As 2003 comes to an end, another chapter in Australia’s radio history has been written – this year marked the 80th anniversary of Australian Commercial Radio.

It’s a milestone that many newspapers, television, and to some extent radio stations have ignored,but one worth marking as we come to the end of this year.

Like any 80 year old, there’s a lot of stories to tell and lessons to learn – here’s some of them.

Early Days

If you haven’t got a wireless set

And fixed your mast upright

You’re losing half the fun we get

By listening in at night

The world is mad about the game

Why don’t you start and do the same…

Those lyrics of a popular dance tune 1920’s shows the immediate impact of radio. Australians were crying out for the entertainment that the radio set could bring them and even in those days were ‘early adopters’ of technology they thought would enhance their lives.

There’s conjecture as to when the first official broadcast began. There’s no doubt the station was 2SB in Sydney. Some people mark it as the 13th of November, while others have recorded it as the 23rd of November. In any event it was a momentous occasion as listeners were treated to a concert-featuring soprano Miss Dorothy Dearing. Several Sydney theatres had installed receiving sets to allow patrons to hear the broadcast. By coincidence, Dorothy Deering’s granddaughter, Kate Dundas, works in radio today – she is Head of the ABC’s Music Radio networks.

Two weeks later 2FC started in Sydney, but in terms of an inaugural broadcast, 3LO came up with a coup, broadcasting Dame Nellie Melba’s farewell performance of La Boheme (See Making Radio History chapter).

Strict government regulation almost saw radio end before it got started (things haven’t changed much). The government had introduced a sealed set scheme, whereby the listener would pay a subscription fee and receive a radio set that would be sealed to one frequency. By 1924 only 1400 listeners’ licenses had been issued, but is believed many more were listening in on crystal sets they had made.

This was abandoned in favour of categorising stations as A or B class. An ‘A’ station would be supported in part by a license fee and advertising, while a ‘B’ station would depend solely on advertising revenue. It was envisaged that the A class stations would eventually be able to relay to country areas as their revenue in part had been secured through subscription. The ‘A’ and ‘B’ class stations eventually grew into the government and commercial broadcasting sectors, although in the early days, all stations were commercial.

For many stations the revenue from advertising was supplemented with sales of radio sets and in the case of stations like 2UW who was eventually bought by major music company Palings, promoted its sheet music and gramophone records.

By mid 1927 there were 21 stations in operation, including 2GB, 2UE, 3LO, 3DB, 5DN, 2HD and 7ZL.

The 1920’s were a difficult period for radio. Poor reception and unimaginative programming hampered stations and by 1925 thousands of people mainly in NSW had cancelled their licenses. Thomas Stilley from Clovelly Rd echoed many of the sentiments at the time.

“Cut out churches, football matches, weather reports, cookery lectures, race meetings, tips to punters, lectures of all kinds, announcers’ opinions, clock and chimes every half hour, kids’ stories and lies, also pious hymn singing and let us have something worth listening to; not the doleful, dreamy drivel we have suffered for so long.”
 

A lot of soul searching was taking place particularly among the ‘B’ class stations that depended solely on advertising revenue. By the late 1920’s Australia was gripped in depression and radio had an opportunity to divert people from their problems. Sport, in particular cricket, was to play a big role in radio’s recovery. By 1930 there were 330,000 licensed sets. This figure grew to a million in 1938. In later years, when SBS television was being introduced, the network used the same strategy of gaining coverage of a high profile sport, soccer, to drive sales of new antennas and build viewers to the new network.

The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) began transmission over 12 stations on July 1st 1932. These stations had originally been A class stations including 3LO and 2FC.

At the time 2GB’s A.E.Bennett, speaking for the commercial stations said: “The ABC should be to broadcasting as the conservatorium was to music. It should be a showcase of high culture, national sentiment and civic consciousness.” Part of this civic consciousness extended to the listeners in the country. By the 1940’s the ABC had established a rural department and many children who didn’t have access to schools would listen to the correspondence school broadcasts on the ABC.

