ABC Perth to celebrate 50 years

Hot on the heels of ABC Adelaide celebrating its golden anniversary, ABC Perth will mark 50 years on Friday 7th May.

To mark the occasion, ABC Perth is bringing together past and present staff for an ‘afternoon tea’ reunion, which pays homage to the ABC tea ladies who had the reputation of knowing everyone in the building, before they were phased out in the early eighties.

On its Opening Night, there was 15 minutes of speeches from dignitaries, before the first ABC News bulletin was read by James Fisher, followed by the station’s only western, Tales Of Wells Fargo, then the madcap US army based Phil Silvers Show, the BBC series Portraits of Power, British courtroom drama Boyd, QC. Next at 9.30pm was a live twenty minutes studio show followed by a sporting session. The first night concluded with a prize winning ABC documentary titled Up With Guba which was the story of New Guineas’ development. The station closed at 10.35pm.

In its early days many programs for ABW2 were produced daily from the Adelaide Terrace studios with up to 700 people working during the sixties and seventies.

In March 2005 staff began to move to the new shared facilities in East Perth bringing radio and television closer together.

Commercial stations now rely heavily on the ABC for the hire of OB facilities. Since Seven’s Studio One has been mothballed, the big OB van dispensed with and the annual Telethon moved to the Perth Convention Centre, its necessary for Seven to hire the ABC’s modern outside broadcast facilities. This makes good economic sense when few large OB’s are being regularly scheduled by the commercials, other than the football.

For more info on the reunion on May 16 visit ABC and WATV History.