The Go!! Show
Encyclopedia
The Go!! Show was a top rating Australian popular music
television series which aired on ATV-0
Melbourne from 1964 to 1967, and was produced by DYT Productions at the Channel 0 studios in Nunawading, Victoria
.
, which was made in Sydney. While that series had been an important outlet for the first wave of Australian rock'n'roll, it did not engage strongly with the so-called "Beat Boom" acts that emerged in the mid-1960s and from the mid-1960s onwards, Bandstand settled into a mainstream musical variety format aimed at a broad general audience.
Unusually, the main competition for Go!! was broadcast on the same station. In early 1965 Channel 0 took the unusual step of commissioning a second pop show called Kommotion, produced by the Willard-King organisation and hosted by popular Melbourne radio and TV personality Ken Sparkes
.
Go!! focussed on the more sophisticated segment of the newly discovered youth market and tended to concentrate on local solo performers, while Kommotion (which was in part modelled on the American series Shindig
) pursued a more group- and chart-oriented format, as well as featuring a troupe of go-go dancers and a regular team of young performers who mimed to the latest overseas hits.
The Go!! Show was made by DYT Productions, a production company founded and run by veteran Australian musician Horrie Dargie
with partners Arthur Young and Johnny Tillbrook. It premiered in August 1964, just after the Beatles
' Australian tour and Channel 0's inaugural broadcast. It was videotaped before a live audience, with early episodes being one-hour long and it screened three nights per week. In its third season of 1966-67, it was shortened to thirty minutes. Because national television networking was only just being established in Australia, The Go!! Show was only seen in Victoria for its first two years.
There were three hosts of Go!! during its run: the first was English comedian Alan Field, who had come out to Australia as compere of the July 1964 Beatles tour. Singer-actor Ian Turpie
took over from Field from episode 26 until the end of 1966; pop star Johnny Young
was the final host, beginning from the start of the third season in 1967.
The Go!! Show almost exclusively featured local performers and concentrated on solo singers, who were typically backed by the show's house band The Strangers
. It featured many of the major Australian pop stars of the time including Bobby & Laurie
, Lynne Randell
, Johnny Devlin
, Colin Cook, The Twilights and Normie Rowe
. Olivia Newton-John
and Pat Carroll
were regulars with Newton-John making at least sixteen appearances between February 1965 and December 1966. Singer and composer[Buddy England] - later, a member of The Seekers from 1974 to 1981..then Buddy returned to his solo career and is still writing, recording and touring - auditioned for the premiere episode and became a regular performer for the entire run of the series.
The Strangers
also performed their own material on weekly basis throughout the show's life. They notably secured one of the first sponsorship deals in Australian pop and were provided with a set of distinctive "El Toro" model electric guitars and basses provided by the noted Melbourne-based luthier Maton
. Strangers singer-guitarist John Farrar
became a prominent session arranger in the late '60s before moving overseas and achieving great international success in the 1970s and beyond as a producer for Olivia Newton-John; he also wrote two additional songs for the soundtrack of the film version of the musical Grease
which became the biggest hits of the movie.
Coinciding with the premiere of the TV series, DYT launched their own record label Go!! Records at and The Go!! Show frequently cross-promoted acts signed to the label. Unconnected pop magazine Go-Set
(1966-1974) which coincidentally shared the "Go" brand and market formed a marketing triumvirate.
Although it was extremely popular, attracting as many as 400,000 viewers each week, The Go!! Show was cancelled suddenly in August 1967 after more than 200 episodes, at virtually the same time as the axing of Kommotion. According to Kommotion host Ken Sparkes, the main cause was the imposition of an Actors Equity ban on miming in TV programs, which effectively put both shows out of business.
Like most pop shows of the time, it was customary for performers to mime to a recording of their latest hit; Kommotion typically used commercial recordings of current hits, whereas Go!! (like the BBC's Top of the Pops
) often used pre-taped tracks specially recorded for the show. With the cancellation of the series the Go!! label soon folded since its main means of promotion had been removed.
Channel 0 replaced the cancelled shows with a new Saturday morning pop show Uptight, which was nationally networked; it ran until the end of 1969 when it was 'rebranded' as Happening '70 (followed by Happening '71 and '72).
Like most other Australian TV shows from this period, there is very little surviving archival material from The Go!! Show. Most of the more than 200 episodes were subsequently destroyed when the Channel 0 archive ran out of storage space, although numerous fragments and several entire programs have survived. The exact amount of remaining footage is uncertain, but at least seven episodes from late 1966 are known to have survived in their entirety. This material was copied from tapes in the Channel 0 archive sometime in the late 1990s and circulated widely among collectors over the next few years; some clips have since made their way onto YouTube
.
