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Sign of the TCN times

For the first time in 50 years the entrance to Nine's Sydney headquarters has undergone something of a facelift.

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For the first time in 50 years the entrance to Nine’s Sydney headquarters has undergone something of a facelift.

The historic TCN-9 sign has been replaced with a new one, to better represent the current Channel Nine look and feel.

Nine’s Willoughby head office has been in operation since 1956 and is the longest running television station in Australia.

Meanwhile GTV9 at Bendigo Street Richmond is about to face its final live telecasts in the coming month, ahead of a shift to Melbourne’s Docklands.

11 Responses

  1. Yes, massive changes taking place, all mostly within the last 10 years, last great years of the networks was nearly 30 years ago now. The old haunt where Number 96, Arcade & Simon Townsend’s Wonder World sets sprawled on the floors of the huge studios of TEN 10 has been demolished a couple of years now, don’t know where 10 has gone – probably a 2 x 4 shopfront somewhere on Oxford Street & ATN 7 has moved to inner city Sydney from Mobbs Lane where Country Practice was made.
    Down in Melbourne, HSV 7 left its Port Melbourne studios, the Roger Climpson This is Your Life & Mary Hardy haunt a few years ago & moved to an ugly post, post modern throwup at Docklands, Nine is about to buldose its revered history & move into something similar, but the shock rumour for me is that Global TV’s Neighbours studio – the old ATV 0 studios Nunawadding, the arguable former nerve centre of Vic & probable national tv production – The Magic Circle Club, Young Talent Time, The Box, the almighty ‘Prisoner’ & of course ‘1981’s Holiday Island’, the set, reincarnated as ‘Lassiters’, is due to be sold off & its huge acrage ripped & redeveloped as residential. That leaves Ripponlea – ABC ABV 2, famous for Bellbird, Adventure Island & of course the mighty ‘Countdown’ hanging by a thread. I know that ABC ABN 2 Sydney rationalised some years ago & buldozed the old Gore Hill studios, home to Mr Squiggle, Play School & The Norman Gunston Show, but dynamiting the Countdown studio, now that would be sacrilege!

  2. Personally I like the new sign.

    The old one had degraded with age and it needed a facelift. I understand some people might miss it as a piece of history, but i personaly never felt of it as such, unlike Television city.

  3. There used to be a giant wasp’s nest hanging underneath the C for years
    It always used to give me an ironic chuckle going in there to work every day.

    I feel sad about Bendigo Street. You got a real sense of history walking in there. As you did at Ripponlea. And as you did at Mobbs Lane in NSW.

    You’d think that Grollo/Meriton et al (the developer they sell it to) would have the foresight to preserve the studio space and convert it into some kind of a luxury pad. For a premium, of course…

    At least the eventual owner when seeing all those classic TV clips of Graham Kennedy/Don Lane etc could think to themselves… “hey! hey… I live there!”

    In L.A. you can hire out Frank Sinatra’s place for parties etc.

    I dunno, surely there’s something creative that can be done with the space rather than just putting a bulldozer to it.

  4. Well, another part of television history gone. The current management of Nine in particular are just are bunch of Sydney-centric clods with no respect for the past and no clue of the future. Ironic given their CEOs pedigree – I would have thought he may have cared.

    I await with relish the time when they’ll all be overrun by the oncoming storm of the real promise of the internet, when everything will stream via one box and the viewers will dictate everything they see.

  7. 🙁

    I used to smile every time I walked past the ‘TCN9’ letters to start a days work. It felt like I was a part of history. That was the last thing linking the past with the future.

    The ‘Golden Age’ of working television is now truly gone. 🙁
    They’re all just creative banks now. How upsetting.

  8. I know that time waits for nobody, but the final days of ‘Television City, Melbourne’ are going to be pretty inglorious.

    A tv special, dvd box set, souvenir book, anything, would be apt to mark this occasion. Sadly it seems that the only ones who would give a damn are either dead or not worth listening to or caring much about these days, at least by those in management.

    I suspect there will be media scholars and fans who will one day years from now consider this time similar to when they sold off the backlot of 20th Century Fox and MGM — an overstatement for sure, but considering the amount of live television and film production made at the Bendigo St studios, it would be the nearest thing Australia’s had to a facility in that league.

    The scuttlebutt is that everything at Bendigo St has been barcoded for either future sale or donation to museum and archives (Victoria’s Performing Arts Museum perhaps).

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