Media Report

This weekend sees the final edition of Channel Nine's Sunday program. When it premiered back in 1981 it was revolutionary. There'd never been anything like it on commercial television. We'll look back with its former Managing Editor, Tom Krause.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Antony Funnell: First, the passing of yet another faded media icon, which when it was launched in the early 1980s helped change the face of television journalism in Australia, particularly commercial television journalism.

SUNDAY OPENER

Jim Waley: Good morning, I'm Jim Waley, this is Sunday. Today is a first, not only for this network but for Australian television. It's the start of a new program with a fresh emphasis on what's happening here at home and around the world. Sunday is a mixture of news, current affairs and features, the arts, human interest stories, business, and of course politics.

Antony Funnell: That was Sunday, back in 1981. And of course this weekend as you will have heard, Sunday will officially become part of Australian media history, another victim of cost-cutting.

Tom Krause is now an Executive Producer with Sky News Australia, but for 20 years he worked for Sunday variously as its Foreign Editor, its Supervising Producer and finally as its Managing Editor.

Tom Krause: I was sad, very sad. As a matter of fact I'd been talking to Laurie Oakes that morning, who had asked me for some anecdotes about Sunday, and I didn't realise of course that he was writing - I said, 'Are you writing something?' He said, 'I'm writing an article', and I thought, 'Hey, that's terrific, Sunday's finally getting some publicity.' And I didn't take it up to the - the only thing I was busy trying to get a guest for the program which didn't happen till the next day, and so I thought if I sat down and thought about it, I might even start to cry, you know, I mean that's an honest admission because I thought 'Well if I start thinking about this, I'm really going to be sad' because I put so much into the program and I loved it, and I still have really good friends there. And I was also thinking that it wouldn't happen. But it did.

Antony Funnell: You left in 2006. The last years of the program haven't been harmonious; it was a very stable program for two decades. Was it though inevitable that it was going to disappear, given the state of Channel Nine at the moment?

Tom Krause: I guess I'd have to say Yes now. But I kept hoping that given the fact that David Gyngell came back as a supporter of the program, he was a supporter of the journalism, you know, he cares about journalism, he cares about music, he cares about a lot of things, but he had to face the private equity people I guess, and that was going to be a problem. But the program was breaking stories, they still had Ross Coulthart breaking stories about the Butcher of Bega, they still had Ellen Fanning as a terrific presenter. It still was a good program and I was hoping against hope I guess that it would be kept there, but you know, the almighty dollar rules in television these days, and television and journalism don't often get together.

Antony Funnell: What was the Sunday program, what is its legacy for the Australian media industry?

Tom Krause: Well I think it was probably the first real program that defined television journalism. It was all about journalism, it was all about quality, and I remember even Richard Carey, the late and great Richard Carey who was a supervising producer from the beginning of the program, along with Al Hogan the Executive Producer, and Richard always would say, 'The only brief I have, is to do a quality program'. And the idea was that you just did stories that counted, so it was about current affairs, it was about journalism, and journalists watched it, but I've always thought this that because it was good journalism, we got a lot of viewers. And people talk about ratings and so on. I still think it's still about good journalism, and probably we don't have as many people - I say 'we', actually I can't help myself - it doesn't have as many people watching as it used to, but it still has a core audience and those people who are watching Weekend Sunrise were missing a very good program

Antony Funnell: It always struck me as being an ABC-style program, the sort of program that the ABC should have actually done on Sunday mornings. I mean of course they now do similar programs, but was Sunday actually good for the ABC in the sense that it kept it on its toes? That there was a competitor in the hard broadcast news sector, in the current affairs sector for the ABC while Sunday was around?

Tom Krause: Look there were a number of times I felt exactly the same way. I was always afraid the ABC would suddenly come up and do a Sunday-type program, and I was wondering why they didn't But the idea was we weren't trying to be the ABC, we were trying to do what the ABC does best, which is all about good journalism. The ABC now starting a morning Breakfast program; maybe that'll help to bring the Breakfast programs back to journalism, because I think in some respects, they have become entertainment/lifestyle programs, and although they're actually very good - they do television well, but they have gotten away from the journalistic days, although if a big story breaks, they'll be there.

Antony Funnell: And look just finally, I have to ask you about the role of Kerry Packer. How involved did he get, given that this was his baby, wasn't it?

Tom Krause: I think in the early days, I didn't get there till '86 and the program started in '81, and I think it may have been in the early days he might have called up occasionally. But he called up once to congratulate Paul Ramsay, who had done a story the day before and he was looking for Steve Rice, and Steve Rice was in Beirut producing a story with one of the reporters in the Middle East, and he said, 'If you guys keep doing programs like that, you'll be fine. It was a good story'. And I thought that was good. And then another time he was complaining about the Sunday program covering his heart attack, you know the one when he went to the Other Side for a while, and he was complaining, he said, 'I didn't want that on our program', and he complained about the fact that it was done, and of course it was written by Jim Waley which made it quite interesting because he loved Jim but he also was unhappy that we had done a story for - it was only a Week in Review, it had been on television anyway.

He never interfered in the program, and I know that's hard to believe. He might have called the Executive Producer but you know, I was the one who put it to air for about 10 or 11 years, he certainly was not calling us for anything at all. So Kerry, he loved the program at the beginning, but he was smart enough to stay away from it. I think he instinctively knew that good journalists, doing good journalism, don't want to hear from an owner, because the only thing he's going to do is get their backs up.

Antony Funnell: Tom Krause, a long-time producer with Channel Nine's Sunday program, and now the Executive Producer of 'Sunday Agenda' on Sky News Australia.

Guests

Tom Krause
Former Managing Editor of 'Sunday'

Presenter

Antony Funnell

Producer

Andrew Davies

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