Farewell to Nunawading

A significant slice of television real estate will soon be no more as the Nunawading studios that have housed some of Australia’s favourite programs and made some of our biggest stars over the past 60 years is being shut down for developers.

TV Tonight reports that current lease holder Fremantle Australia is preparing to vacate the property at the end of the month following the end of production of Neighbours and completion of a short-run series, Imposter, being made for Network Ten and UK Channel 5.

The building exterior is protected by a heritage overlay but anything inside the building and separate exterior sets that have been built for Neighbours, are expected to be demolished.

The site’s history dates back to 1963, when transport tycoon Reg Ansett secured the licence to operate Melbourne’s third commercial TV station. He purchased a 17.5 acre block of paddocks in the eastern fringe of the Melbourne suburbia. Ansett had a vision – ‘Austarama Village’ – a television studio with adjoining hotel, restaurant, swimming pool and a heliport to welcome guests arriving from Melbourne’s Essendon Airport or the city.

While it seems Ansett’s plans for a multi-function oasis out in the paddocks — as envisaged by an architect’s sketch of a proposed design, above — might have been a bit ambitious, the building that eventuated was state-of-the-art and completed well before his new channel, ATV0, launched on 1 August 1964. The building went on to win the title of Building of the Year from the Architects’ Institute of Victoria.

YouTube: Australian Television Archive

The original design allowed for four separate studios and an isolated lobby area, including toilets and kiosk, for studio audience members to enter the premises without getting in the way of operational areas.

ATV0’s opening night broadcast began with a half-hour introduction hosted by newsreader Barry McQueen and children’s host Nancy Cato, followed by the variety special This Is It!, hosted by Ray Taylor and featuring a performance by Diana Trask. McQueen then returned with Seven Wonderful Nights, a preview of the upcoming week of programs on the new channel.

YouTube: Australian Television Archive

In its early years, the Nunawading studios hosted children’s show The Magic Circle Club and later Fredd Bear’s Breakfast A Go-Go and Helen O’Grady‘s Marvellous Munchkin Show; late night chat with The Ray Taylor Show; talent quest Showcase with Gordon Boyd; musical variety with Jimmy!; game shows like Musical Cashbox and Off To The Races and situation comedies Hey You! and Good Morning Mr Doubleday. Blind Date matched eligible singles, the pop scene was covered by Go!!, Kommotion, Uptight and Happening ’70 (later ’71 and ’72), and Mass For You At Home began a Sunday morning programming fixture that continues over 50 years on, though now produced elsewhere.

In 1967, ATV0 demonstrated Australia’s first live colour telecast to station executives, government representatives and invited members of the press, assembled at Nunawading to watch the Pakenham and Yarra Glen races in colour on closed circuit television. Meanwhile, the channel launched its first morning program, Chit Chat, hosted by Roy Hampson. The modest chat show would go through multiple titles and co-hosts during its 20 year run — Morning Magazine, Roundabout, In Melbourne Today, The Roy Hampson Show, Everyday and eventually Good Morning Melbourne — but Hampson was there until the final edition in 1988.

Ralph Baker, from ATV0’s studio crew, took on the ghoulish persona of Deadly Earnest to present B-grade late night horror films on Aweful Movies With Deadly Earnest, emulating a similar concept adopted by the channel’s network partners interstate.

Into the 1970s, there was drama from Matlock Police and the adults-only series The Box. The Price Is Right was such a hit with a daytime audiences that a prime-time version was also added. Johnny Young had assembled his first Young Talent Time line-up of junior stars, and the studios hosted early presentations of the TV Week King Of Pop Awards as well as the Johnny Farnham and Colleen Hewett variety series, It’s Magic! Bruce Mansfield made the move from Nine‘s The Graham Kennedy Show to reading Eyewitness News, accompanied later by weather presenters including Briony Behets and Christine Broadway.

After the demise of The Box in 1977 came the disastrous Hotel Story — axed before the first episode had gone to air. Peter Couchman Tonight and Ernie (Ernie Sigley) provided variety, and there were outdoor games with Almost Anything Goes, hosted by Tim Evans and based on the British format It’s A Knockout. Spruiker Hal Todd and later Ross D Wylie hosted the late night movies and infomercials.

Daryl Somers and Ossie Ostrich had made the move from Hey Hey It’s Saturday for the short-lived The Daryl And Ossie Show; and the station produced its annual telethons for the Deafness Foundation. Five years after the demise of Fredd Bear’s Breakfast A Go-Go, The Early Bird Show gave us early morning cartoons and competitions and introduced us to Marty Monster. Tommy Hanlon Jnr‘s daytime talent show Pot Of Gold featured Bernard King‘s acidic appraisals of the show’s hapless contestants.

Brisbane TV personality Annette Allison came south to Melbourne in 1979 to read Eyewitness News next to Mansfield, and to co-host Everyday. Prisoner came along with gritty drama, and the studio building becoming a star in its own right, serving as the exterior for Wentworth Detention Centre, complete with fake prison signage and windows attached to the building exterior that remain there decades after the show ceased production.

Graham Kennedy stood on the studio rooftop in 1980 to announce, “You’re on top with Ten” to viewers as ATV0 made the historic channel change to ATV10. A few missteps early in the decade included The Saturday Night Show, The Ted Hamilton Show, Together Tonight and an Australian adaptation of Are You Being Served?. Holiday Island failed to learn the lessons from the earlier Hotel Story, but there was more luck with Carson’s Law, a starring vehicle for Lorraine Bayly. The change from 0 to Ten led to a revamped Eyewitness News with David Johnston and a new talent named Jana Wendt. Others to feature on the news set included Jo Pearson, Rob Gell, Eddie McGuire, Bruce McAvaney, Stephen Quartermain, Charles Slade, Jennifer Keyte, Tracey Curro and Mal Walden, as Ten presented a strong force, and some victories, against its competitors in the news race.

Perfect Match gave us a revival of the old Blind Date dating show and set ratings records for the 5.30pm timeslot, and The Early Bird Show was reborn as a five-hour Saturday morning marathon. Talent quest Pot Of Gold also came back as Pot Luck, with Ernie Sigley taking on the host role and Bernard King returning as resident judge, and no sign of softening his brutal takedowns of the aspiring performers.

It was big news when Network Ten announced that it had secured Neighbours from the Grundy Organization after the Seven Network axed it. Never before had an Australian drama series made a shift from one network to another. When the series commenced production at Nunawading in January 1986, it would start an association between the show and the studios for the next 40 years. Relative newcomers like Jason Donovan, Kylie Minogue and Guy Pearce and later Natalie Imbruglia and Margot Robbie went on from the Neighbours set to become international stars.

Young Talent Time came to an end in 1988, while The Comedy Company, The Great TV Game Show and a prime-time revival of The Price Is Right ended the decade on a light note, but gloomy times were coming with Ten going into receivership. As a result, Ten vacated Nunawading to move to smaller premises in inner suburban South Yarra, selling the studio site to Global Television as a production facility. The studios continued to host Neighbours and other programs including The Morning Show and New Faces, both with Bert Newton, Jeopardy with Tony Barber, sitcoms Bingles, Late For School and Col’n Carpenter, and later Rove Live and Thank God You’re Here.

Eventually, Neighbours would become the sole output from the studios, with significant investment made in building exterior sets around the grounds of the studio to support the depiction of the various sites of the fictional suburb of Erinsborough, including the signature Lassiter’s complex, and the backyards of the Ramsay Street households.

More pictures and stories from Nunawading over at TV Tonight.