Frank Avis's Memoirs of 42 Years in Radio

Frank Avis Continues: 3DB and beyond

2008-09-30T12:00:00+10:00

I moved back into the city to 3DB which was sited in the Herald Sun Headquarters.

Talk about a massive rabbit warren. I was told to go up to the second floor for a meeting in an office and failed in two attempts to find it. In the end they had to send somebody down to escort me there. Embarrasssing. I’m remembering Brendan Sheedy (The Manager), Paul Thompson (PD) along with Geoff McComas, David Shoreland (ex XY), Laurence Costin (absolutely lovely bloke), my mate Col Denovan (XY), another great mate Ian Nicholls, Wally Ryan, Alex Shabs (ex AK), Chris Lewis and many others who will remind me that my memory has crashed. Sorry.

Anyway the pervading atmosphere was bad. DB had been a giant in the industry but was now declining.

In fact, I hope he won’t mind me saying this, but Col rang me when he found out that I could be moving to warn me to reconsider. So, it was a pretty gloomy outlook. Still, there was a job to do and we all got on with it. I have to tell you the most wonderful story about the first few days. I walked into the newsroom, had a fossick around and found a bank of printers along the rear wall. There must have been four to six printers just sitting there. I kept checking them every hour or so and couldn’t find any sign of activity. I waited until late in the day and eventually asked somebody what they were or whether they worked. Whoever it was didn’t have a lot of information... He thought they worked occasionally.

Anyway, I went another 48 hours looking at these printers and finally could no longer contain myself. So I asked Laurence what was going on and he said that he thought the previous News Director had got sick of reading through all the stuff and had simply turned them off. Laurie and I pulled the printers out and sure enough the plug had been pulled out. We stuck it back in and they all went berserk. I sat there dumbfounded as I watched 3DB NEWS get a copy of every story filed to the Herald Sun network from around the world. I sat there all afternoon, bewitched. It was like going to heaven. We had the hard news, the backgrounders, and—believe it or not—even the phone numbers of people involved.

We never turned the printers off again, not as long I was in the ND’s chair anyway.

Then, a week later I happened to be patrolling the corridors of the Herald Sun upstairs—probably trying to find the office of somebody important I was supposed to see—when I walked through what appeared to be some sort of central receiving agency for newswires.

As I walked through some lady looked in my direction and said, "It’s about time you people came back to get your stuff." I looked bewildered and she said, "Aren’t you the new bloke from DB?" "Yes," I agreed, "I am." "Well," she said, "there’s all your copies... No one’s picked 'em up for about 18 months."

There in front of me were several huge spikes, marked DB, full of stories going back over a year. Every story filed by local reporters was copied for DB and left on the spike. This was astounding... Certainly the most formidable source of news available to a radio station I have ever seen or heard about. I hope you don’t mind a bit of boasting here, but let me tell you for 12 to 18 months DB was the hottest source of radio news on the planet. We broke so many stories you wouldn’t believe it. I know the station was in serious trouble overall but for a wonderful year our news team was up there and running. And we loved it. We kept telling each other what stories we’d broken and how far in front we were. These were difficult times but for the newsroom we were humming and really proud of the stuff we were doing. I reveled in the standard of our product. And I could tell our peers were paying attention. When you get two job offers from Sydney while you’re there you know something is going right.

Speaking of Sydney, I found myself facing a dilemma. Every morning around 8:15 to 8:30 one of the printers fired up from the Sydney office with a stack of stories which would be leading the afternoon papers in Sydney that day. We had a sister station relationship with the mighty 2UE but I really didn’t know what to do... Did they already have these stories and if I went to a lot of trouble and started giving them a one hour lead over their rivals would they simply regard me as a smart arse? Remember there’s a lot of jealousy in our trade. Anyway, one morning I bit the bullet when a really big story came in on the Sydney wires around 8:45. I rang the UE desk and can’t remember who was there—Vincent Smith, Greg Milne, not sure—but I asked if they were running the story of a well known pop star going to jail over a serious offence. They hadn’t heard about it... Indeed they almost laughed. So I read them the story that would be front page in the afternoon papers in around two hours. They were stunned. But the evidence I’d given them was overwhelming. The reporter had just a few minutes to make a decision on whether to accept what I’d told them or reject it. He went with it. It was a big story and UE broke it more than an hour before their opposition. From that day on, as long as I was in the DB news chair, we rang the UE desk around 8:45 with any hot stories coming in. I don’t know whether they really liked it—Sydney doesn’t like getting favours from Melbourne—but the arrangement continued and was very effective.

Another tale—detailing just how much information we had—concerns the sudden death of the great Bing Crosby who collapsed on the golf course (that’s probably what’ll happen to me). Anyway Ivor Davis ran this wonderful story with tributes from far and wide including a lovely piece from Dorothy Lamour, the female lead – remember – in those great old Hollywood Road movies with Bob Hope.

And there in the middle of the script, in brackets, was a Los Angeles phone number. I knew it wasn’t Ivor’s number and I kept thinking it’s in the middle of the Dorothy Lamour tribute... Surely it couldn’t be, could it?

I went into the booth rang the number and the voice at the other end said, "Hello, Dorothy Lamour."

I was stunned, quickly explained I was ringing from a radio station in Sydney and then waited for her to hang up in my ear. No way. She laughed softly and then spent 15 minutes telling me about Bing and Bob and how she loved the road series the three of them did in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

We did this sort of stuff all the time... The resources were unbelievable.

We should have done fair dinkum "news and info" but things were difficult for Brendan and I could never talk him into giving it a fly. Or rather, he probably couldn’t talk the Herald Sun heavies into giving it a go. I’m positive it would have worked. Take my word for it. And allow me to go into some detail, including a NEWS AND INFORMATION CLOCK that I drew up for DB and later 2GB back in the mid-70’s.

I warn all readers the following information is probably for the consumption of journos only. It’ll just bore everyone else. So I’ll give you a clear warning when it’s over and you can then resume checking out the gossip, having given the technical stuff the big flick.

It was obvious from the mid-70’s that we were heading into specialist radio, particularly with the possibility of FM ripping into the music arena over the next decade. I’d listened to a bit of US news and info and was totally unimpressed. It was heavily national/international/political, so that I guess it could be easily formatted nationally. Indeed, quite a few of the formats were nationally-syndicated with 1 minute breaks or "local news". Maybe it worked in the US but I can tell you then and now, forget it in Australia. If you’re in Sydney at 7:30 in the morning and the Harbour Bridge is closed for an hour, it is THE STORY of the day. You can forget the latest Canberra surveys or US forays into Deep Mongolia. When Sydney’s main artery stops, Sydney stops and the audience wants to know about it, big time. But it’s not a story in Melbourne, Brisbane or Perth. Whooooo cares!

My concept for news and information in Melbourne and Sydney was LOCAL... Underlined... So it was very labour intensive. And you couldn’t on-sell it around the nation. End of Frank’s dream.

But it would have been good radio. Still could be.

Basically, you’re looking at my NEWS AND INFO format 5:30/6:00 AM to 9:00... Switching to NewsTalk Radio till noon... Resuming NEWS AND INFO 12:00 to 2:00... Back to NewsTalk until 4:00 and running NEWS AND INFO 4:00 to 6:00/7:00 PM.

And there’s no padding. The stories run as long as they run. The infamous “voicer” would be banned (more on that later, when I journey to 2GB). I don’t wish to be offensive but listen to the ABC’s NEWSRADIO and then go in the opposite direction.

I also incorporated a lot of production aids, including thematics which meant you had to include a panel op or an extremely gifted announcer/panel op to keep the show running.

The concept was to move it quickly and to keep the information flowing.

I won’t use the “clock concept” here, but rather simplify it into a half-hour block format which just keeps repeating:

00:00 Station ID/news thematic
00:15 Situationer*
00:30 News, sports and weather
05:00 90 second commercial break and community announcement
07:00 The Big Story/The Big Interview
09:00 Sports wrap
10:00 Local/interstate weather
11:00 Situationer*
12:00 Business Update
13:00 90 second commercial break and community ammouncement
15:00 News briefs and city weather
17:00 All the Sport
20:00 Situationer*
20:30 90 second commercial break
22:00 Business update
23:00 Feature**
25:00 City weather, interstate and international
28:00 90 second commercial break and community announcement
30:00 Repeat the format

Notes:
*Situationer is normally the latest traffic update, but can include any major happening having an impact on the city.
**Feature. The idea was to allow room for special input, eg backgrounders on big events or high profile names. In Sydney we planned to use the feature for a special report titled "What’s going up, what’s coming down". The intention was to have a reporter exclusively following major building projects across the City, updating the current state of play.

Not just the huge projects but things that were happening right across the metro area. Just imagine if you were driving West along Parramatta Road and we were updating you on a building project you were just passing, letting you know when it would be finished and what it was for.

The idea was not just to keep the listener briefed on the "hard news" and the obvious information like weather and traffic, but to also sell our credibility on "what was going on" on the wider frontier.

Well, so much for News and Information programming.

Basically, I failed to win that one and things started to drift away at 3DB. When Ron Hurst rang from 2GB I was ready to make another try at the concept, thinking GB, with its Fairfax affiliations, was perfectly suited to the concept.

Ron seemed interested in pursuing the idea and so I made the move to my old home, the Harbour City. Again a lot of my mates rang me saying, "Don’t do it... It’s suicide," but I figured you only live once and you’ve got to give it a try."

I should also mention that this was the time when I was really into long distance running, an interest I’d acquired when our intake had won the 1956 National Service road race.

I’d somehow got through the Big M Marathon, after injuring my knee at cricket the day before (Col Denovan kept asking me why I’d be playing cricket the day before I was to run 42km and he never got a satisfactory reply). I was training with ultra-distance runner Tony (Run Run) Rafferty at the time and wondered out loud how far an average person would go trying to do what Tony did. He replied, "Why don’t we find out," and so we both set off on his historic Melbourne to Sydney to Melbourne run. It was my fantasy to make it to Sydney, but by day three—after running 125 kilometres—my ankles admitted defeat and our team just staggered on to the border at Albury. I can still see the sign reading "301 kilometres". I think Tony actually passed me as he ran back down the Hume Highway from Sydney. I was assisted by a wonderful team, including one of the journos from the newsroom, Chris Lewis. I wonder if he remembers that week?

Enough of that stuff. Let’s get back to the main game.

It’s late ’79 now and In the next episode we tackle 2GB—and fail.

Frank Avis Returns To Melbourne To Continue His Radio Career

2008-08-27T12:00:00+10:00

It was the mid-70’s and we were heading back East after a short but very enjoyable time in Perth. And yes, I repeat, I felt badly because I’d let Rhett Walker down by not staying longer, particularly as 6PR was now performing in brilliant style. But there you are: anyone following my career can see how I never stayed that long in one place. I took on a specific job, succeeded or failed, and then moved on to the next one. Actually I had two decisions to make on my return to Melbourne... the new 3MP, hopefully to be established in Frankston, and a surprise second possibility, an offer from Bill Howie to return to my old job at 3AK.

