There has been plenty of coverage of the death this week of Australian TV and radio veteran Philip Brady . Brady was one of the very last survivors of Australian TV’s launch era (Pete Smith, you’re not allowed to go anywhere soon, OK?)
But alas, what becomes very clear on digging through the stories (ABC, The Age, Sky News, The Nightly) is that the reporters involved have rarely done any more than see what’s on Wikipedia and repeat it alongside 3AW’s press release. And in this case, the information on Wikipedia isn’t always well-sourced.
Let’s take a single example: the game show Concentration. Wikipedia mentions that Brady hosted this in its article on him, and the associated Wikipedia entry claims it ran on Nine from 1959 to 1967, and says Brady was the host across that era.
We see that information echoed at, for instance, TV Tonight . (Love the site, no flamethrower here!) Sky News gets even sloppier, saying Concentration was part of a run of 1970s shows hosted by Brady.
None of this is correct. Concentration didn’t debut in Melbourne until Tuesday 16 August 1960, as this listing for its debut episode from The Age makes clear.
It was a once-a-week show, running for 30 minutes at 1:30pm on Tuesdays, and Brady hosted it for less than a year. Why? Because in July 1961, a version produced in Sydney and hosted by Terry Dear took over in both Sydney and Melbourne.
Prior to that date, network cross-sharing had been rarer and relied on lower-quality telerecordings, but improved transmission options meant there wasn’t any value in producing the same show in both cities.
Dear stayed as host until at least 1963, when he featured on the cover of the Women’s Weekly TV guide.
By 1966 Howard Craven had become the host, and the last listing I’ve found for it so far was indeed in 1967. That broadcast history needs to be properly fleshed out, but one thing is clear: Brady only hosted Concentration for a limited period.
Digging through the archives also highlights a few other aspects of Brady’s life which haven’t been widely documented. A 1958 newspaper article notes that Brady’s father Wilfred Brady was the composer of ‘Blue Dusk’, described as “the top hit of 1946”.
And here’s an extremely early photograph of a 17-year-old Brady appear in his school’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience in 1956:
But there are even earlier mentions to be found. An 11-year-old Brady wrote in to The Argus’s children’s pages ‘Super Comic’ in 1950 to boast about his ancestor Manuel Garcia, who invented the first working laryngoscope:
As I’m fond of saying, I like the details to be right. And yes, I’ll be updating the relevant Wikipedia articles to be more accurate.
For more deep dives on Australian TV history, check out whether Kwicky Koala was Australian, the Australian broadcast history of the Star Wars Holiday Special and when Australia first saw Sesame Street.
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