Channel 10 is celebrating 60 years on air.
One of Australia’s three major metropolitan commercial broadcasters, the channel first came to life at the start of August 1964 as ATV-0 in Melbourne.
Since then, the channel has birthed Australian shows such as Prisoner, Number 96, Good Morning Australia, Neighbours and Rove Live.
Reporter and presenter Angela Bishop said she was “beyond excited” when she joined the broadcaster in 1989, meeting such famous faces as Katrina Lee, Harry Potter and Larry Emdur.
“It's always been an exciting, vibrant place to work and what I've learned over 35 years is what a risk-taking network we are, how bold we are. It doesn't pay off every time but when it does, it pays off in spades,” she said.
Whether it’s recent shows like Masterchef, Thank God You’re Here, The Cheap Seats and Have You Been Paying Attention? to older classics like The Panel, Big Brother, Australian Idol and Blankety Blank, Bishop said there has always been an element of thinking outside of the box.
"We've always been a bit cheeky right from the very start - like when we started in Melbourne in 1964, we had this singer and her whole song was ‘here you are to watch television, we've got ads up to here’ - supporting advertising from the very beginning and calling a spade a spade,” she said.
“It's always been that little bit irreverent, that little bit bold and that's what I love about place - and long may it continue.”
For Sandra Sully, who has been there nearly as long as Bishop – joining in 1990 - she said Ten has always been “enormously innovative”.
“Having been there for over three decades, I've witnessed the digital revolution and evolution, which has been a game changer for everyone.
“It's been fantastic and eye opening to be a part of that, to see how we needed to adapt to the changing landscape and no longer rely on the eyeballs in a linear format, but actually find the eyeballs where they are on all sorts of platforms.”
The presenter of 10 News First said that there was no better case of this than the recent CrowdStrike outage, which resulted in the network having to quickly adapt to ensure news could still be produced.
“We had to revert to old school techniques, such as trying to find a typewriter, which we couldn't find, and hardwire a printer to the only computer that was working, which was tethered to my phone,” she told AdNews.
“Rather than sitting down for a bulletin with 100 pieces of paper, I had one and a half pieces of paper. For all the young people in the newsroom, they sat there gobsmacked going ‘how do we do this?’ - this is old school TV, lesson 101 – welcome to the old world.”
Sully said one of the biggest changes in her time in the media industry has been the profound changes in both the way stories are told and how new audiences are found.
“We've got to keep up with the times and in media, there's no greater incentive than to actually find the audience where they are and not rely on the traditional linear format, because it doesn't exist in isolation anymore,” she said.
Over its 60-year history, the network has gone through several ownership reconfigurations.
Originally owned by Ansett Australia, the network changed hands numerous times over the next few decades – including a period of receivership in the 1990s – before being listed on the ASX in 1998 as Ten Network Holdings.
The 21st century saw the broadcaster launch a number of multichannels – 10 Peach Comedy and 10 Bold Drama among them – along with rolling out BVOD service 10Play, before once again entering voluntary administration in 2017 prior to being bought by the US-based CBS Corporation.
More recently, with the rebrand of ViacomCBS to Paramount Global, the network has been able to add subscription streaming service Paramount+ and FAST service Pluto TV to its offering, although a recent sale of its parent company looms over Channel 10.
Sully said that as difficult as many of those upheavals were, it forced 10 to be incredibly agile and innovative.
“We went digital probably almost a decade before everyone else and we had to adapt very quickly. 10 have always been highly innovative in terms of programming and news and the way it's been delivered and communicated,” she said.
“News in itself has become far more conversational and we've had to adjust to that as well, which has been great fun, because you don't want to stand still. The great thing about being at 10 is it's had the best culture and always has – that’s why I’ve stayed there.”
For Bishop, it’s the speed of today’s 24/7 news cycle that she thinks is the biggest shift, but as someone who “loves and embraces” change, she says such industry developments are a positive as it means the network can do things differently.
“Once upon a time, I would be on a red carpet, and I might do a couple of live crosses from the Oscars and Golden Globes and then I'd work on putting together a major story for the evening news and that’d be it, but not now,” she told AdNews.
“Now, I'm filing for social media while I'm there, probably doing a couple of radio interviews. I'll be doing live crosses continually into whatever program we have on 10 right now and then I still do that main package for the five o'clock bulletin, but we're getting it out to viewers in as many ways as they want to see it.”
Looking back on over three decades of reporting, Bishop said her career highlight would have to be when Oprah Winfrey came to town in 2010.
“I did a big interview to coincide with the announcement and I knew that she was coming before she told all her viewers, which is the biggest secret I've ever had to keep in my life,” she said.
“She didn't do many interviews back in those days because she still had her show and she didn't see the need, so to do that very in-depth interview with her, another interview with her on Hamilton Island and then following her on all the adventures around Australia, which I then turned into a TV special - that was very satisfying.
“Being involved in the first episode of The Panel and being part of that family was a definite career highlight too, as was getting to learn some of the craft of live television from Bert Newton - those skills that you can pick up that you just can't get anywhere else.”
For Sully, she said she has been “really privileged” to work for the one company for as long as she has, a phenomenon almost unheard of these days.
“Through that time, I've had the opportunity to work on Olympic Games, like Atlanta in 96. I went to Borneo and released orphaned orangutans into the wild. I went to Timor 10 years after it got independence and did a documentary on that. I was in New York a year after September 11. I was in Bali a year after the Bali bombings,” she told AdNews.
“Those sorts of things have been really, really significant as a journalist to be able to bring those stories to life.”
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