I met with both sides and after talks with Norm Spencer I opted to stay with my original choice, to set up News and Information at 3MP, an incredible opportunity to start from the beginning.

It’s a long time ago but I remember there was Brian Rangott, Mike Walsh, Joff Ellen and Judy Pollock among the main shareholders. Ray Bean was the GM, John Lloyd, from KZ, had moved into the job of Sales Chief, Murray Korff was the Chief Engineer, Geoff Charter was in the Programming chair and I was working side by side with Geoff Brown from early in the piece as we were charged with assembling a wide range of community licence promises, some of which were going to be extremely difficult to meet.

We were lucky to win the support of several modern-thinking religious leaders in the community, otherwise I think some of the religious commitments might have made us sound like a country station on a Sunday morning (no offence I hope). Ray, Geoff and I worked for some time to convert a lot of the religious content into genuine community information. It took a bit of discussion but we were able to convince the local churches to run "informationals" across the schedule, professional 30-second clips which accented the community side of the various churches... counselling, youth work... a series of direct messages from the church aimed at solving community problems rather than 15-30 minute lectures by clergymen. This method turned out to marry directly into the general profile of the station. These prestigious, community oriented information pieces certainly did no harm and we have to regard them as a key success.

On the news front, I had Barry Owen, Ray McGhie, Peter Young and Col James with me, among others, and we were looking for a central plank to make us stand out from the rest. I sat down with the map of Melbourne and kept looking at the geography. What was there here that we could use to cement our image? I kept returning to the Bay. Now, Melbourne is a very unusual city. Sydney is very aggressive, incredibly competitive and very, very confident. Melbourne is very internal. There are no show-ponies in Melbourne. Have a look at their stars. Most are "nice guys" who are never overtly stars.

Very few people succeed in Melbourne, saying publicly "look at me, aren’t I terrific?" Sorry, I digressed there for a while. The more I looked at Melbourne the more I saw this huge tract of water smack in the middle of the city... Port Phillip Bay. Funny thing about the Bay, hardly anybody seemed to talk much about it, certainly not boast about having it (nothing like Sydney Harbour, for example). I said to Ray that we should wade into the Bay big time... We should own it from the moment we went to air. But I didn’t know how.

Then one night at my home in Mount Eliza I was wading through files and files of ideas and research and I put two things together. "The BAY and the WEATHER." It all became clear. We could own the Bay via the weather. I couldn’t do a deal with the Weather Bureau but as I looked around we could come to an exclusive agreement with the local Volunteer Coastguard. They were the people, after all, who had to head out on to the water if someone had to be rescued. But how do you take advantage of any such association? How does it transfer to, if you like, controlling the territory?

By bringing in a RED and BLUE ALERT system, that’s how. I think the idea came to me about 10 o’clock one night and my colleague Geoff Brown was in the lounge room within 15 minutes as we reviewed the whole scheme.(I should point out that Geoff had almost moved into our lounge room permanently by this time as we spent whole days working on all of this critical on air content... More behind the scenes stuff on this subject later on.) It only took Geoff 30 seconds to look at me, smile knowingly, and confirm that it would do everything we wanted. It would, in one simple stroke, give us critical ownership of a key geographical area. And it wouldn’t be just for summer, this was a 12 month deal.

But did General Manager Ray Bean want ownership of the Bay? Was that his plan as well? We put the idea to him the next morning, pointing out that we hadn’t even discussed it with the Coastguard hierarchy. Ray was pretty much like Geoff: it took him about 30-seconds to nod in agreement and give us the go ahead. There were long talks with the Coastguard because what we were asking was a 24 hour, 7 day commitment. Mind you, there was a huge plus in the prestige factor to the Coastguard as well. In the end we did the deal, which included a stack of "informationals", voiced by the Coastguard themselves, about boating and boating safety. These guys became local celebrities within weeks of MP going to air. But it was a significant responsibility for the top officials at Coastguard headquarters.

By the time we got to air we not only had red and blue alerts but Ray and Murray had briefed the architects and the news and studio block had a RED and BLUE light alert system.

When the light went on the jock knew that he had to play the appropriate cart several times an hour.

The alert could be phoned in by Coastguard at any time and be on air in minutes. It worked wonderfully.

And of course The BAY theme was perfect. Little did Geoff and I know when we put the original proposal together that Ray had already been considering our programme positioning sales pitch... "Bay city radio". Now, we knew why he smiled and nodded in approval that morning.

The other plus was that the station theme music was being done by Peter Best. He was also charged with doing the news theme. We played around with all sorts of stuff, including a montage of famous moments in history, but it was just too long and too over the top. Not the sort of image we wanted to portray at MP. So in the end Pete came up with a short, simple news thematic which worked admirably.

Then, we got to talking about how we could individualise the news ,making it instantly recognizable.

And we came up with a plan to add SFX to the weather. Pete went crazy, and ended up giving us about a dozen weather variations. If it was sunny we had this soft, sunny theme we played under the weather. There was this gorgeous tinkly thematic we could play under the weather if it was really cold and rainy. I know it created a bit of flack in the trade... I can imagine what the team at AW would have said about such sacrilege, but I think it worked exceedingly well in augmenting the on-air sound. Ray wanted "fresh" and the weather thematic s certainly met the station criteria.

The other stuff we did was to run a series of historical pieces, researched by either Col or myself, which followed key news broadcasts during the day. These usually ran an average of 30-seconds and were "think pieces" about something significant or potted versions of famous happenings which had occurred on that day. The first one I did, on our opening breakfast show, was an investigation on whether it was possible to build a bridge across the Bay entrance. If you want to go from the Peninsula over to Geelong and along the Great Ocean Road you have to go north into the city, across to the west and down the Geelong Road, a journey of more than an hour. Putting a bridge across the Entrance would have reduced that to 15 minutes. It actually excited a lot of interest, to tell you the truth ,and I got a lot of calls from engineers commenting on the project.

Col also did a series on the assassination of JFK, summarising all of the ballistic information which suggested that if Oswald had indeed shot Kennedy then he must have been the best marksmen in the history of the world. This was Robin Hood with a rifle. This too excited a bit of comment. So the general theme of providing a news service, high on information input, seemed to work pretty well.

Geoff and I also pioneered a lot of local historical stuff which Andrew Rutherford was to expand into the VICTORIA STORY series in later years. We took famous buildings and well known sites in the area and told their stories, along with info on how to get there including a Melway reference.

I had talks with the man who owned the Melway maps - Iven, a really terrific bloke - who agreed immediately to allow the map references to be used on air. In fact,he loved the idea so much he put 3MP ads into any spare space he had as part of the deal. It didn’t cost us a razoo.

I hope you’re all following this?

Everything seemed to be moving along nicely... The format was in place, Ray was assembling the cast, Murray and his engineers were working on the complex job of getting our signal right and so Ray and I went to meet the Chairman of the Control Board, Myles Wright, who had to sign-off on the license.

We had a most convivial meeting during which he asked us a lot of probing questions, concentrating on the various promises made in the original application, finally announcing that he would not be signing our license as we had not meet quite a few of our crucial local requirements.

There was a strange quiet in the room as he smiled and said goodbye, until we came back with a new plan.

I drove back to Frankston absolutely shocked. Ray headed off to the city for an important meeting, doubtless about what had just happened. I got back late in the afternoon and rang John Lloyd who was similarly shattered. So I thought I’d better do something about my main areas of interest to see if the original promises could be accommodated in some way. Yes, I rang "Old Faithfull", Geoff, and we sat up until around 3:30 in the morning using the same methodology - converting everything to across the station "informationals" - to see if it would work.

We took our finished product to Ray first thing that morning and he was suitably impressed.

I don’t know how important this was but I can only report the next time we went to the Board the license was officially approved.

Now all we had to do was to get our signal correct, ensuring that it wasn’t impinging on other stations, especially at night. Easier said than done. Murray Korff was practically living at the transmitter site, along with a team of fellow engineers... Consultant Tom O’Donohue, Control Board reps Frank Waldron, Ray Kelly and Dave Paget, and RCA techs Jim McGrath and John Innes. I don’t want to depict myself as "Mr Goody two shoes" but I took an increasing interest in events at the TX, not necessarily because of completely altruistic motives but essentially because, if they failed, I would’t have a job and we’d just bought a lovely home in Mount Eliza.

So, I started making regular trips to the TX at night, and gradually my wife Anna started preparing food for the gang there. Eventually this turned into a sort of nightly ritual. When the techs were working at night, and I think it was pretty much 7 days a week, I was there with the food, to run messages, make phone calls and provide whatever help I could.(Anybody who’s known me for longer than 15 minutes would know that this did not include any technical matters. Frank and technology parted ways a long time ago and we’re not going to be reunited.) I don’t think it’s possible to describe how all of these people just came together to get 3MP to air.

You wouldn’t think the Control Board Techs would have had any more than a bureaucratic interest in events but let me tell you they were down there in the trenches, night after night, trying to get the signal array correct. This went on and on for some considerable time. We couldn’t go to air till the Control Board approved the performance of the transmitter, especially that the signal was not causing any problems for any other operators. Truly, I didn’t think it would ever be solved. One night the group had been going from sun-up till 2:30 the following morning when Murray Korff fell asleep standing up and started to fall forward into the back of the open transmitter. As I remember it, Tom O’Donohue and Frank Waldron leapt forward grabbed his shirt and pulled him back from almost certain death.
"That’s it," said Frank Waldron, "we’re all going home to get some sleep."

Eventually there was this magic moment when we got 5 K signal to air. It was perfect.

I raced home, grabbed a magnum of Stonyfell champagne and we toasted the future of MP as we sent out our first official signal. It was 2:42 AM, July 21, 1976. Harry Wilde was the announcer back at the station in Frankston and the first track played on Melbourne’s newest station was John Paul Young’s "I hate the music". Never has a song sounded so good.

As a matter of interest I still have the bottle of champagne, appropriately marked with all the salient details, which I’d love to pass on to 3MP if anyone is interested in preserving some of the station’s history. Feel free to call me and I’ll ensure it’s delivered safely. Otherwise it’ll probably end up in a garbage bin somewhere. That would be a pity because so much went into that first signal and MP became an immediate hit, an unsual blend of local and big city radio, a format which later worked a treat for WS in Sydney.

One of the other tactics much discussed by Frank and Geoff in the wee small hours of the morning was how to carry a substantial "local" load without appearing to be a country station. Everyone, especially Ray, knew we’d be dead in the water if we sounded provincial.

We could control a lot of on air content, but not the ads. Everyone forgets that the audience’s perception of a station is not just from the music, news and the jocks but from the commercial content as well.

We knew John Lloyd and his team could sell MP’s schedule many times over from the local market but what would that do to our image as a major metropolitan station. How would we sound if every second ad was for "Harry’s hamburger stand" in Frankston? Bad, that was the answer. So we spoke at length to Lloydie and his sales team, explaining how - though heavy local advertising would pay our bills - it might also destroy the station as a major player in a big city. The programmers had nightmares that the audience perception of MP would be that of a "country station". The sales team was terrific. Everyone co-operated to achieve the right balance even though it often hit the sales guys in the hip pocket for the first three months. Anyway, the joint was a tremendous success from day one .We were elated.

