Like No Other Business: 60 Years Of OZ TV

By Bob Phillips

The author, Bob Phillips, commenced his career in Showbiz as a Carnival hand, worked as a “Spool Boy” & Projectionist for the Hoyts Cinema chain and moved to Television to become Graham Kennedy’s Floor manager on “In Melbourne Tonight” & later Producer of “The Graham Kennedy Show”.

Over the years he worked as either Producer or Executive Producer with TV icons such as Bert Newton, Daryl Somers, Don Lane, Mike Walsh & Steve Vizard.

Bob also managed & represented many of Australia’s top variety performers, and in 1988 together with his actress wife, Judy Banks, he established Australia’s first Television & Media museum - TV World on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.

He is also a regular guest TV historian on ABC Radio.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Feb 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369490105

Bob Phillips

Bob Phillips, PhD, is a licensed counselor and the director at large for Hume Lake Christian Camps, one of the nation's largest youth camping programs. He is the best-selling author of over forty books.

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Copyright © 2023 by Bob Phillips.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Cover design Sylvia Blanchard

Photo by Anika Mikkelson on Unsplash

& assets from Freepik.com

First published July 200560

Reprinted: 2005, 60 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 9th ed 2020

by STUDIO CITY PUBLICATIONS

285 Bungower Road, Moorooduc, Victoria 3933

Printed by KINGSTON DIGITAL

417 Warrigal Road, Cheltenham, 3192 Vic., Australia www.kingstondigital.com.au

Our thanks to BARRIE BELL, PETER ENGLISH, ALAN WINDLEY & the major Australian TV networks for photographic and other material

Rev. date: 08/03/2023

Xlibris

AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)

AU Local: [phone] ([phone] from outside Australia)

www.Xlibris.com.au

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

1.     PROGRESS PISSY PICTURES

2.     ALL THE KING’S MEN

3.     RINGSIDE AT CAMELOT

4.     JUDY AND THE BEAR

5.     DON’T SHOOT MY COWS

6.     THE DAYS OF WINE AND SIGLEY

7.     THE RECORD MAKERS

8.     RADIO DAZE

9.     IN SEARCH OF ELVIS

10.   UP THE RIVER WITH MOOMBA

11.   HEY HEY IT’S HOLLYWOOD

12.   THE HIGH PRIESTS OF AUSTRALIAN POP

13.   THE GOOD SHIP VIZARD

14.   SOMETHING BIG . . .

15.   THE ENTERTAINERS - GOOD MATES AND COBBERS

16.   CHILDREN OF THE SUN

17.   TWO LIVING EXHIBITS

PREFACE

The following saga, for want of a better word, is in no way intended to be an autobiography, a serious history, or even an exposé, but merely a portrait of the Australian entertainment industry from the early ’50s to the present.

It recalls a great many of the real characters of the Oz entertainment industry during this era, some anonymous (to protect the safety of the author!) but none fictitious. In fact, a few who were products of the infant Australian star system became living legends in their own time, names like Kennedy, Newton, Packer, O’Keefe, Lane, Henderson, Farnham, Somers, Young, The Seekers, Faiman, Vizard, Walsh and many, many more.

The writer was fortunate to work closely with majority of these identities over a long time and shared their triumphs, disasters, laughs, and tears in an industry that truly is like no other business!

x

Sometime during the ’60s, on a wintry grey Melbourne day, I wandered into the offices of H. F. Fox and Co, chartered accountants in Queen Street.

In an inner office, the firm’s principal, Henry Fox, and a couple of other grey-suited accountant types were huddled in discussion, closely examining the biggest bra I’d ever seen!

It belonged to Sabrina, the busty blonde sex symbol from Britain, who had taken Australia by storm.

The point (or points!) under discussion obviously related to problems the firm was having convincing the deputy commissioner of taxation that Sabrina’s main tool of trade was, in fact, her tits and the possibilities of special dispensations that could be claimed for special custom-made brassieres and related breast-displaying equipment.

Apart from my own fascination with this piece of ladies’ apparel, I was intrigued by the conversation and later asked Henry Fox about their likely chance of success.

Henry (and he really was a wily old taxation fox!) just smiled and said, My boy, this is a very peculiar business . . . It’s laughingly called show business, and it’s LIKE NO OTHER BUSINESS!

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Hoyts Circle Essendon’s very own Picture Palace

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The home of Progress Pissy Pictures West Brunswick

CHAPTER 1

PROGRESS PISSY PICTURES

THE SPOOL BOY

My very first rather limited glimpse into any form of showbiz occurred in very early school years, when my dad, Alf, took me on an annual pilgrimage to the children’s Christmas party at the Masonic Lodge.

I was a somewhat guilty participant, being a good Catholic schoolboy in a mixed-marriage situation, a fairly common but nevertheless socially unacceptable scenario in the pre-rock-’n’-roll and pre-television days of Robert Menzies Australia of the early ’50s.