The ABC had also developed its reputation through its in-house orchestra, which became a feature of most radio stations in the 30’s and 40’s.

Golden Days

The period leading up to WW2 and through to the 1950’s has often been referred to as The Golden Days of Radio. Names like Jack Davey, Bob Dyer, Roy Rene ‘Mo’, George Wallace, Smoky Dawson will bring many memories for people who lived through that era. Radio was a major influence in the lives of all Australians.

With World War 2, newsprint had become scarce, so advertisers looked to radio to sell their message. As a result they poured hundreds of thousands of pounds into the development of Australian radio programs, which in turn gave secure employment to actors, writers, engineers and producers. Before WW2, many radio dramas were made in the US (media cultural imperialism is not a new phenomenon), but the war made it difficult to import overseas radio serials, so serials like Superman, Tarzan, and Night Beat had Australian talent putting the programs together. But not everything was imported and many locally produced serials like Dad and Dave, Blue Hills and Search For the Golden Boomerang also became very popular.

Advertising wasn’t very subtle either with program titles often having the sponsors name associated with it.

There was Jack Davey’s Dulux Show, The Lux Radio Theatre, The General Motors Hour and The Cashmere Bouquet Show to name a few.

Advertisers also needed advertising agencies and two of Australia’s largest at the time J Walter Thompson and George Patterson became major players in the radio game and influential enough that they could make or break a station. These advertising agencies made programs on behalf of their clients. One of the biggest was the Colgate-Palmolive Unit, which produced programs like Pick a Box, Quiz Kids and Calling the Stars. Recently Harold Mitchell said advertising was going back to this kind of thinking – ‘owning’ a whole program and incorporating product placements into the show.

Initially many of these top rating radio programs were broadcast on the Major network, a group of independent stations that pooled their resources together to make broadcasting programs with a national sponsor an attractive proposition. The stations within the network could choose which programs they decided to take. This made it difficult for non-Major network stations, as they had to depend on local sponsors. Out of this style of radio syndication the Macquarie Radio Network was born and soon became a huge force in Australian radio.

There was programming for just about everyone. There were soap operas, children’s adventure serials, family serials, radio plays, comedy and variety, sport, music and the most popular form of entertainment Quiz Shows. For the advertisers quiz shows were great as the product gets countless mentions and for the listener at home, they can compete against the question and the contestant, taking pride in the fact they’re able to answer it. The kings of these quiz programs were two of the biggest personalities of this period, Jack Davey and Bob Dyer.

By 1955 a McNair Anderson survey reported in Broadcasting in Television found that 40% of shows on the Macquarie Network were quiz shows and 37% of programs on the Major Network were quiz programs.

The war provided women the opportunity to work at the ABC as many of the male announcers went off to war. Women worked as announcers, newsreaders and in the sound effects and drama department. By the end of the war the ABC had established its own news service.

The coming of Television

Back in the 1920’s people would often crowd around a shop window listening to this new novelty called the wireless. A generation on, they were still crowding around shop windows, but this time they were watching radio with pictures. Television came to Australia in the year of the Melbourne Olympics 1956 and, as expected, caused a shake-up of the radio industry. It didn’t happen immediately as only 5% of Melbourne homes and 1% of Sydney homes owned a television set in the early years.

Soon advertisers who had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into radio over the years looked to television as a way of visually getting their message across. For companies like Kellogg’s who sponsored the Adventures of Smoky Dawson between 1952 and 1962, continuing with radio became financially unviable, as most of their competitors like Sanitarium had embraced television.

The serials which the previous generation had grown up listening to eventually faded out and block style programming became a format more suited to TV than Radio.