Popular music
Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres "having wide appeal" and is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. It stands in contrast to both art music and traditional music, which are typically disseminated academically or orally to smaller, local...
television series which aired on ATV-0
ATV-10
ATV is a television station in Melbourne, Australia, part of Network Ten - one of the three major Australian commercial television networks.-History:...
Melbourne from 1964 to 1967, and was produced by DYT Productions at the Channel 0 studios in Nunawading, Victoria
Nunawading, Victoria
Nunawading is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 19 km east from Melbourne's central business district. Its Local Government Area is the City of Whitehorse...
.
History
When Go!! premiered in 1964, the other major competing television music show was the well-established Channel 9 series BandstandBandstand (Australia)
Bandstand was an Australian musical/variety television show which screened from November 1958 to 1972. It was produced at the studios of TCN-9 in Sydney and eventually became a national program as Nine Network expanded into other Australian cities in the early 1960s.Bandstand was created by Nine...
, which was made in Sydney. While that series had been an important outlet for the first wave of Australian rock'n'roll, it did not engage strongly with the so-called "Beat Boom" acts that emerged in the mid-1960s and from the mid-1960s onwards, Bandstand settled into a mainstream musical variety format aimed at a broad general audience.
Unusually, the main competition for Go!! was broadcast on the same station. In early 1965 Channel 0 took the unusual step of commissioning a second pop show called Kommotion, produced by the Willard-King organisation and hosted by popular Melbourne radio and TV personality Ken Sparkes
Ken Sparkes
Ken Sparkes is an Australian radio and television personality. He has been a presenter of radio programs, including presenting the breakfast program on Adelaide's 5AD....
.
Go!! focussed on the more sophisticated segment of the newly discovered youth market and tended to concentrate on local solo performers, while Kommotion (which was in part modelled on the American series Shindig
Shindig
Shindig may refer to:*Shindig!, a '60s American music variety television show*"Shindig" , an episode of the television series Firefly*Shindig , an open-source software implementation of the OpenSocial standard...
) pursued a more group- and chart-oriented format, as well as featuring a troupe of go-go dancers and a regular team of young performers who mimed to the latest overseas hits.
The Go!! Show was made by DYT Productions, a production company founded and run by veteran Australian musician Horrie Dargie
Horrie Dargie
Horace Andrew Dargie was an Australian musician and harmonicist.-Biography:Horrie Dargie was born in Whyalla, South Australia, the second son of Andrew Dargie and Adelaide . His older brother Sir William Dargie was a noted Australian portrait artist.Dargie began his musical career as a diatonica...
with partners Arthur Young and Johnny Tillbrook. It premiered in August 1964, just after the Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
' Australian tour and Channel 0's inaugural broadcast. It was videotaped before a live audience, with early episodes being one-hour long and it screened three nights per week. In its third season of 1966-67, it was shortened to thirty minutes. Because national television networking was only just being established in Australia, The Go!! Show was only seen in Victoria for its first two years.
There were three hosts of Go!! during its run: the first was English comedian Alan Field, who had come out to Australia as compere of the July 1964 Beatles tour. Singer-actor Ian Turpie
Ian Turpie
Ian "Turps" Turpie is an Australian television celebrity, best known for hosting the long-running game show The Price Is Right before being replaced by Larry Emdur.-Early life:...
took over from Field from episode 26 until the end of 1966; pop star Johnny Young
Johnny Young
Johnny Young is an Australian singer, composer, record producer, disc jockey, television producer and host. Originally from Netherlands, his family settled in Perth, Western Australia in the early 1950s...
was the final host, beginning from the start of the third season in 1967.
The Go!! Show almost exclusively featured local performers and concentrated on solo singers, who were typically backed by the show's house band The Strangers
The Strangers (band)
The Strangers was a Melbourne based Australian band that existed from 1961 to 1975. The band started out playing instrumental songs in a style similar to The Shadows with influences from Cliff Richard. The original lineup included Peter Robinson , Graeme Thompson , Laurie Arthur and Fred Weiland...
. It featured many of the major Australian pop stars of the time including Bobby & Laurie
Bobby & Laurie
Bobby & Laurie were a popular Australian singing duo of the 1960s, featuring Laurie Allen and Bobby Bright . Their regular backing band were The Rondells...
, Lynne Randell
Lynne Randell
Lynne Randell was an Australian pop singer. For three years in the mid-1960s she was Australia's most popular female performer and had hits with "Heart" and "Goin' Out of My Head" in 1966, and "Ciao Baby" in 1967. In 1967, Randell toured the United States with The Monkees and performed on-stage...
, Johnny Devlin
Johnny Devlin
Johnny Devlin, born John Lockett Devlin , was an influential early New Zealand rock musician, sometimes called "New Zealand's answer to Elvis Presley"....