The lodge organisers had provided an amazingly bad array of clowns, magicians, and frighteningly inept fire-eaters; one retired early in the event, looking as though he had barely survived a Mekong Delta napalm attack!

But as the performers worked their bums off, I was totally mesmerised by only one person—the projectionist, who battled away at the rear of the hall with an ancient Bell and Howell projector and a dubious collection of kids’ flicks, ranging from Felix the Cat to an early model Tarzan.

I took little notice of anything on the screen but was fascinated with the clattering machine, the shaft of light, and the superpowers the operator seemed to have. Back at home and for weeks after, I played projectionist with an improvised projector made from tin cans, shoeboxes, etc.

Sounds absolutely pathetic! But a decade later, I was working part time for Hoyts Theatres at the old Circle Essendon as a spool boy, which had about as much status as the circus hand delegated to clean up after the elephants!

Hoyts at that time was the major cinema chain in Australia and had given little thought to the horrendous impact the small-screen wonder television would have on the motion-picture business. Every major suburb in Melbourne had a rather grand Hoyts Picture Palace, and they packed them in night after night, with many families having a regular Friday- or Saturday-night booking at their local Regent.

I desperately tried to get a regular job with Hoyts but had to be content with relief assistant operator’s work at some of Melbourne’s best and worst hardtops, as they were known as distinct from the newly popular drive-ins. Whilst still at school, I would often get a call from Hoyts head office only an hour before showtime to grab a cab and race over to locations, such as Hoyts New Malvern, The Trocadero Footscray, or the old Waratah in Ascot Vale. Sadly, most of these grand old movie houses vanished with the advent of TV.

It appealed to me greatly that the cinemas created a wonderful night-worker culture of projectionists, usherettes, and managers, all of whom seemed to be mad party animals, and you didn’t have to get up in the morning!

There were some amazing characters, including Harold, assistant projectionist at the old independent Regal cinema in Essendon. Harold, to most of his teenage admirers, was the nearest you could get to Hollywood—in Essendon anyway. He had little real aptitude or technical knowledge for the job but possessed somewhat of a James Dean personality and combined with a sleek black utility, became quite a hit with the local chicks. I now know why they called them pickup trucks!

I really did want to be a projectionist more than anything else and wrote off countless letters to theatre managers all over Melbourne. Eventually, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, an old operator called Joe, projectionist from the Moonee Cinema in Puckle Street, Moonee Ponds, Dame Edna territory, arrived unannounced at home and offered me a permanent job—could I start tomorrow?

I was totally elated, but alas, the parents, Alf and Glad, said no and were adamant I get a real job. Years later, when I was appointed producer of The Graham Kennedy Show, my father was still concerned that it was really only seasonal work—he was spot on.

Shortly after this unhappy Sunday afternoon, I left school and reluctantly took a cadetship with Chas Steele & Co., a printing and packaging company in Brunswick—absolutely nothing to do with show business but wonderful grassroots people I learnt much about life, human beings, and how to make chicken noodle soup pouches!

By this time, television had jolted the cinema industry like a blow from a giant jackhammer. Graham Kennedy was already King of Melbourne television, Brian Henderson’s Bandstand was booming, and a TV dinner in front of Disneyland on a Sunday night was the norm.

Hoyts and the other major cinema chains retaliated with giant screens, enormous mag-optical sound systems, CinemaScope, and practically every other kind of scope, but within months, majority of the old Picture Palaces were closed—some to become service stations, supermarkets, and bingo halls. The movie business in Australia was dead, killed by the mini-screen David television!

Never again would those grand old theatres display the house full signs they carried so proudly in the boom times of the ’30s and ’40s.

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Threading up in the early days pre-

television and multiplex cinemas

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Hoyts Waratah

Early 1930s, Ascot Vale, Melbourne

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Regent Theatre, Fitzroy

Once a grand, stately Picture Palace, then

Australia’s first tele-theatre for Channel 7, now

sadly demolished for a retail shopping centre

The remaining cinemas suffered staff cuts, reduced screenings, even the ignominy of toilet-paper rationing, and a Hoyts edict that only every second globe in the front of house chasers should operate.

I was called out to a relief shift at the old Waratah in Ascot Vale one Saturday night, and at 8:00 p.m., our only patrons were an elderly couple sitting in the front stalls. At 8:15, the manager went down to them, very nicely apologised and explained there would be no screening tonight.

For the Waratah, it was almost time for the last-picture show!

During this period of gloom and despair, and continued work at the printing factory, I was contacted by Harold Davison, an executive at MGM in Melbourne and a somewhat colourful industry identity, who offered me some part-time work at a tiny cinema he had an interest in called The Progress at Reynards Road, West Brunswick. Affectionately known by the locals as Progress Pissy Pictures, the old Progress hall had never been much of a hit, even in the pre-television days, but had now been given a new lease of life by Harold and his partners Frank Nairn, an executive with Westrex Sound Systems, and Ted Stephens, a real character and seat-of-the-pants old-school projectionist who taught me much, good and bad!

