Welcome to Television Philip Brady on In Melbourne Tonight and Australia’s Early Variety Shows

When Graham Kennedy appeared for the last time on In Melbourne Tonight (IMT) on 23 December 1969, preeminent Nine Network newsreader Eric Pearce crowned him the ‘King of Television’. For many, it seemed like the end of an era. In taking his final bow, the ‘king’ brought one performer forward from the line-up to bow with him on stage: Philip Brady. ‘It was a well-earned moment for Philip’, says long-time friend Mike McColl Jones, who was Kennedy’s comedy writer from 1963. As Kennedy’s straight man, Brady was the constant butt of his pranks and jokes, but, as he reflects, ‘I didn’t really mind so much because it made me a household name and, in those days, everybody was watching television.’ Perhaps, in inviting him to share that bow, Kennedy was seeking to make amends, give credit where it was due.

These early years of television were formative to Australia’s screen landscape, yet so many of our records of this period have been lost – most of the taped IMT episodes stored at Nine’s studios, for instance, were junked or wiped when the station ran out of space. As such, laments Dr Derham Groves, who curated the Tee Vee at Sixty exhibition at the University of Melbourne, the history of early television in Australia is largely an oral history. By the same token, the first decade