The golden age of TV and radio footy
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My dad is an immigrant from Slovakia and my mum grew up in North Shore Sydney. Though neither of them had the slightest interest in Australian Rules football, I cannot remember a time when footy was not an integral part of my consciousness. The fact that I was the youngest of six kids (five boys) growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne probably had a lot to do with it. The children of the predominantly migrant parents were all very keen to embrace the indigenous game.
My eldest brother Stefan was something of an artist. While in primary school, he created a mixed-media picture of a footballer kicking a ball which adorned the living room wall possibly from before my birth. (Stefan is 10 years older than I am.) And I can't remember our backyard not having at least one footy, plastic or leather, sitting or being kicked in it somewhere.
My brothers quickly discovered the phenomenon of Scanlen's footy cards and by the time I was four, collecting and swapping became became part of our lives. Even Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Sun Valley Chips had footy cards on offer.
Though my parents were not amongst those who embraced the game, they knew that they at least had to support a team. We lived in St Albans. Although we were half-way between Windy Hill and the Western Oval as the crow flies, our train line went through West Footscray, so they picked the team that many of our area did – Footscray. (Dad was proud to be “working-class”, so that also might have been a factor.)
Despite our parents' choice, we kids were more influenced by what the TV showed in choosing our clubs. Amongst the six of us, we had five different teams, and not one of them was Footscray! Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon and St Kilda, glamour teams of the time, were all represented. (Stefan chose North Melbourne, an underperforming, under-supported team at the time. He always did seem to do things out of step with the rest of us.)
I chose Essendon, mainly because one of my older brothers barracked for them. In later years though, my Collingwood brother and I began to feel the pull of the local team and we became diehard Doggies.
Before we were old enough to attend matches, the television was our footy focal point. I have warm, fuzzy memories of Saturday night TV in winter. We had one of those classic three-in-one 'Admiral' brand sets. In those days, pre- the colour era—TVs weren't just TVs, they were magnificent pieces of display furniture. Ours had a dark walnut finish, and the actual unit was twice as wide as the screen, which took up the right-hand side. On the left were the speakers, from which a beautiful, deep, rich sound emanated. Above the speakers, the top left of the unit had a lid which lifted like the hood of Dad's XL Falcon. Under the lid were a turntable (with four speeds—78, 45, 33 and 16!) and the radio controls, complete with an imprinted listing of station names. I knew the important ones for footy—3KZ, 3AW and 3LO—or 3GL if your team was playing Geelong. 3DB and 3UZ were also in the mix, but you didn't want your team's game broadcast on either of those two because you got about 10% footy coverage and 90% racing.
After a Saturday afternoon of listening to the game, it was great to be able to revisit it—and all the other games—via the footy panel shows and the replays. When I was a kid various stations covered the footy on a Saturday night, but until some time in 1971 (when I was six), the most important of those was Channel 2—the ABC. And there was a very good reason for that: until 1971, Channel 2 was the only channel on our TV that worked!
So my earliest television footy memories consist of grainy black and white images of teams in vertical stripes, hoops or sashes. It didn't matter that there was no colour; it was easy to tell the difference between North Melbourne and Collingwood if they were pitted against each other. According to our TV, Collingwood's stripes were black and white, and North's were grey and white. Simple—no clash strip required. (Take note, Adrian Anderson's replacement.)
Sometimes the image would “ghost”—a second, fainter image of the action would appear as a shadow to the main one. In our house what this meant was that there was a plane going over our house, either just about to land or having just taken off from the nearby newly built Tullamarine 'Jetport'. (It's true, they called it a jetport. Check out maps 4 and 5 of Melway edition 4—the first Melway Dad ever owned—if you doubt me.)
But before the replay started, there was a half-hour panel show. Hosted by Harry Beitzel, it featured ex-players such Thorold Merrett, Doug Heywood, 'Chicken' Smallhorn, Geoff Leek and Doug Bigelow. Doug Bigelow is the character who sticks most in my mind. Because, if my memory serves me correctly, he almost always wore a chequered jacket. There was nothing inherently wrong with that. It was the fashion of the time after all. But whenever Doug came on screen, his jacket would shimmer and the telly would buzz…loudly! When the director switched back to Harry in his plain suit there was no buzz. Then back to Doug in his houndstooth jacket and “bzzzzzzzz”! It used to drive us insane. We could never understand why no one at the ABC let him know that chequered jackets were a no-no.
