ABC 90th birthday: from Countdown to Roy and HG – our favourite shows and moments.

Extract from The Guardian 

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

As the national broadcaster celebrates the anniversary, Guardian staff recall programs and moments that shaped us.

As the ABC celebrates its 90th birthday, Guardian staff share some favourite moments. From left: Please Like Me’s Josh Thomas, Countdown’s Molly Meldrum and The Bill’s Trudie Goodwin.

Guardian staff

Thu 30 Jun 2022 03.30 AEST

Last modified on Thu 30 Jun 2022 03.31 AEST

The national broadcaster, the ABC, is marking its 90th birthday this year, with a special live event going to air on Thursday.

To mark the milestone, we asked Guardian staff to nominate their favourite moments and programs from ABC television, radio and the digital era – things that brought their families together, made them laugh or kept them in touch with Australia while overseas.

Here are some of our favourite ABC moments. Share yours in the comment section below, and we will reproduce some of them in another article.

Countdown

Countdown on Sunday nights was must-see TV, gathering at whichever household would tolerate overexcited tweens/teens in their living room, talking over each other during the show, then dissecting the acts afterwards before revisiting yet again at school on Monday. What a window it was into a glitzy world far from our coastal suburban lives.

Countdown enticed some of us into lifelong music nerdiness, beyond the general titillation with lurid pop fashions displayed by many schoolmates wafting around on talent nights, exhibiting the sewing skills of indulgent family members. Less predictably, those fashions provoked regular water-fights on mufti days, between the girls clearly visually aligned with either Team Sherbet or Team Bay City Rollers, during which we neutrals with broader (or at least less divisive) tastes cheered/jeered from the sidelines.

Countdown was king (though Monty Python was the court jester).

Viv Smythe

The Goon Show

Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan during rehearsals for The Goon Show in 1968 at Thames Television studios in London. Photograph: PA

My family has always been rusted-on ABC listeners and watchers. My Melbourne-based parents’ radio seemed to have only one station, ‘3LO’ as it was then called on the AM band, or just 774 these days.

There was one exception. At noon on Saturdays, we’d move the dial to the other ABC station, 3AR, or Radio National as it is now, at 621. There we’d get half-hour reruns of The Goon Show. The comic mayhem was made for radio (although the musical interludes perhaps less so). The Goon Show had been broadcast through the 1950s by the BBC. The irreverent humour, which took on the British establishment of that era, somehow resonated with Australian audiences a couple of decades later (with ABC apparently broadcasting The Goons up until 2012). It’s not surprising that the creators and members of Monty Python – something of a visual version of The Goon Show – would cite the radio program as a major influence on their work.

Peter Hannam

ABC Grandstand

ABC Grandstand saved me on a backpacking trip and is now a regular when I go overseas.

I was a few weeks into a long trip a few years ago when I really started missing home. The Ashes were on and I had been following along on some liveblogs. But I realised that I should be able to get the radio on my phone. The long bus trips and endless fields just melted away as I listened to Jim Maxwell from the other side of the world. I’ve kept doing it whenever I’m overseas and there are games on. I listened to most of last year’s Brisbane Test while working in my grandpa’s garden in Sri Lanka.

Josh Nicholas

The Bill

The cast of The Bill pictured on 22 December 1988. Photograph: Douglas Doig/Getty Images

Watching The Bill on a Saturday night on Channel Two was a weekly ritual for my family. When my brothers and I were little, we were only allowed to watch the first of the double-episode hour; it was a big deal when we got old enough that our parents didn’t bundle us off to bed at 9pm and we were allowed to stay up to watch both. We spent so much time with Jim and June and Tosh, it felt almost like they were our aunties and uncles.

Years later, we extended family cop-show viewing to Tuesday nights with Police Rescue – I still remember the anxiety of watching that episode involving the man trapped under the oil tanker. So many police procedurals in my childhood thanks to ABC programming – it was probably the foundation of my addiction to crime drama today.

Stephanie Convery

Roy & HG’s State of Origin

‘Rampaging’ Roy Slaven (John Doyle) and HG Nelson (Greig Pickhaver), pictured in 1993. Photograph: Patrick Riviere/Getty Images

Whether you considered their sometimes risque, always freewheeling commentary a distraction or the only thing that made watching rugby league bearable, there’s no denying a State of Origin call by HG Nelson and “Rampaging” Roy Slaven was an experience. In their 1990s pomp they coined player nicknames that still stick – endearingly, in the case of Glenn “The Brick With Eyes” Lazarus, and somewhat regrettably for poor old “Backdoor” Benny Elias. Roy and HG arguably hit their peak in the famous 1995 series, when a Queensland side coached by Paul Vautin claimed an unlikely series sweep without the stars blacklisted during the early skirmishes of the Super League war (meaning my favourite nickname, Michael “Three Knees” Hancock, was watching on from the grandstands). No matter: Fatty’s Nevilles became household names in Queensland two times over thanks to sobriquets like Debbie Does, The Penalty Puller and The Far Side, and Roy and HG had etched themselves into Origin folklore.

Kris Swales

Peter Greste

In 2015 I was a panellist on the Chaser’s Media Circus, and we’d just finished a studio recording with a live audience. My head was buzzing with puns and all manner of superficial things, when comedian Craig Reucassel showed journalist Peter Greste a text. Greste had been freed from an Egyptian prison earlier that year, and was still fighting for the release of his colleagues Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, and the text held the news that Fahmy had been released.

Greste’s intense, eloquent celebration and immediate and emotional concern for Mohamed (we would find out later that he had also been pardoned) was so striking – especially in the context of an inherently silly pun competition.

Tory Shepherd

Please Like Me

Please Like Me, nowadays, is shorthand for an entire generation of gay men whose lives were touched, changed and broken by Josh Thomas’s era-defining series which managed to ping-pong between hilariously offbeat comedy and devastating tragedy, often within the same scene.

But discovering it as a 16-year-old on my parents’ sofa – late at night, obviously, with the volume down low – made me feel like I was the only one privy to Thomas’s secrets and admissions, the awkward sexual encounters and eddies of twentysomething dread always rippling in the background. So much so that I ended up modelling my entire (freshly out) identity off Thomas’s in the last two years of high school, which made me think I was “special” and “cool” and “communing with queerness” when in reality I was probably “neurotic” and “annoying”. Thank you Josh Thomas for granting me a personality via the show which – a decade on – remains a landmark of queer programming.

Michael Sun