Reg Livermore - the Official Website

The Television years.

I suspect that most people’s recollections of my Australian television appearances are to do with the lifestyle “infotainment” genre that emerged in the late 1980’s, proliferated through the 1990’s and sadly stalks us still. I spent two years as a presenter on the show credited the first of this breed, Burke’s Backyard: fronted by the self styled Don Burke and allegedly the style’s self confessed originator, the network had a ratings winner on its hands: pay dirt. My relationship with the host was as distant as I could skillfully manage, but the chance to be seen by so many in such popular light was not an opportunity to be sneezed at. Ostensibly about gardens and gardening the show covered all specific and loosely related topics.

I found myself doing the quirkier stories, certainly not the horticultural ones since Don was nothing if not ‘the expert’; if ‘quirk’ was my domain I made the most of it and enjoyed myself. I found that people working in television are good company, the fact that they had a healthy disrespect if not actual ignorance of my usual work place mattered little to me. I was as I say having a good time. Eventually, however, I found Burke’s manner overwhelmingly irritating and much too stressful, basically he was a control freak so I left; my only course of action since it was, after all, his show.

Happily there was another of these popular lifestyle programs on offer: Our House, and as the name suggests a televisionary wander in and around what’s arguably the most important pre-occupation of most of us, the home. It was a brand new Australian show, new to Australia that is, copied of course (as everything in this country tends to be) from a similar program overseas. For quite some time I was offended by the dumbing down of the entertainment form, how vacuous it was, subjected to increasingly facile points of view playing to a formula network executives believed conformed to the attention span of its audience: Play School presenters treated their viewers more intelligently. I bit my tongue most of the time, once again enjoying the friendship and camaraderie that went hand in hand with the job mindless that it was. Our House survived almost nine years, a long time in television land these days, it was only pulled because of the paranoia of the channel’s marketing and programming experts; in terms of winning the ratings war another network was perceived to be closing the gap and Nine panicked, axing from it’s stable two of the firm viewer favourites – Our House and Sale of the Century – thereby abandoning and alienating at one fell swoop the major component of an Australian television audience, the ageing population. Television takes no prisoners.

Happily my significant involvement in local television production occurred with the ABC during the 1960’s and early 70’s in the areas of drama and variety. These appearances include roles in The Recruiting Officer, Rape of the Belt, A Curate in Bohemia, The Tempest, and the groundbreaking children’s sci-fi adventure series The Stranger. Crackerjack, a long running children’s variety program I co-hosted with Michael Boddy in 1965/66; and in 1967 ABC starred me in its twenty episode Saturday night musical entertainment I’m Alright Now which included Ruth Cracknell and Toni Lamond as regular guests.

Each of these opportunities extended the vocabulary of my professional capabilities and brought my name to a much wider audience than would have been the case had my career been restricted to the world of theatre.