The Progress was fairly poorly equipped, old C&W machines not far out of the silent era, but it had great atmosphere and personality. I loved the place and really set out to impress my new employers. The senior projectionist was a great guy, Harold Youdan. At that time, the local film industry seemed to be full of Harolds. He was an excellent technician, and I think also worked for the Blind Institute. I suspected Harold may have had some slight visual impairment himself, and on our very first shift together, being the eager beaver, peering out of the projection box, I suggested to Harold that the picture was slightly out of frame. Harold squinted out into the darkened theatre and seemed to agree and suggested that we rack the old projector with a giant worm gear at the rear of the machine, whilst I watched the image on the screen. I think I’d called to Harold just a fraction more twice, when without warning and a sickening crash, the old projector crashed forward, sending John Wayne and a posse of screen cowboys off the screen and straight into the front stalls.

For a few seconds, our young patrons were part of the movie, before the front shutter of the old machine disintegrated, hurling wood, steel, and thousands of feet of 35 mm classic John Wayne footage right throughout the projection box. It really was a scene straight out of Peter Sellers’s Smallest Show on Earth, and so ended my very first day at PP Pictures!

Eventually, the hissing, booing, and catcalling subsided, and Harold and I settled into a happy, professional working relationship for some months, until Ted Stephens, the old pro projectionist, took over and to some extent, left most of the operating duties to me.

Ted knew every trick in the book, including how to burn the carbon arcs down to a perilously low length, where other less-daring projectionists would discard them rather than risk losing the picture.

He also had a great fondness for beer, and I quickly became accustomed to drinking vast quantities of warm Fosters in paper cups in the often semi-tropical heat of the Progress bio box.

In such conditions, Ted and I had our share of disasters. One Saturday night we were starting to relax into the final session of the day, after a horrendous matinee and intermediate screening, and were into the second reel of Charles Chauvel’s Australian classic movie Jedda, a fairly serious piece of Australian indigenous culture.

It was standard practice for the assistant operator, me, to show the projectionist the reel number on the next spool prior to threading up. From memory, Jedda had seven spools, and somehow or another, in our fatigued state, perhaps influenced by the warm Fosters, I managed to thread up reel 5 instead of reel 3.

After the changeover, I fairly quickly realised the mistake, and a lively debate ensued, during which, by some unfortunate circumstances, reel 4 ended up on screen. At this stage, our front-of-house manager, Harold Davison, burst into the box and demanded to know, "What the f— you guys are doing?"

On that night, Jedda ran for approximately 50 minutes longer than its scheduled running time and left a capacity house audience totally bewildered.

Nothing against Jedda herself, but I never, ever, grew fond of that movie!

I wouldn’t say we were constantly pissed in charge of a picture theatre, but on one hot summer Saturday night, we were certainly in excess of .05.

The Progress projection box seemed to be awash with hot Fosters, paper cups, and fish and chips. For some long-forgotten reason, an impromptu party had developed as the King and I rolled on to a far-less-than-capacity audience in the auditorium, more and more people climbed the steps to the projection box, including one unrecognisable gentleman in a dark suit, who announced that he was from the Department of Health and immediately asked Ted and myself for our papers—cinematograph operator’s licence.

Harold Davison and Ted did their very best to charm the bureaucrat, but his final words were, indeed, ominous: You guys are booked.

I went home absolutely devastated; 18 years of age and my career in the motion-picture industry was over.

Too terrified to tell my parents, I was in agony for a week, eventually turning up at the Progress the next Saturday in great trepidation. But nothing was said that Saturday or the following Saturday. On the third week, the paper cups and the Fosters reappeared, and I gingerly broached the question about our visit from the Department of Health.

Ted Stephens just laughed and said, You won’t be hearing from him, pal . . . He was caught soliciting a bribe down the road at the Empire!

After many months at West Brunswick, I began to work a number of shifts at the Merlynston Cinema, which was vaguely tied to the Progress. Again, similar equipment, a similar operator, and some very funny moments.

On occasions, we would actually switch entire film programmes between the two cinemas. This, of course, was a widely accepted practice with Hoyts and the larger cinema chains, particularly in the early days when multiple prints of big box-office successes were hard to obtain.

However, with the larger cinema chains, this practice, which is rarely employed today, was very well organised and employed a number of motorcycle riders, all travelling virtually with one reel apiece. The idea being that two theatres in the chain would screen the one print in the same evening but run their support programme either before or after interval.

Unfortunately, we were not quite as well organised and had to rely on volunteer switchers with a wide variety of transport.

On our very worst night, both theatres unknowingly scheduled the support programme first! The following confusion was indescribable, during which, one of the audience members had to be enlisted to run the second reel of the feature from Merlynston to West Brunswick in what looked like a converted milk cart.

Another frightening night at the Merlynston theatre occurred when because of some transport mix-up, our main feature had to be replaced at the last moment. Sadly, it was Blackboard Jungle, and the gentle folk of Merlynston did not take kindly to this deprivation.

Suffice to say