I’m remembering back to those days... I don’t know whether I mentioned the jocks, but I’m recalling John Burgess, Brian Bury (absolutely wonderful bloke),Richard Combe, Dean Matters, Keith McGowan and others to whom I apologise. My memory is shot.

Have I mentioned that we returned to the traffic girls concept and that I contracted a range of businesses, mainly service stations, on key roads across the metro area? This not only gave us excellent updates on traffic, but also good sources for happening news. The other thing I did was do a deal with a major provincial newspaper chain, who happily supplied us with all of their weekly publications in return for a mention as the source. This also provided us with some top news stories. I remember we lead our breakfast news with one story from Western Victoria on a Tuesday, only to see it pop up as a big deal in the Herald the next afternoon. I loved that.

The other interesting story is what we did during the great petrol strike in the mid-70’s. As fuel was running out we found more and more people in our local Peninsula area were finding it harder to get to work. So I put a concept to Ray that we set up a "car matching" pool. There was one card file of people who could offer lifts and another composed of those who were looking for a lift, willing to help pay for the petrol. Ray loved this idea from the first 10 seconds and it was on air the next day. The girls set up a special office with the phone lines open from 2-4 every weekday afternoon. We took down the details and put the two groups in contact with each other. Really a tremendous success.

The only thing was I was awake in the early hours one day and I thought, "Hang on. What happens if there’s an accident involving one of these match ups? Are we liable?” We had a big meeting the next morning which resulted in a series of on-air disclaimers plus a half-page ad in B&T.

MP was a wonderful learning process and let me place on record that Manager Ray Bean never ever rejected any of my good ideas. I was backed all the way.

But you know me... I got restless. I tried to talk Ray into creating a new position where I could be a Special Assistant to the Manager charged with coming up with all these schemes (Look, I had a million ideas in those days, and candidly I didn’t feel much like putting them forward and having somebody else claiming them as their own). But there was no such position available and Brendan Sheedy was looking around for somebody to take over DB NEWS. I took one look at the Herald Sun facilities and thought, "If anybody is going to make a play for NEWS AND INFORMATION it’s got to be DB." So I made the change amid much sadness, really. But I’d spent the past 12 months putting a peak-hour NEWS AND INFO clock together and I knew it would work in a major city. I just wanted the chance to do it.

That took me out of leafy Mt Eliza and up north back into the big city. Was it a mistake? Look it was just another chapter and I always knew radio was like Broadway... You had to accept you’d win some and you’d lose some. But that’s another story for our next chapter, providing your reporter actually gets off his backside this time and gets it done. Thanks for all your emails, reminding me that the latest chapter had taken a bit too long, including the enquiry from a colleague of years ago who asked if I’d actually passed away between chapters? Still hanging in there mate...

Frank Avis continues his radio career, now off to Perth in the mid-70's

2008-05-19T12:00:00+10:00

We arrived in Perth and the weather was beautiful.

6PR had already launched its format “Gentle on Your Mind” but it still hadn’t succeeded in the ratings. I wish I’d been there from day one, but my arrival was in the early stages and just in time to ride the elevator up to the next floor.

Gordon Leed was ND and I remember Tom Drewell, Tony Stanton and Col James in the newsroom as well as RW, of course–the man running the show, Cherie Romaro doing the music and Tony Hartney, Ted Bull, Dean Matters and I’m sure many others who will remind me that my memory is stuffed.

The music was excellent and Rhett ensured that there was a direct link to the audience with a lot of information including, believe it or not, lost dog and cat announcements.

The news team was really good, particularly with RW’s policy allowing us a certain latitude. We called it “soft editorial”, in that if the story was sad we were supposed to sound as if it saddened us. If it was happy then our delivery was supposed to underline that. The policy makers weren’t even averse to a certain amount of “internal commentary” providing it didn’t impinge on our responsibility of fairness in reporting. The three people doing the on air work were well experienced so I think we managed to stay on the right side of the knife-edge.

I note 2SM launched a roughly similar style, a bit different featuring Brian White and Steve Leibman, a year later. Indeed, Garvin Rutherford actually offered me a position there in that period but that’s another story, a rather strange story, for later on.

I arrived in WA just as the con men were busily infiltrating the state financial system. We had pretenders setting up multi-million dollar international conglomerates and even establishing “banks” using, of course, somebody else’s finance, much of which was subsequently lost forever.

If you want to know the inside story of this wheeling and dealing, involving the financial vultures and their friends “in high places” just get one of the books written about the era. Or go to the library and get a few back issues of the Financial Review. She was a funny old state in those days, folks.

The first thing I noted was the distance between the media and the authorities, especially the police. The WA police, I think, regarded most journalists as pests that needed to be kept at a distance.

This came to a head shortly after my arrival when Perth actually turned on a genuine, national story – a big payroll heist. I whipped down to the scene with my recorder only to be told that we weren’t allowed into the area or to talk to anyone in charge.

After an hour or so a man emerged from the building and gave a statement to the gathered TV and radio journos. He was very good. He took us through the whole robbery, how it was done and what avenues of enquiry the police were pursuing. “Wow,” I thought, ”what a terrific police PR man.”

I wrote down his name and asked one of my fellow journos what his position was only to be told that we’d just been briefed by a journalist from WA Newspapers. Police had taken this trusted journalist on to the scene, given him a full briefing and – out of the goodness of his heart apparently – he’d decided to share some of the information with the rest of us.

I was dumbfounded and went back to work, ringing the Police Minister’s office to ask what they were running here? I guess that caused a bit of friction and apparently a fair bit of embarrassment for Gordon, for which I belatedly apologise.

I certainly learned quickly that the local police did things differently in WA.

Of course, the mid 70’s were dominated by one sensational story: Cyclone Tracy in Darwin.

No one had any idea just how disastrous it was in the early hours. I know Gordon made initial attempts to get someone up to Darwin, suggesting we could tag along with one of the air force crews heading North. The authorities in Perth just laughed and made it clear there’d be no one else on board the flights. It was virtually impossible to get anywhere near the place. We kept getting all of these calls from the Eastern states ,wondering when we’d have someone on the scene. It took a few hours for someone in Sydney to actually look at a map of Australia and realise it’d be a lot faster to send a reporter from Brisbane or even Adelaide. Anyway, we all know now that it was extremely difficult to get anything in or out of Darwin in those early days.

That was almost certainly one of the most frustrating stories of my career. Authorities just weren’t deeply into Public Relations at the time and it was extremely difficult to get any actuality/comment.

I just loved the PR music format. It remains my equal favorite with the 2DAY FM adult format of the 80’s. Although I have to confess I also loved the music of 2MMM FM when we went to air in 1980. And PR was beautifully sold to the advertisers, with a sophisticated campaign featuring the “butterfly” motif. We’re attaching an example so you’ll get the idea.

After a few weeks at PR it became obvious that the station’s real ratings were significantly higher than the returns we were getting in the surveys. The same thing happened to 2MMM FM in Sydney in later years. This is one of the most intriguing issues in mass marketing: why do the survey audiences take so long to catch up with the real ratings out on the street?

We’re plagued I fear by the phenomenon of “residual goodwill” where a station manages to maintain its ratings figures when every man and his dog knows they’re going down the drain. It can be a radio station, TV channel, even a restaurant or hairdressing salon.

Whatever it is, the audience perception that the company is still a major player takes a long time to evaporate. So you can have a station management getting all the signals that it is in decline but receiving a different story in the monthly ratings. It’s hard to take tough action when you’re still hanging on in the ratings. Like a footy team that is clearly in trouble continuing to just hold on, within a win or two of making the finals.

The trouble is the ratings suddenly catch up with the word from the street and when they do it’s usually in a fairly dramatic fashion. All of us know stations which have just managed to hold on to the rating middle ground for two to three years and then – all of a sudden – Wallop. They suddenly lose 30 % of their audience. The problem is they lost those 2 to 3 years when they should have called in the cleaners and gone for a new format.

I can’t tell you a great deal more about my time in Perth except that gradually I wanted to get back to the main game. There was an offer from 2SM but when I flew across for my interview the situation seemed to have changed.

Then I was approached with word that Norm Spencer (of channel 9 fame) was hopeful of a new Melbourne licence, operating out of Frankston. I won’t need to tell you how putting a whole new station together grabbed me. I just wanted to get over there and do it, so the Perth adventure ended and I guess I let Rhett down by heading back East. Sorry about that.

It was a privilege to watch PR’s programming, though, and a great experience to see the ratings eventually catch up with the real world.

There is one story that remains to be told about PR, a story that is I guess almost mystical in how it demonstrates that journos sometimes know there’s a story there, when no one else can sniff it out. We seem to be able to smell it.

It was I think a holiday Monday and Col and I were the duty team for the afternoon news. We looked at each other in alarm. There was absolutely NOTHING happening. As far as I could see ANYWHERE ON EARTH. Certainly nothing our audience would have wanted to know about anyway.

We did the 1 O’Clock bulletin which was full of politics (Australians absolutely HATE politics and politicians which will probably come as a tremendous shock to the ABC and all the TV networks. The law is don’t run political stories unless they really are genuine stories and never allow yourself to be sucked into a story by politicians or unions. They are so good at that). Sorry, I digress.

Back to that Monday afternoon. We got to 1:30 and I said to Col, “Stuff this, we’re not going to run another bulletin like 1 O’Clock.”

“Well,” he said, “ if there’s no news, there’s no news.”

I picked up the WA phone directory, divided up the state and announced that we were going to ring every police station we find. There was a story out there, we just had to find it.

Col didn’t necessarily seem convinced but he went hard at it. We rang police stations across the state asking if there was anything happening. We were knocked back at every turn. Remember the police in WA were operating like an army unit in WW2 in those days, working on the adage “Never give the enemy anything.” After half an hour that’s what we had, NOTHING.

We did the 2PM news, looked at each other and got back to the phones, knowing we couldn’t possibly inflict that sort of news on our public again in an hour’s time.

At 2:15 I spoke to a Sergeant on duty in a seafront town south of Perth. I asked for the umpteenth time if anything had happened and his reply was, ”No one’s told me anything.” He was pretty grumpy so I got off the phone and looked for the next contact.

Then I paused and asked Col to take a breather. I remember saying to him that the officer never said a direct “NO”. He chose to say that no one had told him about anything.

I started smelling a rat and Col was just as suspicious. The more we talked about it the more we came to the view that the Sergeant didn’t say NO because he was trying not to tell us something but didn’t like to lie so directly

Maybe Psychology 1 was starting to pay off.

We formulated a plan to test our theory, ringing the local Ambulance station, intimating that we already knew something. The next 5 to 10 minutes were really quite astonishing. I’ll try to reduce it to transcript so you get the picture.

