Children’s TV
Once upon a time, Adelaide was the Australian Capital for Children’s TV.
The 1960’s saw the discovery of a rather rotund bear who didn’t wear any pants. His name was “B Bear”, but this was deemed to be a little bit impersonal, so a competition was held to find a new name with “Humphrey” being the winning entry.
Sometime afterwards, a rival TV station discovered a large marmalade coloured cat, that it named “Fat Cat”.
These two characters became idols for a generation of Adelaide children, who would sit there in the morning first thing (7 am, which was first thing in the 1970’s, as it was when TV used to start) to watch Fat Cat appear with his off-sider Jane Reilly. The older children would have to then leave for school, which for some reason was always within walking distance, while the younger children would stay at home, change the channel and tune in to watch “Here’s Humphrey”.
Children would come home from school at the end of the day to watch Dean Davis or Joanne Moore in “Crackerjack”or “The Channel Niners”, the after school program that seemed to waver between one station or another during the 1970’s. A bicycle wheel with a generator would be spun to give away some prizes to audience members, children with interesting hobbies would be paraded before the cameras, tickets would be made available to school groups to sit in the audience, someone would talk about their pets.
And for the older children, or those younger ones with a scientific bent, “The Curiosity Show”would come along and provide almost a full hour’s worth of physics, chemistry and natural science, presented by Rob Morrison and Dean Hutton.
Children’s TV in Adelaide was just good, clean fun. Parents could leave their children to watch it in the knowledge that they would enjoy it and maybe even learn something.
Then came the networking of Adelaide TV stations…
The locally produced after school programs disappeared to be replaced by formula based programs fed in from the eastern states, including the ultimate indignity—a cartoon program aimed at teenage males, hosted by a scantily clad female model.
In the words of a British newsroom comedy, “After all, today’s teenage masturbators are tomorrow’s corporate executives”.
The Curiosity Show shut up shop and went into re-runs, though I believe that Dean Hutton still travels the country explaining science to all and sundry. It’s just a pity that Dean’s most recent TV appearance has been in an advertisement for MSG, still, he has to eat too. Even the much loved Prof. Sumner-Miller ended up flogging chocolate.
Humphrey Bear hung in there and is still around today, though he’s no longer a “funny old fellow”, rather he’s “the bear who cares for me”. Perhaps “funny old fellow”was too much of a worry for parents, who used to read in the newspaper of “funny old fellows” who abducted children, the latter of which was something of an Adelaide pastime until the 1980’s.
Humphrey is such a survivor that he even has his own web site and can be seen in localised productions in the USA where his program is presented in English and Spanish, though that would not matter too much for Humphrey because he doesn’t talk anyway.
And what of Fat Cat? His “Fat Cat and Friends” program was banished from the airwaves by the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Why? They decreed that an oversized orange cat to be an uncertain role-model for children. Much ballyhooing was made of this, culminating with a mock funeral for Fat Cat, at which Humphrey Bear was a pall-bearer.
Still, if Fat Cat was an uncertain role model for children, what the hell does that make the Teletubbies? [CL]
Christmas pageant, John Martin’s
This wasn’t just a parade of Christmas floats sponsored by a department store, it was a very big parade of Christmas floats sponsored by a department store. And an Adelaide institution.The pageant was established by Mr John Martin in 1933 as a way of cheering up the Greatly Depressed. For generations of South Australians, Christmas came to town on the day Santa waved from his pageant float and made his triumphant waddle into the Magic Cave (conveniently located in the centre of John Martin’s toy department). For many families, this was the sign that it was time to put up their own Christmas trees, and they continued this tradition, with just a little grumbling, when the pageant was moved from late to early November in the ‘80s to coincide with the Grand Prix.
Characters on the floats were played by Johnnies’staff and family members, and people were known to take jobs at the department store at the urging of younger siblings desperate to wear elf costumes. When John Martin’s went bust in the ‘90s, the question on everyone’s lips was: what about the Christmas pageant? Fortunately, local credit unions picked up the sponsorship, and life’s rich pageant rolls on. [HV]
City of churches
‘Adelaide is known as the City of Churches,’tourist brochures often say. Surprisingly, this is never followed up by a listing of the many fine examples of church architecture. That’s because it would be quite short.
Adelaide really only has one nice church: St Peter’s Cathedral, the one cricket commentators are talking about when they mention the ‘cathedral end’of Adelaide Oval. All right, St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral is looking better now that it’s had the steeple added. But beyond that, Adelaide’s churches are nothing to write home about, either in quantity or quality.
A frequently quoted statistic is that Adelaide has twice as many pubs as churches (and thanks to the priests at Sevenhill Winery, the quality of alcohol supplied to the latter compares very favourably to that supplied to the former). So why was Adelaide crowned the City of Churches? Perhaps it was just a devious ruse to attract hordes of tourists. [HV]
Communism
Russia’s flirtation with communism might be a bit better known, but South Australia’s came first.Back in the 1890s, when unemployment in Adelaide was at an all-time high, groups of jobless people with hammers and sickles in their eyes left Adelaide and headed out to the country to establish villages based on communist principles. The villages—most of them along the River Murray—failed pretty quickly for several reasons. Most of the city slickers were hopeless at farming, employment prospects soon picked up again in Adelaide, and…well…communism doesn’t really work.
Although some villages, like Waikerie, Moorook and Lyrup, survived as towns, others, like New Era, disappeared altogether. If Lenin had just paid a bit more attention to South Australia, he might have avoided a lot of trouble later on. [HV]
Coopers brewery
Brewing beer is a lucrative industry for the driest state in the driest continent and where the water is almost undrinkable.Thomas Cooper brewed his first ale in 1862, as a tonic for his sick wife, and it must have done her wonders, because the couple’s great-great-grandchildren now run the brewery. They make a great Pale Ale and Sparkling Ale, but the big success story of recent years has been their Extra Strong (that is, 7.1%) Vintage Ale.
In 1998, the year the Vintage Ale was first produced, Coopers released only 22,000 slabs. Demand was so high that once bottle shops ran out, slabs were being sold at auction for up to $500. That’s more than $20 for a stubbie of local beer. Supposedly the Vintage Ale improves with age, but I don’t know anyone who has tested this theory. [HV]