'Let's Go Shopping! ’ Tony Barber and Philip Brady on the Golden Age of Australian Game Shows

Something quite extraordinary happened in the early 1970s when Tony Barber was recording the last episode of the day for his daytime quiz program Temptation for the Seven Network. As a contestant pressed the buzzer and correctly answered the question that won her the game, she slumped over the desk. From where Barber was standing, it was great television: ‘I thought: Too much excitement; she’s fainted. Quick, get her some water!’ he tells me. But, as a nurse from the audience came to assist, it became apparent that something more serious had befallen the contestant. ‘People were feeling for pulses; she was being resuscitated,’ Barber recalls. ‘The studio was cleared. It was awful.’ In retelling the story, however, Barber admits that he finds solace in the knowledge that the contestant literally died happy.

It was Bruce Gyngell – head of Seven at the time – who suggested to program packager Reg Grundy that Barber host his new game show, after seeing him in a popular television commercial for Cambridge cigarettes in the mid 1960s. The ad had Barber walking smartly down Martin Place, Sydney, whistling a jingle. Born in Lancashire, England, in 1940 and immigrating to Australia in 1947, Barber had swapped a career in the navy for one in show business, getting his start as a radio announcer in Western Australia before moving to Sydney. There, he competed in talent quests while working as an advertising executive for an agency. As he relates in his searching 2001 autobiography Who Am I?, in casting himself as the ‘Cambridge Whistler’ for the agency, he ‘suddenly had an identity in the entertainment world’: ‘Club agents