FRANK: Hi, sorry to bother you on a holiday Monday.
AMBULANCE OFFICER (Like he was taking a call from his mother in law): Yeah, that’s alright.
FRANK: We’re just checking on an incident we understand you’ve had down there this afternoon.
AMBULANCE PERSON: Oh. Who told you that?
FRANK: We were just talking to the local Police Sergeant. (Well, it’s not a lie is it. We were just talking to him. It’s just that he didn’t say anything.)
AMBULANCE PERSON: Well, you don’t need anything from me than do ya?
FRANK: Well, we really like to double check with all of the services involved, you know, we hear they had to call you out.
AMBULANCE: Ok, how many did you hear?
FRANK (Interesting question, as I haven’t got a clue what he’s talking about, so just choose a number): I think they were saying there were two.
AMBULANCE: No, it ended up three. One died at the hospital.
FRANK: Thanks very much. That confirms three dead at the scene… Right?
AMBULANCE: That’s the best I can do for you. Ok?
FRANK: Thanks very much. You’ve been very helpful. Thanks again.

Now what incident are we talking about?

Col hits the area phone book, gets on to the local store and we find out that a mother and two of her children had wandered out on to a sandbank, not realized the tide was coming in and drowned trying to get back to shore.

Not exactly the joyful story we were hoping for on a holiday afternoon, but a big story nonetheless, and a tragedy that travelled interstate within the hour, courtesy the PR news team.

Col later joined me at MP in Melbourne and then went on to the chief of staff chair at TEN.

We used to talk occasionally on the phone in the 80’s and we always remembered that strong incident which reinforced another unwritten rule: listen to what they say but also pay great attention to the way they say it.

Melbourne Radio

2008-04-10T12:00:00+10:00

It was the early 70's and I'd made the big decision to switch from the faithful 3XY and move across to 3AK and it’s "take no prisoners" rock and roll format. It was an unusual operation in that I was actually employed in Channel 9 news and answerable to the N.D Mike Schildberger, later Tom O’Connor.

But I generally managed to steer a course close to 3AK, mainly because of my good relations with Gary Day and the PD Rhett Walker (RW on UW). I had an immediate rapport with R.W who turned out to be a dynamic leader. We had similar interests and once he found out I was a Marx Brothers fan he immediately labeled me Wolf J. Flywheel. All my memos were hereafter marked "To: Wolf From:Rhett".

Now let me see if I can remember a few names. I keep having to respond to Emails from people I've completely forgotten which is dreadfully embarrassing. Others I've placed at the wrong stations and in one case the wrong city. I immediately responded to the wronged party by pointing out, I think quite reasonably, that at least I put him in the right country. I mean, how much accuracy do these people want?

John Bailey was the 9 reader at this time and he was one of the first to drop the declamatory approach and deliver the news in a more conversational style. Hendo, of course, perfected the technique in Sydney but Bailey was very, very good. I later saw him on Sydney's Ten news but to be honest I don't know why he didn't end up an out and out superstar. If you missed his style it was very masculine and very personable. I found him to be a really nice bloke. He switched to Current Affair in the early to mid 70's and had a real crisis when he came down with a killer dose of flu on opening night.

I remember Hilton Prideaux and Rupert Macaw in Tech along with I think Tom O'Donohue. At AK there was Graeme Boyd, Yorkie, Bill Howie and Tim Hewat while the much loved Peter Tate was our top news presenter, along with Graham Cumming, Barry Owen (from Hobart), Alex Shabs, Rob Grant and John Westbury.

Just after I left XY they went full on r 'n' r,challenging AK's number 1 status. They ripped AK to shreds from the first survey sending shock waves through the Richmond studios. Rhett’s answer was to bite the bullet and switch formats to Beautiful Music.
I loved the dramatic change as it allowed me to virtually rebuild the news and information coming out of the newsroom. You should have seen my news guide to staff. It must have run to 30 pages.

But it all worked well and we saw the station back on to the right side of the financial ledger. There is incidentally a great story about Sir Frank Packer's first visit to the Melbourne studios, obviously long before I joined the company.

Sir Frank apparently rarely travelled by plane so he was driven down from Sydney arriving midway through the afternoon. Everybody was there, even the cleaners, to greet the great man. All the executives gathered to catch the historic first phrase uttered by the media mogul. Apparently, he got out of the limo walked through the guard of honour stepped inside the building and turned to the General manager asking… "Why are those bloody lights on in the middle of the day?"

It's not quite "one small step for a man…" but it has passed into industry legend.

One of the best stories during my tenure at AK was the Queanbeyan siege where a man had taken over a sports shop in the town and was reportedly holding his young daughter hostage, demanding his wife come to the store to talk to him. Apparently there'd been a break up of the marriage and the man had gone over the edge. As we understood it, he had his daughter tied to a chair and had manufactured a bomb to explode and kill her if he didn't get his wife to agree to the talks.

Anyway I grabbed a local phone directory (the first thing I did whenever I took over a newsroom was to stock it with every phone directory in Australia, plus directories for city centres like London, New York and Los Angeles), and started to ring the sports shops in the area. Believe it or not, I got him first try.

The father answered the phone and I started running a tape. He confirmed that he had his daughter tied up to a bomb and that he was threatening to explode it. We spoke for some time and it was obvious that he was desperate to find a way out of this dilemma and that he really didn’t want to harm the child.

I asked if there was anyone he trusted to talk to him and he mentioned a local police sergeant. So I got a colleague to ring the Station and the sergeant hot-footed it down to the scene. I told the man that the Sergeant was waiting outside to speak with him and pleaded with him to go out and talk. There was no response. A short time later we got reports he'd walked out the front door and surrendered. The bomb was dismantled. We did a quick edit job and put 1'15" of the tape as the lead story into Peter Tate's 8.30 bulletin. I have to admit it sounded sensational. The guys at the 9 news desk loved it. They ran it as one of their top stories that night showing me talking on the phone and running the audio. The next day the Channel 9 caricaturist delivered a drawing to my office showing me, dressed as Superman, coming to the rescue. There I was thinking I was a hero and along comes this drawing, reducing me to a cartoon. They know how to get you, don't they?

Anyway I've kept the drawing to this day and with the good offices of my technical back-up team (ie. partner Darleen working with John and Janie) we will hopefully be able to include it in this report. I'm the thin bloke with the glasses who – for a brief time – thought he was more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings.

Things went along reasonably well at AK although there were ominous signs as senior staff started to depart. Gary Day left and then my hero, RW, departed to seek new fields of conquest in Western Australia. Then something rather unfortunate occurred. For some time I'd had this running dispute with a senior executive about… believe it or not… including the Football scores in our Saturday afternoon bulletins.

It was his argument that people listening to our all-music format would hear the footy scores and be enticed to switch over to a station covering the footy. My response was that the people listening to AK were actually doing so because THEY DIDN’T WANT TO LISTEN TO THE FOOTY. That's why they were with us. I said that our listeners got the best of both worlds.

They had their favorite music but our hourly news gave them the footy updates. This debate raged on although I was supported by most of the executive members. Then RW left and this person was advanced to senior executive status. I went on holidays for a couple of weeks and when I got back the footy scores were missing – under the personal direction of the senior executive in question. Nothing was ever said to me and there was no memo carrying the directive and the executive's decision.

I had talks with my staff and several execs, believing that the action was a direct attack on my position. Most of my staff I think were ready to back any stand I decided to take on the issue. They were extremely supportive. I went home and thought long and hard about this difficult problem. I was pretty confident that I would have been able to win the battle, but kept questioning whether it was the right thing to do by the station. My job, the transfer of news and information to this new format, was complete and increasingly I realised that I wasn't interested in long term tenure at AK.

From AK onward I tended to take on specific assignments in newsrooms, either succeeding or failing, before moving on to the next challenge. The rest of my career was based on this philosophy. I think people never quite understood that. I know the guys at UE used to call me the "Southern Aurora" because "I worked in Sydney and Melbourne and all the stations in between", (it was a really funny line), but that's what my career turned into…taking on particular assignments and then moving on to the next one. In many respects' I operated in much the same fashion as a modern football coach. The upshot was that I didn't see any future in declaring World War 3 over the issue so I decided it was time to find new pastures. I rang Rhett where he was re-positioning 6PR PERTH into an exciting new format and asked if there was anything going?. He said "come on over" and I did, joining ND Gordon Leed, Tom Drewell and Colin James in the Newsroom. We all had a wonderful time.

Before I leave Melbourne and head West to the Indian Ocean I need to set the record straight regarding a controversial story I ran in the Mike Walsh Show on XY. It was during the period that I was calling the footy with Jack Dyer. I took a phone call one morning from one of our staffers who happened to be in a certain place just before the Grand Final, Collingwood vs Carlton.

Anyway, several key Collingwood players had a semi-formal meeting over money. I don't know that it was as simple as this but as I remember it they were extremely angry at the huge difference in match payments between the locals – who were expected to play for the love of the club - and those imported from other states who were apparently getting a lot more.

The group of local players was irate and voted to consider withdrawing from the Grand Final team unless the issue was addressed by the club. They voted to make their feelings known to the Club and to meet later that week to consider the position.

My source was impeccable. There's absolutely no doubt that the story was correct. I ran it in the Mike Walsh show and the "fall out" started. The Club rang issuing the strongest of denials. The Press rang of course. The problem was that I ran the story before the players managed to put their concerns to the club. This was a disaster for the group of local players who had to retreat without even having had the chance to talk to club officials.

Oh boy, I was jumped on by everyone... The other radio stations and the press gave me heaps. Only one person offered support. My old mate, the ultimate straight shooter Ian Major, rang from 3KZ and asked me how I was doing. He didn't say much but asked if the source of my story was a certain person. Maj was absolutely trustworthy – and the person was a mutual friend - so I said, "Yes, he heard the whole meeting."

Maj replied, "Well, if he told you that, then you can believe it... It'd be right."

We then had a laugh about the business. I mean it doesn't matter whether you're right or not.. what matters is can you prove it. And I couldn't without publically revealing the source and the players involved. And I'd given my word that I wouldn't do that. If my "source" happens to, reading these recollections... I kept my word mate.

So, the upshot of all of this is that we put the trusty Valiant Ranger on the train and boarded our plane heading for Perth. Perth, on the Indian Ocean, where there's no dirt, just sand.

In fact, we bought a house fairly quickly and found that we had to put in a lawn. All we saw in the front and back yard was sand, so we said to be the builder, "What do we do, just bring in some top soil for the lawn?" He looked a bit mystified and replied, "well,if you want the ground higher, just bring in more sand". There’s no dirt in Perth, not that I could see anyway, just lots and lots of sand.

Next time... PR launches its new format with a red bullet.

Frank Avis continues his career, in Melbourne

2008-01-11T12:00:00+10:00

I arrived in a major mainland capital in the mid-'60s, ironically not as a career move but due to personal tragedy. My life was clearly in chaos and I was lucky to have my friend Woody, now working in Melbourne TV, to look after me.

My first appointment was with 3UZ to see if I could get some work with their news team.

