Wiping - Australia

Australia

Australian broadcasters did not gain access to videotape-recording technology until the early 1960s, and as a result nearly all programs prior to that were broadcast live-to-air. Very little programming survives from the earliest years of Australian TV (1956–1960) as kinescope recording to film was expensive, and most of what was recorded in this way has since been lost or destroyed.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) erased much of their early output. Much of the videotaped ABC program material from the 1960s and early 1970s was erased as part of an economy policy instituted in the late 1970s, in which old program tapes were surrendered for bulk erasure and reuse. This policy particularly targeted older programs recorded in black-and-white, leading to the loss of many recordings made before 1975, when Australian television converted to color. The ABC continued erasing older television output into the early 1980s.

Programs known to have been lost include most studio segments from the 1960s current affairs shows This Day Tonight and Monday Conference, hundreds of episodes of the long-running rural serial Bellbird, all but a handful of episodes of the early-1970s drama series Certain Women, an early-1970s miniseries of dramatizations based on Norman Lindsay's novels, and nearly all of the first 18 months of the weekly pop-music show Countdown.

Many episodes of popular Australian commercial TV series are also lost. In the 1970s, Network Ten had an official policy to reuse tapes; hence, many tapes of Young Talent Time and Number 96 were wiped. To this day, Network Ten still only keeps some of its programming. Other notable casualties from the Ten archive include hundreds of episodes of the Melbourne-based pop music shows commissioned and broadcast by ATV-0 Melbourne in the 1960s and early 1970s – The Go!! Show (1964–1967), Kommotion (1964–1967), Uptight (1968–70), and the Happening 70s series (1970–1972).

The Nine Network discarded copies of some of their programs, including the popular GTV-9 series In Melbourne Tonight hosted by Graham Kennedy. Though it ran five nights a week from 1957–1970, fewer than 100 episodes are known to survive, and many of the surviving episodes are edited prints made for rebroadcast across Australia. Early episodes of Hey Hey It's Saturday do not exist because the program was broadcast live and did not begin videotape recordings until a number of years later.