Many radio production houses like Hector Crawford made the transition to television, as did the writers, producers and many of the actors including Gwen Plumb, Bud Tingwell, Gordon Chater and Leonard Teale. A number of radio personalities including Graham Kennedy and Bert Newton made a successful transition from radio to television becoming household names across Australia.

There was one interesting experiment during this period, and that was to simulcast Bob Dyer’s hit radio quiz show, Pick-A-Box. This commenced in 1960 and finished in 1971.

One of the impacts television had on radio was the demise of the children’s session. Radio stations held the children’s session in high regard because if the children were listening to a particular station when father came home from work, then the likelihood was that the radio would remain on the station for the rest of the night.

Television had brought a number of changes to the radio industry, but as they say, one fader closes and another one opens.

Rock N Roll Radio

Just as vinyl records had replaced 78’s, radio stations started looking to replace their current declining audiences with younger ones. Much of the influence in this period came from the United States with stations adopting Top 40 formats and branding their announcers like a team of pop stars. One of the first to do this was 2SM with The Good Guys, a concept that spread to other stations across Australia. The emphasis was on giving people more music in a language that only young people could understand.

Competition to get the first airplay of an overseas song was at times pretty fierce. Announcers prided themselves on the fact that the Qantas stewards would touch down and taxi the record to the station to have it played. Soon the announcers were just as famous as the artists they were playing, with a number of them having groupies hanging outside the radio station. Being a DJ was cool as people like Ward ‘Pally’ Austin, Brian Henderson and Gary O’Callaghan found out. Gary O’Callaghan has just finished his final program at 2UE this week.

The announcers were influential in bringing local artists to the airwaves. In particular Melbourne’s Stan Rofe developed a reputation as someone with an ear for talent and more often than not, exposure on his show guaranteed good sales. This was the same in Sydney with John Laws’ program. As Australia was in the grip of Beatles mania, Bob Rogers managed to live out every person’s fantasy and travel with the Beatles. He was affectionately known as the 5th Beatle. Laws this year celebrated his 50th year in radio; Rogers, now in his 70s, has signed on for more years at 2CH; and Stan Rofe died in May this year.

A big contributing factor in the popularity of radio during this period was the radio itself. Gone were the days where you would sit with the family in front of the wireless the size of a television set. Radios had become portable. You could listen to in the car, at work or on the beach, just about everywhere and have a personal rather than a group relationship with your favourite DJ.

Talk radio

1967 proved a big year for the ‘talk show’ genre. In America Phil Donahue commenced his television talk show Donahue and, in Australia talkback radio was introduced at 3AW. In the era of the Vietnam War, there was lots to talk about and early personalities at the forefront of all this were John Pearce, John Laws, Barry Jones, Terry Lane and Ormsby Wilkins.

The timing couldn’t be better for talkback, with Australia undergoing the huge social change that would be a hallmark of the 1970’s. It was the era of standing up to authority and speaking your mind and soon the authorities were taking notice, particularly of how they can exploit this thing called talkback to sell their message to an ever increasing audience. Importantly it’s a message that is unedited, unlike television that will use a grab and a newspaper that will select a few quotes. Paul Keating once said: “Forget the Press Gallery, educate John Laws and you educate middle Australia.”

The importance of talkback is best reflected in times of crisis, be it bombs, Bali or bushfires. There are also many lonely people in city and country areas and for them participating in talkback is like inviting friends into the home each night. This has been evident in the midnight to dawn shifts where a number of stations have formed listener clubs for people to get together on a social basis. Recent figures show that talk is more listened to than music overnight.

Earlier this year ABC Melbourne presenter Jon Faine gave a talk at the University of Melbourne on talkback radio, where he described his idea of the ideal form of talkback:

“The ideal form of talkback for me is when callers turn out to be the very people you would arrange an interview with if you could find them. If we are talking heroin-injecting rooms – a reformed junkie calls in, followed by a woman who lost a daughter to the drug. If we are talking about the war, the caller on line 1 has a brother fighting in the gulf and the bloke on line 2 was in New Guinea in World War Two and thinks not enough is done for veterans, neither then nor now, line 3 is an Iraqi refugee who came here after the last gulf war and so on.

