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COUNTDOWN IS BACK THIS JANUARY, 2019 ...  ON rage !!!!!
Stay tuned below with regular Countdown full archival information for each Countdown episode rage shall be airing every Saturday throughout January ...

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Re: GTK Episode guides

My memory is probably going....but didn't Rage air an episode of Funky Road during January in the last few years - I seem to recall they did.

How many episodes of Funky Road were made and do they still exist?

Re: GTK Episode guides

How long did Funky road run for??

Re: GTK Episode guides

Patrick
My memory is probably going....but didn't Rage air an episode of Funky Road during January in the last few years - I seem to recall they did.

How many episodes of Funky Road were made and do they still exist?


We were going to see an episode of Funky Road - I think 2 years ago - but it got dropped from the programming due to scheduling changes. It was an episode that had Marcia Hines with Big Band In Russia.

Therefore we haven't seen an episode and I don't know how many survive, probably not many.

Re: GTK Episode guides

Well Guru if the ABC really care about music history(which from where I stand indicates they dont) then why dont they come clean and tell everybody exactly what they have and play it??Because they dont care is my guess!

Re: GTK Episode guides

Bob you seem like one of the only people here that really cares about music History well apart from myself that is.....It makes me very frustrated to hear what they might have in their archives and it just sits there rotting!!

Re: GTK Episode guides

GTK is like Flashez in that I have little interest in the interviews with pop stars/film clips but love the ones that deal with 70's society/culture/trends etc. For eg the Male Model & Fashion Designer segments that aired in 2008. Will be scouring that list to look for clips to request for the coming retro seasons.

Re: GTK Episode guides

RETRO MAN
How long did Funky road run for??


I have no idea, Looking through TV Week it appears sporadically - it wasn't even on every week. In 1977 they seemed to concentrate on the new Flashez show so it may have only been in 1976 for an undetermined amount of shows, and maybe only one of them survives.

 photo funkyroad_zps948f1ed2.jpg

Re: GTK Episode guides

Totally agree about preserving historic TV shows. The wiping and destruction of many shows from the 60's and 70's were cultural vandalism and a blight on TV history.

Hopefully, somehow, there are copies of some of them out there so future generations can look back and see where society came from. I'm all for the ABC or any other channel to air classic TV shows after midnight instead of those trashy info-mercial/diet/religious shows that are always on.

Everyone should see these shows and I know many would love to see them - otherwise they are simply sitting in the archives doing nothing - makes no sense.

Re: GTK Episode guides

RETRO MAN
Well Guru if the ABC really care about music history(which from where I stand indicates they dont) then why dont they come clean and tell everybody exactly what they have and play it??Because they dont care is my guess!


That's a little difficult to answer. You can buy program information from the ABC so they do make it available. Jason bought the Countdown listings that are used here. Before they upgraded TARA to only display limited information I got a lot of listings of The Factory and Rock Arena which I posted a while back. Another person got the GTK and Hitscene information that I posted here.

If you went to the commercial channels there is no way you could gain the same details as easily. From what I have heard it is impossible to deal with Channel 9 in this area.

The Australian sound and film archive are apparently easier to deal with but in the case of music items the same copyrights still exist. Then again in 2010 I was helping the Hawthorn Football Club produce a history book about their 1961 premiership. The football club found that the S&FA had some colour footage of that match on newsreel film but asked $30 per second of footage. Fortunately a former player decided to fork out the $7000 for 4min of footage that was included with the book. That was ridiculous that generic news reel film is treated like that.

These music shows are our cultural history but just not enough people care for it to be worth their while to dig out again - which is really unfortunate. The cost of transferring footage and then paying the royalty rights to air it is apparently just not worth it.

I guess we have to hope that Rage will air what we want to see. At least they have a Retro season. Channel 7 won't show old Sounds or Nightmoves, Channel 9 won't show Hey Hey clips, Bandstand or Wavelength, Channel 10 (which apparently has a great clip library) won't show Wrok or Happeng '70, '71 or '72, SBS won't show Rock Around The World or The Noize.

I guess the TV stations treat it as a commercial venture and if they don't see money in it then they don't care what the reasons are.

Re: GTK Episode guides

Thanks Gurubob

I knew GTK finished with the 1975 season but I had no idea it was directly replaced with Funky Road for 1976. Same producers (Bernie Cannon etc) that were around for GTK. Many GTK shows from 1975 were wiped - a bit like Countdown in that regard although only 3 Countdowns survive from the entire year. With the start of colour TV much material was taped on 2" videotape masters and then later wiped. Yet most of GTK from its black and white days up to 1974 survives on film. If it was possible to back-up colour videotape on 16mm film at the time, then I am sure some Countdowns may have been preserved that way. As it was, in hindsight they should have kept U-Matic back-ups during the big purge of 1982, but it was the middle of the infamous Malcolm Fraser public service "razor gang" era, so everything on videotape basically got wiped.

The situation with commercial channels is pretty well as Gurubob has described it - we can be thankful that the ABC at least are a bit more open about what they have and do not have. And that we can see much of this older material on Rage in Januarys.

As a rough guess, the episode of "Funky Road" with Marcia Hines may well be the only surviving one - pity they did not get round to showing it when they intended to. Looks like it has been forgotten since

Re: GTK Episode guides

Guru Bob

I guess we have to hope that Rage will air what we want to see. At least they have a Retro season. Channel 7 won't show old Sounds or Nightmoves, Channel 9 won't show Hey Hey clips, Bandstand or Wavelength, Channel 10 (which apparently has a great clip library) won't show Wrok or Happeng '70, '71 or '72, SBS won't show Rock Around The World or The Noize.


There was a rumour going around that old Hey Hey shows were going to be shown on GO in 2013 but sadly it was just a rumour. I've always thought it would make sense to show old Hey Hey eps on one of the digital chs. Hey Hey has a huge fan base so they would rate well I'm sure. And there are some old shows on the commercials just not music ones. Skippy on Nine,old Leyland Bros,Sons & Daughters on Seven etc.

Re: GTK Episode guides

Does anybody think they will play any GTK this year for retro?

Re: GTK Episode guides

First episode of GTK features Coming On Down by The Twilights (1969). That was a classic case of a song being monstered by a strange production decision. I remember listening to the song on the Glenn A Baker album in the 1970s and he wrote in the liner notes that the group couldn't understand why the song bombed. I couldn't understand it either listening to the lyrics and Beatles-style sitar and accompaniment, then right at the end a child came on singing All Things Bright and Beautiful. WTF? I thought. Why? It completely ruined the song and I really believe it would have been a Top 10 hit if that crap hadn't been included at the end.

GTK Episodes and 60's and 70's rock TV shows

It's great to see this stuff here, and sad that the commercial TV stations refuse to show any old 60's and 70's Rock clips, Yes I guess they look at it from a pure money making angle, great to see RAGE showing some of the old stuff.