In this week’s column, the last hurrah for South Australia’s birthplace of television, a bittersweet time for former ABC production staff and a legend farewelled.

Channel Nine’s charity trip down memory lane

The birthplace of South Australian television is going out in extraordinary fashion – a six and a half hour live broadcast.

Channel Nine’s historic Tynte Street studios will close this year, with the station moving to more utilitarian city digs.

The North Adelaide studio, which hosted Adelaide’s first television broadcast in September 1959, will have one last big hurrah, with Nine resurrecting a live charity appeal on Easter Monday.

“Telethons” used to be a yearly fixture on Adelaide television, but the last one was held way back in 1983. They typically featured a huge line-up of what we used to call “personalities”, interspersing pitches for donations with music, comedy and interviews.

This year’s “Easter Appeal” will feature local, national and international celebrities (evergreen Anne Wills will present a nostalgic look back on past appeals).

Beside the nightly news, the appeal will be the studio’s last outing.

All proceeds will go to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital Foundation.

New life for sacked ABC staff

One of the off-shoots of the Easter Appeal is some new work for a couple of ABC staff made redundant in November last year after management scrapped South Australian television production.

Producer Lauren Hillman and researcher Leanne Bryden-Brown were both devastated when Collinswood’s highly regarded production unit was closed. Hillman had worked at the ABC for eight years, and Bryden-Brown was a 12-year veteran.

Both have been picked up by Nine to work on the Easter appeal, with the possibility of more work coming their way.

Alfie Tieu, formerly of the ABC and Channel Ten, is associate producer of the appeal show.

For Hillman, 2014 was particularly bitter-sweet.

She produced the well-received show The Daters especially for iView – with ABC2 also picking up the program.

The reality show, filmed entirely in South Australia, has been put forward by the ABC for a Logie. Hillman tells Media Week that she was told it was the cheapest ABC TV production of the year – which isn’t surprising considering it was filmed almost entirely on iPhones.

Her dream is to produce independent TV in SA – maybe even a new series of The Daters, which she says she couldn’t have made for the same cost and quality in Sydney or Melbourne.

“I would love to keep television production alive in South Australia – it’s the best place to do television production in Australia,” she says.

Farewell to a legend

Richly-voiced Adelaide radio legend Vaughan Harvey has died at the age of 82.

Harvey was part of the golden age of local radio, heading up news at AM station 5KA in the 1970s and later running breakfast news for 5AD alongside another veteran Roger Cardwell.

But perhaps his biggest contribution to local media was through his mentoring of a generation (or more) of South Australian radio talent through the Vaughan Harvey Radio School.

Our friends at the podcast, “Another Boring Thursday Night in Adelaide”, have produced a lovely tribute to Harvey, whose funeral is this afternoon (Friday).

Listen here. The Harvey tribute starts at about the 25-minute mark.

Media diversity

The Advertiser achieved what we believe could be a first on Tuesday.

It published three opinion pieces in its news pages – and all of them were by members of the Liberal Party.

On page 13, Nicolle Flint had a crack at the “fun police” who want to stop the promotion of high-fat and high-sugar foods.

On the page 19 opinion page it was a conservative double act, with Liberal minister Simon Birmingham selling the Federal Government’s changes to vocational education and training, and state counterpart David Pisoni bemoaning South Australia’s NAPLAN results.

Naughty corner

You would think the modern media would now be beyond treating disabled people as objects of puerile fascination or prurience.

But no.

Media Week offers these two headlines from The Advertiser’s website this week without the need for further comment:

Top of the class

Media Week doesn’t like to blow InDaily’s own bags in this section, but we will make an exception this week.

Young InDaily reporter Bension Siebert produced a two-part special report this week about the use of electro-convulsive therapy in South Australia.

It was comprehensive, even-handed and sensitive.

Read part one here – about the history and current use of ECT in South Australia.

Read part two here – which tells the stories of two women who have undergone the treatment.