I did an audition and News Director Clive Waters took me into his office, apologising that they had nothing to offer at this time, but asking if he could make a call on my behalf. This was astonishingly good of him. I've no idea why he went to all this trouble but within an hour the tape had been dispatched to 3XY's John Burls and I found myself starting at the XY newsroom the following morning.

I walked in and was handed the 9 AM bulletin which I read reasonably well.

Minutes later General Manager Bob Baeck called me in, said he was impressed and I was officially hired.

Bill Passick was News Chief and I remember Ian Major as the Footy/Sports Chief (absolutely lovely man), Ray Woods was in the Programming chair, Frank Welch in Accounts, and the famous character Wally Chamberlain was the Chief Engineer (you couldn't understand what "character" really meant in radio until you met Wally). Please add to the list of XY identities: Bill Acfield, Vi Greenhaulgh, Jeff Warden, Paul Konik (the laconic Mr Konik), Johnny Young (soon to be found YTT on TV), Barry Seeber, Jeff Sunderland, Bruce Mansfield (anyone who wants to know what radio is really about needed to hear Bruce sign off to Jeff at midday—some of the funniest and most inventive material I've ever heard), Graham Berry, the living legend Jack Dyer doing the footy with Maj, Cyril Stokes, Pam Peters (Mike's Secretary), David Shoreland, Wayne and Maurie Kirby, Geoff Hiscock, Ken Hibbins, Alf Minister, Clyde Simpson, John Magee, Barry Looms, Iven Walker, Paul Sime, Col Denovan, John Boland, Laurie Bennett, Jack the cleaner (who became something of a legend), Jim (the dear man who answered the front door and manned the switchboard at night) and many others. Sorry, my memory no longer behaves properly.

Of course, we were joined at various times by celebrities like Graham Kennedy and Mike Walsh who did 9-2 during this period. In fact Mike did a really good mixed music/interview series from 9-11 and Graham had lots of fun doing 11-1 with Moondoggy at the panel.

I worked particularly closely with the Mike Walsh show and my favorite moment was the brainwave I had when I heard Phyllis Diller was coming to Sydney, but wouldn't be playing Melbourne. When she arrived I rang her management and said what would it take to get her on a plane to Melbourne briefly where Mike Walsh would declare it "Phyllis Diller Day". Her only obligation was a brief appearance in Mike's show around 10.30 and then to be guest at a special luncheon, including 100 lady listeners.

I was thinking, she's going to ask for 100's of Dollars, I think the Manager was particularly concerned, but her response was amazing. Nothing. No money. Get her a plane ticket and a hire car with driver and she'd fly down. It was a wonderful day. Phyllis, who turned out to be a really lovely person, was greeted like royalty, which she regarded as only fitting for a person of her status. She was a very big star at the time, even in Australia, so this turned out to be quite a coup.

This was also the time when Tiny Tim came to Melbourne and we came up with this plan to get him exclusively on to the Mike Walsh Show. In fact, we took the suite next door to Tiny's room at his Melbourne hotel where I stayed that night to make sure he could be intercepted in the hallway the next morning. I did a series of tongue-in-cheek reports through the night, updating the Tiny Tim story, always ending with the same tag line, "This is Frank Avis. I'm just a suite away from Tiny Tim." I don’t know why but I always thought that was really funny.

Anyway, my insider in the entourage gave me a call at 9:30 and I was waiting in the hallway, ready to pounce, when Tiny left his room. He gave me a terrific interview, including a few bars of "Tip Toe Through he Tulips" (God, it was awful) and we raced the tape back to Carlton, edited in a few Mike Walsh questions and, fair dinkum, you would have thought he was sitting there in the studio.

Ah, what happened to Tiny Tim? And to Miss Vicki? I'm not sure I recall the answer but instinctively, I know it wouldn’t have been good.

There were several really big stories in Melbourne during this period.

The disappearance of Prime Minister Harold Holt. Washington stations rang us for interviews for weeks and they kept asking the same question, "How is it possible the Prime Minister was allowed to go into the surf alone?" I think if he'd been an American he would have had six Secret Service agents swimming out there with him.

The Westgate Bridge collapse. I spent all afternoon at the scene and I remember Danny Webb and I were standing together when they found one of the last of the bodies. We looked at the remains and the man had no face. Danny and I looked at each other, filed our last reports, and went home. That was enough for anybody. This disaster incidentally gave me one of my first great examples of how to use radio "sound" to advantage. I often used the edited tape when I did my news lectures at AFTRS. The caller came in around midday and luckily we ran tape immediately, getting his introductory words. He said, "I think... I think... I just saw the Westgate bridge fall down." There were long pauses in between and a bit of static. Normally we would have tightened all of this up to give us a 30-second grab, but considering the gravity of the story – I think the death toll was over 30 – I closed my eyes and listened to the sentences. In the end I left in a lot of the pauses and the static. The static gave the eyewitnesses account a sort of eerie quality, adding to the atmosphere. I haven't got the tape anymore but I still remember how it sounded that day.

Then there were the bushfires. Tthis raises another unusual memory. I remember the bushfires were burning across Western Melbourne and one of our reporters had been stopped on the Geelong highway amid fears the fire would cross the road. I’m not sure who it was. I have memories of John Magee or maybe Frank Marston. Anyway he called me on the two-way and said a convoy of vehicles was going to attempt to head South and he wanted to join them to get closer to the fires. I said, "Of course, what are you waiting for? Get in the line and go!" I don’t know why this happened but some minutes later I called the reporter and asked if he had set off. He said he was just about to but he had a bad feeling about the trip. I responded that I had the same feeling and we called it off. That afternoon, the fire swept across the highway at Lara and I don't think anyone in the convoy survived. Strange, hey?

Oh yes, and I have to recount another weird story from those days. I know it sounds strange all of these odd things happening during my career, but this one was really quite unusual and was witnessed by a large number of people including police, who actually arrested me briefly during their investigation.

The morning papers started to run stories about a suburban house which was having rocks rained down on it every night. I can’t remember where it was, I think one of the middle-class Southern suburbs. Anyway we went down and did several interviews and it transpired the people in the house believed that the rocks were coming from one of the houses above them. Apparently there'd been a falling out with the neighbours some time back.

Just how these people managed to throw hundreds and hundreds of rocks in a few minutes wasn't addressed at the time.

So the police finally got sick and tired of the whole thing and sent half a dozen patrol cars down to the house and nearby streets to personally witness the phenomenon.

A few journos, including myself found out, and couldn't resist taking part in the operation.

I parked up near the neighbours, who I'd been told, were the prime suspects.

Anyway, around 9 PM there was this hell of a commotion as all these rocks rained down on the house, right on schedule.

I'd turned off my lights so I wouldn’t be seen by the neighbours and gunned the news car up the street to see if they were throwing the rocks. Unfortunately, there was a police officer nearby and he pulled me up, thinking I was acting very suspiciously, and was in the process of taking me in for questioning when another officer I knew intervened. The bottom line is that the rocks never came from the "offending house" and after a few nights they just stopped altogether. We never found out where they came from.

PS. I'm not making this up. Check the Melbourne Sun's files. It'll all be there.

It was also during this time that I filled in as the football moderator when Ian Major made the unexpected decision to switch to 3KZ. So I entered the world of Aussie Rules doing the Thursday night teams with Jack Dyer (along with Barry Cable and, after that, Bobby Skilton) and Saturday afternoon calling. We did the second half of the Seconds game and then the main game with updates from our round the ground reporters. I absolutely loved Jack Dyer and Bob Skilton and I would often joke about how unfair it was that jack hadn’t won a Brownlow Medal as Best and Fairest (Bob had won three) as he was such a fair player who wouldn’t hurt a flea. The fact was of course that Dyer, they didn’t call him Captain Blood for nothing, was one of the most feared players of the 30’s. When Jack went through a pack he always seemed to manage to emerge intact on the other side leaving half a dozen opponents on the ground behind him. One day he shirt fronted one bloke so hard that they had to carry him off the ground. The opposing coach ran on to the ground and threw a blanket over the player, covering his whole body. Jack looked over and thought, "What are they doing that for?". The opposing ruckman looked at Dyer and said, "Jeez Jack, you've killed him." Dyer was useless for the rest of the game. He couldn't kick straight and he kept pulling out of contests in case he hurt somebody and Richmond got done.

As Jack left the field, expecting to be arrested, there was his victim, as large as life chewing on an orange and winking at him. Jack never pulled out of a contest again. I've spoken to a lot of experts who remember the '20s, '30s and '40s and most of them say the same thing: if they could have picked a team of all time greats, Jack Dyer would probably be in their first 5 choices. He wasn't pretty but he was tough and relentless. If you’re not a VFL/AFL fan this probably won’t interest you but the WA great Barry Cable finally came across to Victoria at this time to play for North Melbourne and XY signed him up as our special commentator.

He joined Jack and yours truly for the Thursday night teams show. I hadn't realized 'til our first show that Barry had never met Jack and that Jack had never seen him play. I told Jack how brilliant Cable was when I saw him at the '66 Carnival. It was obvious Barry idolized Jack from the moment they met.

Sadly Barry’s form was well down in the first few matches. His famous drop kick was virtually gone and he spent most of his time hand-balling. Jack was increasingly embarrassed as the three of us met every Thursday night. Then one Saturday afternoon Barry started kicking again and it was Jack's great pleasure to name him our Man of the Match in an XY game of the day. Only then did Barry tell Jack what was wrong. He rolled up his trouser legs one Thursday night and the two legs were virtually blue, covered in massive bruising. Barry had been kicked in a trial game apparently and could hardly walk, let alone run and kick, in his first four games. But he never offered an excuse and he never revealed his injury 'til it was virtually healed. He just kept plugging away as best he could. Jack just looked at Barry and nodded quietly in approval. It was emotional stuff. On Thursday nights I walked with giants.

But it all had to end. XY was about to turn to a new format and Bill Passick rang me to say he was switching from AK to CH.9 and would I like to take over? I met N.D Mike Schildberger, took the job and sadly announced I was leaving XY.

They'd been so good to me but I knew it was time to head off to something different... 3AK "where no wrinklies fly", Rhett Walker and an unbelievable format change from Rock and Roll to Beautiful Music.

That's our next adventure...

FRANK AVIS continues his career in HOBART.

2007-12-22T12:00:00+10:00

FRANK AVIS continues his career in HOBART.

I enjoyed my stay in Bendigo, sort of. I certainly made some good friends, although boarding so far out of town, at Kangaroo Flat, made it an exciting bike ride to work, especially in wet weather.

I remember I boarded with Mr and Mrs Small who were extremely kind to me.

