Before streaming services offered endless choice, before audiences could binge an entire series in a weekend, and long before the smartphone became an extension of the hand, there was television.
For generations of Australians, the arrival of television was transformative. It changed the way families spent their evenings, creating a shared popular culture in which viewers could experience the same programmes, personalities and historic moments together.
It is this formative period of television that Australian author Ian Collis explores in his new book, Retro Television, a richly illustrated journey through the first 25 years of the medium and its extraordinary impact on Australian life.
Retro Television looks back to a time when television was still regarded as the ‘new medium’ and the television set was rapidly becoming the centrepiece of the Australian living room. What began as a technological novelty soon became an essential part of everyday life, bringing entertainment, news, sport and international culture into homes across the country.
Collis charts that evolution through a combination of archival photography, rare behind-the-scenes images and meticulously researched stories, creating a vivid portrait of television in its formative decades.
The book’s international television landmarks include such enduring favourites as I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch and Little House on the Prairie, alongside coverage of one of the most remarkable broadcasts in television history: the 1969 Moon Landing.
For audiences watching from Australia, these moments demonstrated television’s extraordinary ability to collapse distance and turn events taking place thousands of kilometres away into shared experiences. But Retro Television is equally interested in the personalities and peculiarities that made television such an entertaining part of Australian culture.
Among the more memorable stories is an encounter involving Countdown host Molly Meldrum and Prince Charles. While in London, Meldrum told the future King that he had seen “your mum”, prompting the rather more formal response: “Are you referring to Her Majesty, The Queen?”
It is precisely these kinds of stories that give television history its human dimension. Beyond the programmes themselves, television was about the people who appeared on the screen, the families watching at home and the increasingly familiar rituals that developed around the nightly schedule.
There was a time when missing an episode could mean missing it altogether. There were no catch-up services, no recording libraries sitting in the cloud and no algorithms suggesting what to watch next. Television happened at a particular time, in a particular room, and audiences largely watched together.
That shared experience is perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the history Collis revisits. Television did not simply reflect popular culture; it helped create it. It introduced Australians to new ideas, accents, fashions and personalities while simultaneously creating a distinctly local television culture of its own.
Retro Television offers an opportunity to revisit that era through the photographs, programmes and personalities that became embedded in the collective memory. For readers who remember those early decades, it is an invitation to rediscover a familiar world. For younger audiences, it provides a fascinating glimpse of a time when television occupied a very different place in our lives.
In an age of seemingly limitless choice, Collis’s celebration of television’s first 25 years is also a reminder of something that has largely disappeared: the shared television experience.
Retro Television by Ian Collis is published by New Holland Publishers and is available from all good book retailers including QBD Books.
Image: Retro Television – courtesy of New Holland Publishers