Each of the six panel members would have been at one of the six VFL games that day and each would give a brief precis of the game, and discuss highlights, incidents and best players. If that game was to be shown on the replay, then you might get footage of a goal or a great mark as the game was dissected by the panel. If your team had won, you'd really look forward to soaking up the description of how they were a side “going places” or a “genuine chance for this year's flag”.
Then came the replay, usually the last quarter of the featured game. If that included your team and they'd won, all the better. But we didn't really care. We just wanted to lap up as much of the game as we could. You couldn't afford to look away, though. If you missed a great mark by Jezza or a snapped goal by Bartlett you wouldn't have the chance to see it again that night. This was long before VCRs and replays from six different angles in super slo-mo. Televison stations generally had a single fixed camera on the grandstand wing of all grounds and all of our childhood viewing was from that angle.
When Dad finally got around to getting the “TV man” to come around and adjust the old Admiral so that we could get channels 7, 9 and 0 (the predecessor of Channel 10), our footy horizon expanded exponentially. Channel 7 had a Saturday night panel and replays as well! And then there were more replays on Sunday morning (only after church, of course), followed by a magnificent three-hour event known as World of Sport! We were in footy heaven.
And when World of Sport was over, if your homework was done and the weather was fine, it was down the street to the school oval for a kick-to-kick session, pretending you were Jezza, or McKenna or Cowboy Neale. But if it was raining you might twiddle the TV knob to Channel 0, where there was this other strange brand of footy being played. It looked similar but the jumpers were different and the commentators sounded strange. This was the VFA. A whole other footy comp—wow!
But I never really got into the VFA. It wasn't a bad thing to watch if there was nothing else to do, especially if Port Melbourne's Fred Cook was kicking a bag of goals and/or getting into a fight. But it was the Saturday arvo radio broadcast and the Saturday night panel and replay that I loved the most.
Mum and Dad still live at that house near the airport (they gave up on the 'jetport' name in the end). The XL Falcon is long gone. Dad doesn't drive any more. But in the back of the garage there's a long cabinet, with a dark walnut finish. It's just an empty shell now, used for storage. But I often go and stand and stare at it. I close my eyes and remember the beautiful acoustics of it as the Captain and the Major gave us 3KZ's game of the day, the not so beautiful greyscale images of Hudson, Tuddenham and Wade, and the buzz of Doug Bigelow's infernal houndstooth jacket.
Comments
Brian Membrey 7 December 2012
... aaahh, yes. The good old days of black and white when even striped shirts were a no-no because of the shiver effect, but yet we happily watched Collingwood v North without any thought of an away strip. And let's no forget the early HSV7 telecasts with Mike Williamson and Alan Gale "that ball must be like a greasy pig, Butch!" and "Jack Hill the blind miner would have seen that one, Butch!"
Rob Scott 20 December 2012
we have the same garage!
Andrew Gigacz 7 January 2013
You're welcome to visit mine on your next trip back to Aus, Rob!
FootyMaths Institute 15 March 2013
I recall watching the same things Andrew... Channel 7's and the ABC's football was compulsory. That said, I always had a thing about Doug Heywood. As a young lad, to me he seemed like a grumpy school headmaster, never smiling, always deadly serious.
Sundays were World of Sport on 7 (with the almost always overlooked 'Gentleman' Jim Cleary, who I thought was just a delightful grandfathery type), followed by the wrestling on 9 with Ted Whitten (and occasionally before that 'Point of View'... that we called 'Point of Head' in reference to the balding pate of the host, Bob Santamaria), and then it was on to the VFA with Phil Gibbs on channel 0. Loved the VFA for its different jumper combinations.
My father also used to work in the back yard on Saturdays... always knocking something together, radio on... "Over to Skeeter Coughlan at Moorabbin".
No wonder my footy career never got passed Primary school... too much TV!
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