But after a while I thought it was time to move on in my constant attempt to get into big city radio so I started to send off the requisite audition tapes. One ended up at 7EX, Launceston, and I suddenly found myself facing a tough decision when I got the job. We thought about it and in the end decided, what the heck, go for it, take the trip over to Tassie. So I resigned and then got a phone call to tell me that the guy who was leaving had decided to stay on, but not to worry, the Manager had found me a position at 7HO in Hobart if I wanted it. So, that’s how things were done in those days and off we went to Hobart where we settled in Lenah Valley and finally in a house at Howrah over on the other side of the river. Allan Brown was the manager at HO, Keith Graham was Chief Announcer and I recall John Loughlin (the breakfast star who was the King of Hobart radio), Allan Maney (My cricketing mate), Peter Sharp (who later moved on to Channel 10, Melbourne), Don Bridgen, Tom Paine, Rod Muir, Mike Webb, Sam Anglesea, John Vincent, John Vertigan (Vertie), the McCarthy Brothers, Doug Fry, Bernard Carr, Ray James and Roger Diakovsky.

Brian Hodgman was at the adjoining TVT 6, along with Ray Sherry (ex Stratford actor and later to be labor MP), Ian Woodward (the beloved Woody, another cricket tragic), Shelagh Keating, Tom Warne, Graeme Smith, Gordon Bell, Bill Lee, Tony Kendrick and the wonderful Mrs Wylie in the canteen.

As a matter of fact, my first memories of Hobart relate to Channel 6. My first Sunday night in Hobart was taken up watching the channel 6 movie and, in those days, the end of transmission for the day was marked by the playing of the national anthem. On this occasion the vision was of the Queen at the Trooping of the Colour ceremony. This night, I watched with interest as the Queen, mounted on her trusty steed, was shown upside down and going backwards.

Then there was the wonderful night when they showed the British historical piece, Scott of Antarctica. You know the story, where Scott battles his way to the south pole only to find that he’s been beaten by the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. His party is then virtually wiped out trying to get back home to base. Pretty rugged material.

Anyway, the movie went on and on and on and finally way after midnight, long after the channel’s licence allowed it to stay open, the director decided to send everyone to bed.

There was Scott and his party slogging their way through the snow to the pole and suddenly one of the actors looks up, points off screen and says, "Look!"

At this point, the director pulled the plug and we never found out what they were looking at, or indeed what happened to Scott and his band of adventurers.

What we were supposed to see of course was the Norwegian flag flying at the south pole signifying that Scott had been beaten to the pole and that all of their courageous efforts were in vain.

For weeks afterwards, you’d be walking down the main street of Hobart and suddenly somebody would point their finger and yell out "Look" and everyone walking down the street would fall over laughing.

But my favorite story was the night I was doing the voice-overs from the booth for a Friday night movie.

Now the general idea for the director and his crew was to turn the sound down while they listened to music or told stories or whatever, and then to turn up the audio every couple of minutes just to make sure everything was operating normally.

But no one told us this night that the movie was a murder mystery set in a radio station. At one point the leading actors are in a studio having a heated argument which the witnesses outside can’t hear because the sound is turned off. This is apparently a central part of the plot.

As it happened the director chose this moment to turn up his audio to make sure all was well. Not a sound. He yells out to his team, "The sound’s gone," which is accompanied by several people yelling out "oh shit". When did it go, they’re asking. What happened to the sound? They quickly stop the show and order yours truly to make an announcement along the lines of, "We apologise for the interruption. The movie will continue just as soon as we can restore the soundtrack."

After about 60 seconds a listener rings in and says, "There’s nothing wrong with the sound you bloody boofheads. It’s SUPPOSED to be off. That’s what the movie’s about, if you’d take the time to watch it."

We quickly restored the movie and got back to the important job at hand. Playing poker as I recall.

I started doing a few night shifts and stuff 'til Keith had the brainwave to extend Locko’s breakfast by one hour, putting the two of us together from 9-to 10 for the Good morning Club. Whatever was he thinking? It went totally bananas. Somebody did a survey at one point in the 60s and we had 76% of the available audience. We were virtually allowed to do whatever we wanted, which often involved insulting our audience and the rest of the community. We crossed to Parliament house where the Premier Eric Reece, played by yours truly–the thespian returns–made a series of highly defamatory speeches. We even crossed to the Queen at one stage where her Majesty–again played by you know who–uttered the immortal words on Tasmanian radio.
"My husband and I (long pause) want to… Go home."

Locko and I had an elephant race through the city. We rode a tandem bike from the station to Glenorchy.

I quickly joined Woody as a devout follower of the Sandy Bay football club, something which caused great merriment on air (until we won a Premiership. That shut 'em up.

I even did some work on the original "In Hobart Tonight" with Tom, Graeme, Shelagh, John Sidney at the piano and Bill Lee in the director’s chair.

I personally thought it went ok but it was pretty basic stuff in the 60s, as you can imagine.

One night Shelagh sang "You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun" from is it "Annie Get Your Gun"? Anyway I was supposed to stand in the background, alongside a bale of hay, looking suitably anonymous.

For some reason I decided to chew on this piece of hay and pretend to start choking.

Poor Shelagh could see me out of the corner of her eye and it took all of her professionalism to complete the song without breaking out in hysterical laughter. Let’s see 'em try that on law and Order.

I also managed to start a BA at the beautiful University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay, where I played B grade district cricket for a season or two.

Sadly, while things looked to be going well on the outside, it turned out to be much different inside.

My wife was tragically dying from a severe kidney disease and this had a dreadful impact on us all, triggering early morning asthmatic attacks in yours truly which had a disastrous impact on my work.

In the end, the staff was wonderfully supportive and I quit Hobart to have my wife transferred to Royal Melbourne Hospital. She had a kidney transplant, the 13th in Australia, which eventually failed after some 12 months. I only mention this personal stuff because it may explain why my work in this period tended to be a bit volatile as I was under massive pressure with a wife critically ill, two little children being looked after by my 60 year old parents-in-law in Bendigo and me working six days a week.

I was lucky to have good friend Woody looking after me in those days. Well, enough of that.

Before we leave Hobart and head north again it’s time to relate another very strange story which, just like the Yowie, I’ll recount exactly as it happened. Only in this case I am not a witness, just a messenger carrying a very unusual message.

Since the UFO sighting in Bendigo I’d been taking a close interest in these strange encounters and imagine my surprise when I read that one of the U.S authors I’d been reading in recent years was coming to Hobart for a lecture, complete with slideshow, summarising the latest work on UFO’s.

I turned up for the lecture only to find the front seats filled up with forecasters from the local Weather Bureau, most of whom I knew personally through interviewing them about the weather from time to time.

I exchanged pleasantries and asked what they were doing at the lecture, to which they responded by shifting in their seats, looking a little embarrassed and talking about how "it was a slow night and they were looking for something different to do, etc, etc."

At the end of the evening, when we were sitting around talking with the author I sidled over to one of the last of the forecasters who’d stayed behind and said, "Now come on Pete, what ARE you doing here?"

He swore if I ever told this story he’d deny every knowing me, but enough time has surely passed to allow me to summarise his response.

Basically, the forecasters were keen to see what they were finding flying in and out of their radar screens virtually every day. Peter said these objects would often move across the screen at speeds of over 3,000 miles an hour. Sometimes they appeared to stop dead and make a right hand turn.

I was truly astonished. Here where two incidents where I trusted the witnesses totally.

So I was given the go ahead to do a special on UFOs, using my interview with the visiting expert as the basis for the show.

There were quite a few interesting phone calls after the programme went to air but the most mysterious was from a man who said he had been working at a lighthouse in recent years and that he wondered if he could come to see me. The conversation was so peculiar that I arranged to meet him the following afternoon in the 7HO-TVT canteen. I was met by a man and woman ,both in their 60s,who claimed to have been recently retired after serving for many years as lighthouse keepers. They told me they had signed Commonwealth papers which prohibited them from making any comment on anything that happened there, but they were desperate to find someone who could record their story for posterity.

They never confirmed this but I think they had worked at the Maatsuyker Lighthouse in southern Tasmania before it became fully automatic.

The woman told me one afternoon, at 4 o’clock, she looked out the window and saw a circular object hovering over the water. She yelled to her husband and both of them witnessed the object, hovering some 20 metres above the water. It sent down a beam of light and remained there for over an hour.

The husband was able to take several photos of the object and immediately dispatched them to his superiors. The next afternoon the UFO returned at exactly the same time and did the same thing.

The couple sent off urgent despatches to the authorities alerting them of the incident.

The following morning, a team of Government officials manned with cameras and various scientific gear, arrived at the lighthouse. The couple were told they were not to discuss any matters with the visiting scientists and were then told to sign a document in which they were informed all information about the incident was classified and covered under the official Secrets Act. Heady stuff.

At 4 o’clock that afternoon the UFO returned and did the same thing, all of which was witnessed and photographed by the scientists. And it did the same again the following afternoon.

After that the UFO disappeared. It never returned during the last 12 months of the couples’ tenure on the Island.

Nothing was said by the scientists. They simply packed up, said a courteous farewell and disappeared just the same as the object of their visit, never to be seen again.

In the end, the only person left was a young Government information officer who was basically there as the gofer for the visitors. He was packing up, preparing to leave when the Lighthouse keeper looked at him and said, "Someone’s got to tell us… What in God’s name have we been looking at?"

The young man wasn’t keen to get into a long conversation but basically told them that the thing they’d seen was almost certainly "not of this world". He said the scientists, at their nightly meetings, were positive it came from beyond the Earth.

They hypothesised that the "beam of light" the craft sent down every afternoon may well have been extracting something from the water, probably hydrogen, which was converted into a power source.

From what he’d picked up, the sighting married in with several other incidents reported in the USA and Europe where these objects were seen hovering on a beam of light, over water.

I did my best to check these stories but as far as I can ascertain there is no record of such a visit to Maatsuyker Island and certainly no file containing footage of such an extraordinary incident.

Who were these two people? "Method" actors getting in some rehearsal time at my expense?

Two people with serious psychological problems? I can tell you this, if they were actors, they were bloody good. They’ve still got me enthralled. Even more than 40 years later.

Hopefully, my technical support team of John, Janie and Darleen will be able to include a couple of photos, covering the Hobart years, which have been provided by radio historian Wayne Mac. [Support team: photos included]

I know Wayne already has his time pretty well filled with work on his own publications covering the radio industry so it’s especially nice of him to take the time and interest in my rambling memoirs.

I owe you one, pal.

Next time we meet, it’ll be back north to the mainland as my radio career continues.

More From Bendigo

2007-11-20T12:00:00+10:00

I know I’m supposed to be sticking to my radio career, but having just mentioned John Laws I’m drawn to a wonderful story. I was driving somewhere in NSW in the 70’s when John was at the height of his career. His programme was being edited and sent to various country stations around Australia. One morning I happened to be listening to one of these outlets when a call came into John from a lady who said, "Mr Laws... Mr Laws... There’s a man living in my roof."

Now, I have this picture of John doing his show, sitting on auto-pilot, leaning back in the chair and saying "Yes" and "Oh really" at the appropriate places while reading his morning paper and letting the caller rave on. Every now and then you could almost see him lean forward, put down the paper and nod to his producer, "We’ve got a live one here, Stan." Then he’d go for it.

I could almost see him leaning forward and nodding to his producer as the lady started to tell him that there was a man living in her roof. Laws got right into it.

"What do you mean, living in your roof?"

