Reg Grundy’, by Reg Grundy

Swinburne Research Bank http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au Given, J. (2011). Book review: ‘Reg Grundy’, by Reg Grundy. Originally published in Media International Australia, (140), 177. Available from: http://www.uq.edu.au/mia/2011-issues#140 Copyright © 2011. This is the author’s version of the work, posted here with the permission of the publisher for your personal use. No further distribution is permitted. You may also be able to access the published version from your library. The definitive version is available at http://www.uq.edu.au/mia/2011-issues#140. Swinburne University of Technology | CRICOS Provider 00111D | swinburne.edu.au This is a pre-print of a review whose final and definitive form has been published at Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, no 140 (August 2011), p. 177 Grundy, R., Reg Grundy, Pier 9/Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2010. ISBN 978‐1‐ 74266‐034‐9, 367 pp., AU$45.00. You know you’ve made it when your name becomes rhyming slang. Australia’s most successful independent TV producer, Reg Grundy, might have wished his was used for something grander than men’s undies, but producing is an opportunistic business. You take what you can get and, as he says often in this autobiography, you ‘keep throwing punches’. Grundy sold the company he built from scratch for almost US$400 million in 1995, so a fair few must have connected. Quiz shows like Wheel of Fortune, Sale of the Century and Perfect Match and dramas like Neighbours, The Restless Years, The Young Doctors and Prisoner have been a huge part of prime‐time TV in Australia. At Grundy’s 85th ‘un‐birthday’ celebration in Sydney in 2008, MC’ed by Alan Jones, Dame Edna Everage joked: ‘If Reg Grundy hadn’t made all those TV shows, Australian families, in the evening, would have had to talk to one another’. Grundy’s special gift was to build a major global enterprise from this Australian base, producing localised versions of global formats for TV networks all around the world. He calls it ‘parochial internationalism’. The book’s short chapters are full of industry detail about the transitions from radio to television in the 1950s, about Grundy’s own transition from a career at the microphone and in front of the cameras to one further and further away from day‐to‐day production. On the way, the hotel suites get bigger and the boats much bigger. We get stories of Bruce Gyngell, Sam Chisholm, Kerry Packer, and Joop van den Ende, the ‘Ende’ of Endemol. It’s a producer’s life, pitching and pitching, modifying proposals, taking them back one more time and then another, searching for the person who might say yes, dealing with the disappointment when regimes change and the preparation comes to nothing, grabbing opportunities, closing deals, holding them together. It’s a manager’s life, finding, securing and keeping good, loyal people, as the empire grows; and an owner’s life, regretting his final decision to sell out, made because it was ‘the only way to capitalise on a lifetime’s work’. It’s a man’s life, one irrevocably altered when a young woman from Ipswich―‘fabulous figure, real good‐looker’― turned up late to audition for I’ve Got a Secret at the QTQ 9 studios on Mt Coot‐tha and quoted Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Any show business experience? ‘I used to recite poems on the Ipswich bus.’ Joy Chambers got the gig, became Reg’s third wife a few years later, appeared in many other Grundy shows including Neighbours, and has clearly played a mighty part in her husband’s life and enterprise. Grundy talks about some failures, like the money he lost buying and selling a stake in AWA, and the ‘indoor fun fair’, Grundys at Surfers Paradise, that turned out to be ‘a massive example of the shoemaker stepping away from his last’. There is also a lot about media policy and regulation. Grundy says he wanted contestants on his first Wheel of Fortune radio quiz show to call in by telephone, but the law prohibited ‘conversations between individuals by wireless’. It was 1967, a decade later, before radio stations could do ‘talkback’. The first Australian content requirements for commercial TV helped Grundy’s business in the early 1960s; the points system introduced in 1973 pushed him into dramas by scoring them higher than quiz shows. His first, the teen soap Class of ’74, ran into censorship problems screening in early prime‐time. Throughout his career, Grundy pushed, pioneered and profited from the uncertain copyright law and industry practices surrounding program formats, as Albert Moran discussed in more detail in his review essay in MIA 138. Jock Given Swinburne University .

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