0/5

Australia’s very first soap opera

What was our first soap opera and which channel was it on?

2015-09-13_0121

Australia’s first soap opera was Autumn Affair, according to a list of “TV firsts” published by Fairfax today.

The series launched on Sydney’s ATN-7 on October 20, 1958.

Wikipedia notes each episode ran for 15 minutes starring radio personality and Blue Hills star Queenie Ashton. The series failed to secure a sponsor and ended in 1959 after 156 episodes.

It was followed by The Story of Peter Grey (1961), another Seven Network weekday series which aired in a daytime slot, which ran for 164 episodes.

The first utterance of the F-bomb on Australian television was Graham Kennedy’s notorious crow call in 1975. It resulted in the Australian Broadcasting Control Board ruling he must not be broadcast Live.

You can read more on other TV “firsts” including same-sex kiss, bare breast, condom ad and female Gold Logie winner here.

8 Responses

  1. If any soap fan didn’t know that, take time to find yourself a copy of Super Aussie Soaps by Andrew Mercado. It is the bible to all aussie soaps, good and bad, and a very funny read. Just check out the Holiday Island chapter.
    I got my copy at the bargain table at Angus and Robertson’s for 10 bucks and it is a treasured part of my bookshelf, worth every cent!!!

  2. Doing a list of “firsts” can be fraught with danger, as we saw with news reports about the transgender guest on The Project the other night.

    Kennedy wasn’t quite the first to do the F word on Australian TV. Mary Hardy let it rip — twice — on The Penthouse Club during 1974*. The first was when she was doing a gag with a buzzer and buzzing out curse words, and one word got out. She was banned from TV for a week for that.

    Second was when she was doing a karate stunt with a pile of bricks that she’d been led to believe had been weakened. She smashed her hand on the bricks and reacted accordingly. Again banned from TV but allowed back only after an impassioned apology and a swell of public support.

    She might not have been the first but she beat Kennedy to the punch.

    * according to her interview in Listener In-TV, February 1975

      1. I remember at the time of the crow call in 1975 a few journalists writing that Graham had been doing the crow call for years up till then. So Gra Gra probably got the F word on TV long before 1975.

  3. “It seems strange that the very first thing broadcast on Australia was not either (a) sport…”
    Actually, it was sport. The 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games was broadcast as a “test transmission” by all three television stations operating in Melbourne at the time.

    1. The Melbourne Olympics were only a test transmission for GTV9, as ABV2 and HSV7 were both officially launched before the Olympics started. (In ABC’s case they opened Channel 2 just four days before the opening ceremony of the Olympics)

Leave a Reply