Bandstand
Bandstand was the longest running Australian pop
television show of its time, and throughout its fifteen years it
featured the same host (bespectacled Channel Nine newsreader Brian
Henderson) and the same format.
Based on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, the
Australian show was pre-recorded before a studio audience, with
singers lip-synching their way through numbers performed on
elaborate studio sets. While other pop shows presented screaming
fans and long-haired beat groups, Bandstand somehow seemed
to ignore the extreme trends in music that happened in the mid and
late 1960s.
Although it showcased a range of pop performers, it shied away
from the brash and the scruffy, becoming a more
family-entertainment program than a show strictly for teenagers.
Bandstand's fifteen year run saw vast, bewildering
changes in pop music, but by maturing with its viewers, the
program retained the loyalty of the viewers who had grown up with
it.
Pop shows abounded on Australian TV in the mid-60s; There was
Bobby and Laurie's Dig We Must, Billy
Thorpe's It's All Happening, Ross D Wylie's Uptight,
Tony Murphy's Saturday Date, Go!! with Ian
Turpie (and later Johnny Young), and Teen Scene with
Johnny Chester. Bandstand outlasted all of them . . .
Each Bandstand episode was usually a themed musical
production with lavish studio sets. By the time its young
producer/director Warwick Freeman left in the mid 60s, the show
was costing $6,000 a week to produce. Occasional outside
broadcasts added variety - In December 1963, for example, in the
midst of the glorious summer of Australian Surf Music, one episode
was filmed at Sydney's Avalon Beach.
With its broad appeal, Bandstand attracted a weekly
viewing audience of two million at the height of its popularity.
It was voted the best youth show of 1961, and Brian Henderson won
a Gold Logie - the supreme accolade in Australian television - in
1967. He even recorded a single called What Is A Square?, a
spoken sermon on the moral virtues of the uncool, which mercifully
failed to chart.
Through the 1960s, Bandstand kept up a roster of
regulars and a cast of hundreds of guests. Viewers became familiar
with Bill & Boyd, Bryan Davies, Sandy Scott, Jimmy Hannan, Ian
Turpie, The Executives, Tony Brady, Vicki Forrest, Jade Hurley,
Frank Ifield, the Barry Sisters, the De Kroo Brothers, The
Delltones, Kevin Todd, Lucky Starr, the Bee Gees, Helen Reddy and
Janice Slater . . . to name but a few.
Overseas performers ranged from middle-of-the-road singers like
Neil Sedaka, Shirley Bassey and Wayne Newton, to the Rolling
Stones and an electric Bob Dylan during the Australian leg of his
historic 1966 world tour.
Four years after its demise, Bandstand was briefly
resurrected in 1976, this time with Daryl Somers as the host, but
the experiment was doomed to fail. After all, Brian Henderson was
Bandstand; Benign, calm, and paternal but never
patronising.
Henderson remained the chief newsreader for Australia's Channel
9 until finally announcing his retirement in 2002.
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