, Colin Cook, The Twilights and Normie Rowe
Normie Rowe
Norman John "Normie" Rowe AM was a major male solo performer of Australian pop music in the 1960s. Known for his bright and edgy tenor voice and dynamic stage presence, many of Rowe's most successful recordings were produced by Pat Aulton, house producer for the Sunshine Records, Spin Records and...
. Olivia Newton-John
Olivia Newton-John
Olivia Newton-John AO, OBE is a singer and actress. She is a four-time Grammy award winner who has amassed five No. 1 and ten other Top Ten Billboard Hot 100 singles and two No. 1 Billboard 200 solo albums. Eleven of her singles and 14 of her albums have been certified gold by the RIAA...
and Pat Carroll
Pat Carroll (singer)
Pat Carroll is an Australian singer from the 1960s.Carroll began her entertainment career at age eight when she started taking singing and dancing lessons. Appearances on children's TV shows followed by the time she was eleven years old...
were regulars with Newton-John making at least sixteen appearances between February 1965 and December 1966. Singer and composer[Buddy England] - later, a member of The Seekers from 1974 to 1981..then Buddy returned to his solo career and is still writing, recording and touring - auditioned for the premiere episode and became a regular performer for the entire run of the series.
The Strangers
The Strangers (band)
The Strangers was a Melbourne based Australian band that existed from 1961 to 1975. The band started out playing instrumental songs in a style similar to The Shadows with influences from Cliff Richard. The original lineup included Peter Robinson , Graeme Thompson , Laurie Arthur and Fred Weiland...
also performed their own material on weekly basis throughout the show's life. They notably secured one of the first sponsorship deals in Australian pop and were provided with a set of distinctive "El Toro" model electric guitars and basses provided by the noted Melbourne-based luthier Maton
Maton
Maton is an Australian manufacturer of guitars and other fretted musical instruments.Maton was founded in 1946 as the Maton Musical Instruments Company by Bill May and his brother Reg...
. Strangers singer-guitarist John Farrar
John Farrar
John Farrar is a music producer, songwriter, music arranger, singer and guitarist who is best known for his work with Olivia Newton-John with whom he wrote and produced many hit songs....
became a prominent session arranger in the late '60s before moving overseas and achieving great international success in the 1970s and beyond as a producer for Olivia Newton-John; he also wrote two additional songs for the soundtrack of the film version of the musical Grease
Grease (musical)
Grease is a 1971 musical by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. The musical is named for the 1950s United States working-class youth subculture known as the greasers. The musical, set in 1959 at fictional Rydell High School , follows ten working-class teenagers as they navigate the complexities of love,...
which became the biggest hits of the movie.
Coinciding with the premiere of the TV series, DYT launched their own record label Go!! Records at and The Go!! Show frequently cross-promoted acts signed to the label. Unconnected pop magazine Go-Set
Go-Set
Go-Set was the first Australian pop music newspaper, published weekly from 2 February 1966 to 24 August 1974, and was founded in Melbourne by Phillip Frazer, Peter Raphael and Tony Schauble...
(1966-1974) which coincidentally shared the "Go" brand and market formed a marketing triumvirate.
Although it was extremely popular, attracting as many as 400,000 viewers each week, The Go!! Show was cancelled suddenly in August 1967 after more than 200 episodes, at virtually the same time as the axing of Kommotion. According to Kommotion host Ken Sparkes, the main cause was the imposition of an Actors Equity ban on miming in TV programs, which effectively put both shows out of business.
Like most pop shows of the time, it was customary for performers to mime to a recording of their latest hit; Kommotion typically used commercial recordings of current hits, whereas Go!! (like the BBC's Top of the Pops
Top of the Pops
Top of the Pops, also known as TOTP, is a British music chart television programme, made by the BBC and originally broadcast weekly from 1 January 1964 to 30 July 2006. After 25 December 2006 it became a radio program, now hosted by Tony Blackburn...
) often used pre-taped tracks specially recorded for the show. With the cancellation of the series the Go!! label soon folded since its main means of promotion had been removed.
Channel 0 replaced the cancelled shows with a new Saturday morning pop show Uptight, which was nationally networked; it ran until the end of 1969 when it was 'rebranded' as Happening '70 (followed by Happening '71 and '72).
Like most other Australian TV shows from this period, there is very little surviving archival material from The Go!! Show. Most of the more than 200 episodes were subsequently destroyed when the Channel 0 archive ran out of storage space, although numerous fragments and several entire programs have survived. The exact amount of remaining footage is uncertain, but at least seven episodes from late 1966 are known to have survived in their entirety. This material was copied from tapes in the Channel 0 archive sometime in the late 1990s and circulated widely among collectors over the next few years; some clips have since made their way onto YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
.