"Well, I go into the kitchen for my dinner and I hear him moving about up there."

"Do you mean he’s living in the loft-above the ceiling-and you don’t know who he is?"

"He shouldn’t be there... No one’s ever lived in the roof before."

"Well, how did he get in there... I mean, how long’s he been in the roof?"

"I think he moved in when my son left home... It’s about 3 months ago... And he just stays there... I can hear him... He’s very quiet, but he moves around when he doesn’t think I’m listening".

"Well..." Laws now assumes the role of her counsellor, "He shouldn’t be there and you’ve got to get him out."

"I know... But he won’t go."

"Now listen, this is what I want you to do... And I want you to be very firm for me... I want you to make sure he hears you clearly... Can you be firm for me?"

"Yes, I’ll try."

"You leave the phone off the hook and go into the kitchen and yell out at the top of your voice... GET OUT OF MY HOUSE NOW! GET OUT! Will you do that?"

"Will he go then?"

"Yes, he’ll leave immediately. You’ll never have to worry about him again. Just put the phone down and tell him to get out. Then come back to the phone and one of my staff will talk to you, alright?"

"Thank you, Mr Laws."

The phone is heard being put on the table and there are footsteps moving away into the kitchen. Suddenly this woman’s voice screams out, "GET OUT OF MY HOUSE NOW! GET OUT!" There is a pause and she yells out again, "GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" She is still yelling when the Producer cuts to an ad' break and on to the 11 o’clock news.

The following day I’m listening to the same station which continues with the John Laws’ show. Laws is sitting back comfortably in his chair when a woman caller gets on the show and says, "Mr Laws, my daughter-in-law is a witch."

You can almost see Laws lean forward, nodding to his producer, "We’ve got another one, mate."

"Well ma'am," he takes on the role of the friendly family mediator, "there are often tensions between mothers and their son’s wife... It’s quite common."

"No, you don’t understand... She’s a witch."

"Of course, and as I was trying to explain, these things usually work themselves out over a period of time and..."

"You’re not listening to me, Mr Laws. I’m trying to tell you that SHE IS A WITCH!"

Long pause...

"Do you mean, witch as in wearing a pointy hat and riding broomsticks? Are we talking here about a witch witch?"

"Yes, she’s got my son completely under her spell... He’s changed completely... He doesn’t talk to me anymore... Never comes home... He’s a completely different person."

"But, surely that doesn’t mean she’s a...?"

"I’ve been in the kitchen, God know what she’s mixing in there, what she’s been feeding him."

"I can’t talk to him... She’s got a spell on him... I’ve got to break the spell."

"But Madam, surely...?"

"You can just see it, the way she looks at me... Oh I know, you little vixen, what you’re up to..."

"Madam..."

"She’s got him now, but I’ll break the spell..."

"Madam!" (Laws' voice is getting a little louder)

"I know what she’s up to... I know she’s..."

"Madam!" (Getting louder)

"If she thinks she can come here with all her chants and potions and take my son..."

"MADAM!" (Extremely loud)

This final scream from Laws finally stops the tirade. The woman stops. There is this incredibly long silence as Laws pauses for effect. And then very quietly he says, "You don’t happen to have a man living up in your ceiling, do you?"

Producer fades to promo, commercials, 11 o’clock news.

Lovely line, perfect timing, your reporter nearly drives off a country road, laughing hysterically. Sorry about that, just another diversion.

Back to 3BO and another strange story.

It was a holiday Monday, I remember that, and I was on duty in the studio while Turps, Graham Turpie, was the duty journalist (I think Dave Horsefall was the Editor in those days), we suddenly started to get all of these phone calls about strange objects in the sky over Bendigo.

It was the late-50’s, maybe 1960, but in those days you didn’t run stories about such things on a conservative radio station in a very conservative city in a very conservative country. But when the number of calls get over 80 you have to do something. So Turps ran a story about the number of calls we were getting about these strange objects.

The calls kept coming in, all reporting these sightings. Eventually Graham had no option other than to go to one of these locations and actually see what they were talking about. I said to him that he’d probably need another impartial witness, suggesting he collect my wife on his way so there’d be two people reporting on the event. So Graham and Elizabeth went to one area where we were getting a lot of reports, not sure just where that was.

Graham could see the objects clearly but Elizabeth, who had excellent eyesight, was the best of all. She could see a large, cigar-shaped object, high in the sky-not moving-surrounded by smaller disc shapes which appeared to be flying around the main object, perhaps even flying in and then flying out again.

It was astonishing. We could, I guess, rule out up to 100 callers, suggesting they were suffering some sort of mass hallucination, but it was pretty hard to rule out Graham and my wife. So we continued to run the story.

I eventually got through to the duty officer at the nearest Victorian Air Force base, asking if he’d received any such reports. He had some difficulty not laughing at me. He repeatedly tried to fob me off, suggesting all we were seeing was a weather balloon. But I asked him how a weather balloon could stay in the same position in the sky for 8 hours without moving.

He didn’t like this and then made it clear that if I thought he was ordering a plane to go into the area to check on these things, then I had better forget it. That pretty much ended the conversation.

The objects remained in the sky for the early part of the afternoon, but then the reports stopped coming in. By the time I signed off, they were gone. This was a most baffling mystery which sent me off on another hunt for ten years or so, reading all of the literature I could get, especially after another extraordinary incident which happened a few years later when I moved to Hobart.

Remember, I never sighted these things myself, but the people who witnessed them were beyond questioning. There is no doubt they saw something very unusual that day in Bendigo.

I hope you don’t mind me taking along these byways with the Yowie story and now these UFO’s but I am reporting them exactly as they happened. Where possible I’ll name names so that you’ll know they’re absolutely authentic.

When these ramblings resume I’ll move from Victoria across Bass Strait to Tasmania and over 5 years with 7HO, Hobart.

Bendigo and John Laws

2007-11-07T12:00:00+10:00

I’ve just looked back on some of my previous entries and realised the rapid onset of senility is white-anting the product. For example, I did my army training at Holsworthy, no “e”. Please make the necessary alterations as you see fit and accept my apologies for any other errors you may find especially in the spelling of people’s names. That being said, let us press on with life post-army. I didn’t take up the offer to resume my career at 2LF, agreeing instead to join Lawrie Shaw and the doyen of 2GB "voices", Richard Gaze. Barry Michael also joined the team late in my tenure and, if I remember correctly, I also met Barry late in my time at 2LF.

Less said about this period the better, although Lawrie introduced me to a lot of terrific literature and music while Richard was just wonderful to be around. Just hearing him do a time call on 2GB was worth turning on the radio.

I spent a pointless year in Sydney trying to break into radio acting but I just didn’t have the voice for that job and should have realised this much earlier. I did a stack of auditions including one with Lyndal Barbour, who kindly took me aside afterwards and warned that it might take a few attempts before I broke through. This was extremely kind of her. Sadly, I never broke through and—down to my last 10 shillings (whatever they were)—I went down to AWA to see if they had any openings on their network. Luckily, they needed somebody at 3BO, Bendigo, and so I boarded a train and went south with the ducks. Down to Melbourne and then on to Bendigo. The Manager there was a Frank McManus, I think Eric Pattison was his deputy and I remember Russ Pilley, Al Scown, Des Nicholas, Campbell Spain (from his fields of waving corn), Ted Bell, Des Tocchini, Graeme Turpie, Bill Moore, Dick Turner and Doug Richards.

I ended up doing breakfast with Ted Bell which became highly successful but which was, not to put too fine a point on it, at times decidedly weird. One morning he saw a workman fixing the roof of an adjacent building and took a mike with 20 metres of cable to continue the show outside with the builder. A lot of this stuff really came off. Another time we had a pie and treacle fight in the front window of a homewares store. I can still smell the treacle in my hair. Ted was also a hypnotist and ventriloquist. I saw him one night doing the warm up for Frank Ifield and he was absolutely brilliant in a routine with the ventriloquist’s doll. Whatever happened to Ted?

I remember taking my trusty recorder up into a helicopter when (I think it was) TAA was introducing helicopters to the public with a series of flights across Victoria. The pilot was a captain Neil McMillan. It was my first and only chopper flight.

A week later I picked up the morning Sun to find that Captain McMillan and a Miss Australia entrant had died when the chopper crashed in a provincial city. One week earlier and it could have been me.

I actually followed not far behind John Laws, who had had a brief career in Bendigo. It did give me the opportunity to read one of his old announcer’s logs which had remained in the studio. Apparently, at one time, John had left the studio and accidentally missed the opening of the 7PM news bulletin from the ABC.

The manager was so incensed that he issued a firm memo, directing that the duty announcer must remain in the studio chair from 6:55 'til he took the ABC landline. Nothing was allowed to interfere with this directive... Not severe illness, mayhem, even an earthquake. The memo made it clear that there was no option. Stay in that chair 'til the news went to air or face the ultimate punishment.

This time it seems somebody had wandered into the studio about 10 to 7 and thrown a cigarette butt into a waste bin. Mind you, it’s 50 years ago so my memory is going to be tested but the announcer’s log book, signed by John Laws, went something along these lines:

Funny, a short time after the announcers were seen in the library, laughing hysterically at John’s report, it magically disappeared, never to be sighted again. Who has it? It’s worth a fortune. Maybe we can find it and could get Lawsie to sign it again?

There is another wonderful story out of 3BO in the 50’s. When John laws moved on to try his luck in Sydney, a senior executive with the station is alleged to have taken him aside and advised him to try another career. John was advised that he’d "never make it in radio". This remains one of the most famous lines in radio folklore.

I actually happened to be in Sydney the night John got his breakthrough gig. I think it was either 2UE or 2SM, but I remember hearing the news at 6PM and the opening bars of Eydie Gorme’s Frenesi. The music dropped and the voice said, "Hello world, this is Long John." Straight into Frenesi. Bang. It was like a tsunami had rolled across the industry. You knew from "Hello" that this man was going to be a superstar. The mike loved him and he obviously loved being there.

John laws dominated the Sydney radio era from the mid-to-late 50’s right through to 2007. That puts him up there with the greatest names in the business including Jack Davey, Roy Rene, Tony Withers and Eric Baume. You can fill in your own nominations.

Next time we meet, or rather next time I manage to stop daydreaming and actually do something productive, I’ll tell you about a very strange incident—oh no, not another one!—which happened in Bendigo in the late-50’s.

Frank’s National Service

2007-11-01T12:00:00+10:00

I was sitting down with three of my children at Manly today, sipping Gloria Jeans as the gentle ocean breezes wafted in off the water (It’s not easy but somebody has to do it) and they were all throwing out hints about the lack of a new episode. Suitably chastened, I immediately raced to the computer on my return in the evening.

It was 1956 and the biggest thing in my life was whether my birthdate would come up in the national service lottery. Actually, it was a funny thing - I knew my number was going to be chosen. Don’t know how, but I had no doubt I was heading for three months of national service. And so it proved to be.

We assembled at Young station one night and headed down to Sydney on the overnight train, bound for our camp at Holesworth. It was a dreadful journey, only matched by the arrival which was equally dreadful. It was never "Holesworthy", by the way, but always referred to as "Holes-bloody-worthy".