They tell their personal stories and connect it to the policy issue. It beats talking to politicians and academics all day every time. We are exposed to ideas and people we otherwise could never meet, whose stories would not be told.”

FM Radio

FM is to radio what colour is to television. It was introduced to Australia in the mid 1970’s with the establishment of fine music stations 2MBS and 3MBS. It wasn’t until 1980 that commercial radio had it’s first FM station. As time went on the production and announcers became slicker and the audiences started to build, with many of the announcers they had grown up with in the 70’s, now on 2DAY, FOX and MMM. By the end of the 1980’s FM stations started to dominate the ratings.

For a number of stations like 2UW, 3DB and 3KZ who have all had a rich history on the AM band, FM was the way of the future and those stations took the opportunity offered by the ABA to convert to the FM band and in the process re-invented themselves.

The story of how Sydney’s 2WS moved to the FM band and took almost all of its listeners with it is one of the great marketing success stories of the modern radio industry, but many stations which made the transition did not have as much immediate success as 2WS and FM did not deliver the revenue rivers that they were expecting amidst the main game which was being fought by the rival Austereo and Triple M networks at the time.

Community radio

Community broadcasting was introduced in the mid 1970’s. Today there are hundreds of community radio stations, each serving their local community and giving a voice to those who normally wouldn’t be able to get their message across, like the Aboriginal community and ethnic groups.

Many professionals working in the media today got their start in community radio including: Director of ABC Radio, Sue Howard; Getaway presenter, Catriona Rowntree and Nova 100’s Dave Hughes, Kate Langbroek and Dave O’Neill who presented a similar program for years on 3RRR in Melbourne.

Community radio provides access and empowerment for people who would not normally have the opportunity to present programs on the other two major sectors in Australian Radio – commercial and national stations.

Today

The 1990’s saw great structural change within the commercial radio industry as networks started to form. This was in part due to a change in the law allowing a company to own both an AM and FM license in the same market. Current media legislation under consideration in the Parliament may have similar far-reaching effects on the future of Australian broadcasting in the same was as the 1990s amendments allowed business consolidation to occur at that time.

The widespread use of satellites these days has meant programs can be more easily and cheaply syndicated across Australia and stations have taken advantage of satellite technology and digital audio storage developments to syndicate and hub programs from a central source to their regional stations.

In 2000, while cricket was coming to terms with the match-fixing scandal, radio was coming to terms with it’s biggest scandal – cash for comment, where a number of talk radio announcers and stations were investigated over payments made for favorable editorial comments. The main focus of that scandal, and the resulting ABA enquiry, fell on 2UE’s John Laws and Alan Jones. As a result the codes were tightened up and announcers now have to declare their interests.

Women, who now hold executive positions within many radio organizations, have made some of the biggest gains in the Radio industry in recent years, and young announcers now go to radio schools rather than learning on the job in the mid dawn shift as they did in the past.

Radio is 80 years old and faces some big challenges in the years ahead.

There is the question of the digital radio trial and what benefits there are for listeners and stations; the competition from cable news channels in providing immediacy; but as always the biggest challenge is providing the listener with programming they will keep their dial switched to.

It’s not a new problem, as this excerpt from the ABC annual of 1939 shows:

“Just as modern psychology has discovered the problem child (not to mention the problem parent), so has modern radio discovered the problem listener? The problem listener is the indiscriminate dial twiddler who refusing to consult his programmes, makes constant complaint if he is unable to get exactly what he wants, when he wants it.”

If you have some reminiscences of the past 80 years of Australian Radio, or views on where the next 80 years will take us, you’re welcome to contribute to this week’s forum topic by nominating your ‘Radio Dream Team’ and telling radioinfo readers why you chose them (click below).