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Happy birthday to The Guide

The Guide chalks up 30 years as a print guide and compiles a list of top shows for every one of those years.

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Congratulations to The Guide, which chalks up 30 years as a print guide as part of the Sydney Morning Herald.

In this ever-changing landscape that is television, print and online, it’s encouraging that small screen criticism still has a valued place. As we were recently reminded, it’s great that the audience still values a print guide, and even notices it when it is absent.

Congrats to Greg Hassall, Michel Idato (pictured) and co. for enlightening us with their views, but special mention must go to Doug Anderson, who has written for The Guide since it launched in May 1982.

To mark the occasion, The Guide selects one show for each one of its thirty years.

These are shows deemed to give us a snapshot of our box and our audience tastes. They not that “some great shows, including Seinfeld, Kath & Kim, The West Wing and Paper Giants, didn’t make the cut – not for any failing of their own but due to an abundance of choice for the year in question.”

Personally I would have liked the list to have confined itself to Australian productions, but it’s still a good read.

Here are the choices for the last 10 years.

2002: The Wire
2003: Arrested Development
2004: Love My Way
2005: We Can Be Heroes
2006: The Chaser’s War on Everything
2007: Mad Men
2008: Underbelly
2009: MasterChef Australia
2010: Downton Abbey
2011: The Slap

Agree? Disagree?

You can read the rest here.

David Knox has previously filed for Fairfax television guides.

5 Responses

  1. Nice list, a few shows on there that I’ve missed over the years, and this has made me now want to go back to them.
    The statement (when referring to Burkes Backyard) “Its success teaches a powerful lesson in patience and consistency – two qualities now lost to commercial TV” rings so true.

  2. I used to read the Guide religiously on the way home from work. It covered so many aspects of media that you couldn’t get info on anywhere else.

    David – Is there a site that has details on Radio? I think it was Sue Javes who did it in the Guide and I’m interested in why some broadcasters on AM have been replaced/dismissed.

  4. I love The Guide. I used to read it religiously (and back when I was younger and didn’t care about the news, The Guide was the only part of the newspaper that I read, haha). It had great articles, reviews and it even had stuff about radio and (for a while) technology. Happy birthday guide!

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