Actually everything had a bloody in it at National Service... Sometimes even worse.

We were outfitted and out on the parade ground immediately. Our Sergeant/mentor was Sgt Dummett, nicknamed Daddy Dummett, and we loved the man. There’s no doubt we would have followed him into harm’s way if required. Luckily, I happened to find myself between Korea and the war in Vietnam. I don’t make jokes about that. I was a very lucky young man.

We arrived at Holes-bloody-worthy in the middle of winter to find ourselves sleeping in tents with little or no protection from the elements. We went to bed with our army socks on, often wearing two sets of pyjamas and with our army greatcoat covering our two blankets. We were dragged out of bed at the crack of dawn and sent to the showers which were freezing. Technically, they were hot, but I never found anyone who had any hot water.

The trick in nasho was to get yourself into some exclusive sporting group, because sporting rivalry in the services was really red hot. We were determined to uphold the Army’s honour in the 13th NS intake.

My first breakthrough was to get into the boxing squad. Forgive me for a bit of background here, but a mate of mine, John Harmer, and I trained for a year or so at a well known Sydney gym. For the life of me I can’t think of the name but it was in George Street, on your way down to Circular Quay. Anyway, in those days a lot of the amateur boxing was arranged by the Police Boys’ Clubs across the nation and I switched over to the Burwood club for the annual state championships. I was fighting as a lightweight at the time and trained by the most decent bloke, a Sergeant at the Burwood Centre. Somehow I got into the quarter or semi-finals and I kept hearing about this young superstar who was favoured to win the title that year. His name was Robert Blue, nicknamed Bobby Blue. Every training night it was all I heard… This Bobby Blue fella.

Well, when we won our way through to the finals, the Sergeant called me aside, fixed me with a long and mournful gaze and said, "Frank, we got him." Always the innocent, I naturally asked, "We got who?"

The dreaded reply came, "We got Bobby Blue, next Tuesday night." Trying to find something positive to say, the Sergeant continued, "but we had to fight him sooner or later, if we wanted to win the title."

"Sure," I thought, "but why couldn’t it be later than Tuesday night."

For the next week, the Sergeant drilled me over and over again, telling me that Blue had this big left hand. He didn’t mess about, he threw it the minute the fight started, and it rarely missed. So the Sergeant said over and over again, "He’s going to throw the left in the first few seconds... Be prepared for it." We spent hours tucking in my chin and putting up my right glove in defence. Never has a fighter been warned more often or prepared more carefully for one punch.

So Tuesday night dawned. I hadn’t realized but one of my schoolmates had spread the word through the school that I was fighting in the state titles that night and when I walked out into the ring there were over a dozen boys from the school screaming and yelling. They even heaped abuse on my opponent when he stepped into the ring. "Jeez," I thought, "why are they doing that? Why would they want to get him any angrier? These aren’t supporters," I thought to myself, "these are complete idiots."

I remember the bell going and making my way out to the centre of the ring. Then somebody exploded a very large missile inside my head. You guessed it. I was warned about it, I trained relentlessly for it and Bobby Blue hit me with it in the first two seconds of the fight. All I remember for about 10 seconds was the strange realisation that you really do see stars... Isn’t that amazing? There were galaxies running across my head. Suddenly, they cleared and I looked up to see Bobby Blue charging straight at me, with a snarling smile on his lips and the word KILL imprinted on his brain. He didn’t worry about defence. He was coming at me, with one thought in mind... DESTROY... DESTROY.

To this day no one knows what happened but 18 months of training suddenly worked. There was Mr Blue coming at me, his jaw wide open and my right hand suddenly decided to launch itself straight at him. I know I didn’t tell it to. For some reason, my right hand looked at the situation and thought, "If I don’t do something here, this goose is going to go to hospital for a very long time." So, my right hand went WHACK. The whole thing was sort of like Chariots of Fire... It was all in slow motion. First my opponent was coming in ready to finish me, then all of a sudden he was staggering back, with this amazed look on his face and then falling to the canvas, taking an 8 count. My school mates were beside themselves. They were up on their chairs going berserk, while the police Sergeant in my corner was apparently sobbing hysterically. They’d never seen him cry before.

Look, I won’t prolong this except to say Bobby beat the count and got up as mad as a hornet, proceeding to rip me to shreds over the next couple of rounds. I don’t know what happened to him after that, but he sure had a big left hand.

Anyway, the boxing squad kept me going nicely in the nashos for three weeks, managing to successfully escape overnight guard duty in that time, 'til sadly I was taken to hospital with an eye infection, missing out on the boxing championships.

Now, guard duty was horrible, leaving you standing at attention with your 303 for hours and hours overnight, rain or whatever. I’d successfully managed to get through my first month without guard duty. Big plus.

But what about the next few weeks? The answer: join the 10 mile running team, special diets, lots of training time, no overnight duties. Wonderful, it got me through the next week or two, when we suffered a shattering loss in the distance runnings... Third out of three entries.

It destroyed our coach, poor devil. Anyway, again, no guard duty. What to do next? This decision was taken out of my hands when Paul Horne wrote to me, announcing that Love’s a Luxury had been chosen to take part in the state Arts Council Awards. Unfortunately, it was to be performed smack in the middle of my national service. I don’t know how Paul managed it, but I found myself called into the Captain’s office to be told I was being given special leave to appear, but I could only leave the day before the performance and I had to be back the day after. There were no rehearsals... Just get there, do it and get back. I don’t think the Captain was greatly impressed by the decision.

So, back to Young to perform before another ecstatic, packed audience but only to be told by the judge that he would have preferred, "Hamlet". We didn’t win. He said I would have been a good Hamlet.

Shakespeare and I both knew a lot better. I mean do you think anybody who wrote King Lear is completely stupid.

So I returned to Holesworthy with just a week of training to go. I had managed to escape all guard duty.

Then on my final night, in pouring rain and freezing conditions the Corporal came into our tent asking innocently how many guard duties I’d done. It was impossible to lie. My final night was spent on guard duty.

They get you in the end, don’t they? I don’t know whether national service really taught me much but I guess I learned to fire the 303, the Bren Gun, Owen Gun and lob the odd hand grenade. You never know when you might need that sort of expertise, particularly in radio.

At the end of training, I accepted Lawrie Shaw’s offer to join him, and 2GB’S famous Richard Gaze, in the Paint It Yourself show across NSW and Queensland. No fault of Lawrie’s or Richard’s, but I absolutely hated it. I won’t bore you with the details.

In the next episode, I fail to make it as a radio actor in Sydney and head back to country radio and further adventures.

The Ball Broadcast

2007-10-17T12:00:00+10:00

So here we are in the town of Young back in the mid-50’s. Now I have to introduce you to one of the most horrific episodes in my career.

Worse than being trapped in the 2MG studios alone late at night... Worse than doing breakfast at 2LF in the middle of winter... and even worse than seeing yowies lurking in the undergrowth. This is one of the nightmares of any radioman’s career... The dreaded BALL BROADCAST.

I’ve seen grown men flee the radio industry and return to their previous occupation measuring ball bearings, after being subjected to this most awful of events, the BALL BROADCAST. It can sneak up on you when you’re least expecting it and when it strikes – the results can be terminal.

It happened to me this way. Things were going pretty well at 2LF when one afternoon somebody told me I’d be doing the BALL BROADCAST on Friday night. I got dressed in my best suit – and pretty ordinary it was too – and went to the Town Hall, accompanied by a girl from accounts who was to do the frock descriptions and the technician who was to ensure the excitement of the evening was captured for posterity (and you can take that any way you want to, ok?).

When I walked in I was surrounded by the cream of Young society, and without being intentionally nasty, isn’t that a contradiction in terminology? The women were dressed in their finest and, to my surprise, all the men seemed to be decked out in Scottish regalia. Here we were out in the middle of the Australian wheat and wool belt and all these blokes are running round dressed up like Bonnie Prince Charley. I found it quite bizarre.

Anyway Ric Colson and his Band got things going and it was on. I should say from the start that I always found this dancing thing highly embarrassing. I didn’t mind watching professional dancers but to watch all of these average Joe’s treading on each other’s toes was quite bizarre. So I went on describing how great all the men looked wearing their skirts when about an hour in I got an urgent message from management which read briefly, ”They’re kilts you bloody idiot!”.I found out that night that Frank and ball broadcasts really didn’t mix well. I did three of them I think and always mention with pride that I managed to get to the end without rolling on the floor and bursting out into hysterical laughter.

During my time at 2LF somebody mentioned to Paul Horne, who had the local shoe shop, that I’d trained at the Sydney Independent. Paul and wife Patricia were mad keen amateur theatricals and he quickly set up a meeting to plan a local production. I wasn’t really interested but everyone was enthusiastic and it was pretty hard to stop the train once it’d left the station. Paul and I didn’t get close when it came to theatre. I wanted to do a quality material, Paul’s choice was a broad English farce. And I’m talking really “broad” here. Well, I’d better publically admit it here. Paul knew a lot more about the local audience than I did. Naturally, as in 99% of all English theatre the male leads inevitably had to dress up as women for whatever reason. What is it with the English and dresses? Oh well, we all said yes and so Paul put “Love’s a Luxury” with yours truly as Bobby Bentley into full scale production. The dreadful thing is that after a week or so I really started to enjoy it all again. My memory was sensational in those times. I knew my lines in the first week and knew everybody else’s lines in a fortnight.

Paul booked the Young Town Hall for two nights as I faced up to the reality of finishing the show around 11, getting home by 12, and then getting up at 4.30 for breakfast. I asked Paul how bookings were going and he smiled and said “it was looking pretty good”. 15 minutes before the curtain went up I took a peek out through the curtains and found it was indeed “pretty good”. The hall, a very large hall, was absolutely packed. We swung into Loves a Luxury with all stops out. They wanted farce. We gave ‘em farce. And the audience loved it. We got curtain call after curtain call. We were superstars.

The look on Paul’s face was enough to make it all worthwhile. He was elated. The local paper gave the show the biggest thumbs up you’ve ever seen in your life. My review roughly placed me up there with Sir Michael Redgrave and Larry Olivier. And word of mouth was sensational.

Our second night was packed enough for Paul to book us for another weekend. We even went on tour. Well, perhaps I exaggerate. What really happened is we piled into two cars one Friday night and performed in Harden, again to an absolutely packed house. Ah, these were heady days.

The local paper even started campaigning for us to be a candidate for the Arts Council’s annual theatre awards. Life it seemed was just about perfect. Except for one little problem. Somewhere in an office deep in Australian bureaucracy, somebody was pulling my birthdate out of a hat. I was just about to learn that my number had come up for National Service.

Goodbye Young, goodbye radio career for three months and goodbye “Love’s a Luxury”. Hello living in tents, digging tunnels, firing 303’s, Bren guns and Owen guns and lobbing hand grenades.

I’ll tell you about that experience next time we meet. Thanks for reading my recollections. Tell your friends.