Molly Meldrum

Countdown: appointment television that changed Australia

At 6.30pm on this day in 1974, Countdown made its television debut. Perhaps it didn’t change Australia overnight – that really happened on 1 March 1975, when Skyhooks heralded the dawn of colour transmission in Australia with a special midnight broadcast – but it’s safe to say music television would never be the same again. This […]

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Michael Gudinski 1952-2021

For more than 45 years Michael Gudinski, who died on Monday aged 68, was a dominant, domineering, polarising but above all passionate figure in Australia’s cultural landscape. He lived and breathed Australian music. Everyone who met Gudinski had a story to tell about him, not all of which are printable. What is indisputable is that life

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Champagne (music) television

Last year’s debut of The Set on ABC television – a house party style music variety show, with the tagline “live music has a new home” – was an attempt to plug a gaping hole in the national broadcaster’s programming: for a long time, live music had indeed lacked a home on our television screens. The gap

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Molly: the mini-series

How to sum up the life and times of Ian “Molly” Meldrum? If you think four hours is an extraordinary chunk of airtime to devote to a television biopic on the cat in the hat, you probably didn’t grow up in the 1970s and ’80s. If you did, you almost certainly grew up on Countdown,

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