new relay station, ABRS3, brought the ABC directly to the Riverland [1] and for the first seminal years of my TV watching life that was the only channel.
The predominance of British programs and, to a lesser extent, Australian programming in the first decades of Channel 3 was definitely formative for young Gary, and in many ways explains this blog. It is nostalgia for the shows I remember seeing as a kid – like Andy Pandy, The Magic Roundabout, Playschool, The Cisco Kid, Doctor Who, The Goodies, Special Branch, Callan – that began my research obsession into Australia’s TV broadcasting history. Later, seeking out other programs of a similar era – Public Eye, Sergeant Cork, Red Cap, The Expert, Doomwatch, Space 1999 – threw new fuel onto my TV history fire. I will be examining all manner of early ‘Archive’ television in this blog with a focus on what TV was like in those early years, particularly for an Australian country kid like myself.
If you share an interest in TV from the 1960s and 70s – and occasionally beyond – with a distinctly British inclination, then perhaps this blog is for you. If you are deeply scarred as I was by the realisation that vast amounts of our TV history has been lost or destroyed with little hope of recovery; if you are fascinated by the differences in viewing choice between government run TV stations and their commercial competitors; or if you are keen to get a taste of what a typical evening’s television was like in March 1964 (for example), then maybe you will enjoy the kinds of things that I hope to share here on Just the One Channel. I hope you’ll take the time to tune in and find out.
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