ABC Radio’s PM program celebrates 40 years on air this week. The program’s first presenter was John Highfield, and the current presenter is Mark Colvin. PM’s first Executive Producer was Tim Bowden. The ABC has now put up a 40 year history page about PM on its website.

A special feature will mark the anniversary on Tuesday, and the ABC’s website will have audio from past programs, but most of the historical audio of the first program has been lost.

On Monday, July the 7th, 1969, the first edition of PM went to air. When it began, it was one of only four current affairs programs of its kind on radio and television in Australia.

Tim Bowden (pictured right) told an earlier anniversary program in 1999 about his approach to producing the first programs:

“When PM started I wanted to have the program presented by journalists. John Highfield was the first presenter and he alternated with a New Zealand guy called Laurie Bryant. I also was determined that if a major story broke, that we would run as long as necessary to cover that story. In other words we wouldn’t be constricted to these little sort of 90 seconds or two minute bites.

“The other thing we had to our advantage is that we started to broadcast to the ABC’s third network, the regional network, so we picked up an enormous audience through all those transmitters all the way through Australia, some of whom I might add had been rather starved for current affairs because they didn’t’ get AM and all they got was news, news bulletins read by announcers, written by print journalists essentially for their sub-editors who were also ex-newspaper men. The tape recorder was an instrument of the devil for the news department in those days.

“So, it was very kind of straight down the line, sort of structured stuff, and I wanted the freedom to react to the breaking stories of the day, which of course we had. I also wanted to reach into the region, into South East Asia, where the ABC had fortunately a lot of correspondents. The major newspapers of those days, I think, still concentrated on New York, Washington and London. But we had people in Singapore, in Kuala Lumpur, in New Delhi, in Saigon and, of course, things were hotting up, you know, in that sense too.”

Since then the program has continued to wrap up the major current affairs stories of the day for the last four decades.

Happy birthday PM.