Wide World of Sports was a ratings hit. But it wasn’t enough to impress Kerry Packer

Sigrid Thornton grew up with Australian television. Before she became a child actor at the age of 13 on Homicide, she sat glued to Romper Room and The Magic Circle Club, and was later inspired by the late Johnny Young’s Young Talent Time. She remembers her activist mother, Merle, attending protests in the 1970s for the TV: Make it Australian campaign, which demanded – and got – government mandated quotas for Australian content. So when asked to take part in Nine’s 70 Years of Television, celebrating the nation’s broadcasting history, she had plenty to say.

“We’ve still got a need to be vigilant about local productions and to be careful that we reinforce our own identity through television,” says the SeaChange star, whose bio is synonymous with Australian drama, from All the Rivers Run and Prisoner through to Wentworth. “We now have a vastly different television environment.

“It’s no longer dominated by free-to-air. On the very positive side, we have access to drama from all over the planet … But I’m very proud to have been able to track my own working journey alongside a lot of the history of Australian content on television, particularly drama.”

She credits the late, great television producer, Hector Crawford, with many of her roles. “He, along with Reg Grundy, was a maverick, a trailblazer, and an extraordinary figure.”

Retired Wide World of Sport broadcaster Ken Sutcliffe, who also appears in 70 Years of Television, didn’t own a TV set until he moved out of home, huddling with his mates outside a shop window in his hometown of Mudgee to watch this newfangled device. When Australian television went colour in 1975, he was presenting the news in Townsville.

“It struck me that, ‘Gee, sport is going to look terrific on this!’” he says. “I had no idea. I just knew it was going to be good. Sport became pure entertainment. We didn’t take ourselves so seriously. What I liked about Wide World of Sport was its irreverence. It was naughty. It was a cheeky child. It was innovative. We were putting rock ʼnʼ roll music to sporting vision. Even ABC America saw what we’re doing. Record companies were queuing up to have their records on the show – Van Halen and Jump and Elton John with Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.”

Thornton and Sutcliffe are joined in the presentation by notable peers throughout the decades – David Gyngell, David Koch, Denise Drysdale, Catriona Rowntree, Eddie McGuire, Kerri-Anne Kennerley, Patti Newton, Peter Hitchener, Peter Overton, Ray Martin, Tracy Grimshaw, Steve Liebmann and Mike Munro. The extensive line-up also includes Adam Liaw, Hamish Blake, Sarah Abo, Leah Purcell and Todd Woodbridge. All share priceless memories, as viewers and as the talent on the box.

For Thornton, her early days on set were all about single cameras and learning quickly on the job: “There was no room for mistakes!”

Sutcliffe recalls an exchange with the late Kerry Packer, then the owner of Nine*, that was simultaneously “enlightening and frightening”.

“He said, ‘How much am I paying you, Sutcliffe?’ And I told him my number, and I said, ‘I’m rating really well with Wide World of Sports with Max Walker, and we’re winning [the ratings],’” Sutcliffe recalls. “And he looked at me and he said, ‘Good. I don’t pay you to come second!’”

Sutcliffe hopes that the medium that has made him “a billionaire in memories” keeps pushing the boundaries in sports broadcasting. “Sport will always be sport. Everyone gets touched by sport. It’s just integral to our Australian psyche.”

Thornton’s “dream” for the next 70 years of Australian drama is for it to endure.

“I’d love there to be big opportunities for creatives to make more and more Australian stories, to help us with our self-identification as a culture,” she says. “I’d like there to be greater opportunities for Indigenous stories to be told through television, and for women’s stories. There are still, many, many stories that are untold. Television is still, as a storytelling vehicle, extraordinarily powerful. We must never forget that.”

70 Years of Television, a two-part special, premieres at 8.45pm on Wednesday, September 9, on Nine (*Nine is the owner of this masthead).

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Bridget McManus is a television writer and critic for Green Guide. She was deputy editor of Green Guide from 2006 to 2010 and now also writes features and interviews for Life & Style in The Saturday Age and M magazine in The Sunday Age.AdvertisementAdvertisement