Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to acknowledge the achievements of a truly great Australian who has had many very significant milestones in his life—and this week marks yet another personal milestone for him. I speak, of course, of Australia’s own ‘Mr Television’, the incomparable Reg Grundy, who celebrates being 85 years young this week. Reg Grundy, almost by himself, created and gave birth to the Australian game show genre and, not content with enormous accolades in this country, developed still more wildly successful game shows. In 1974 he took his ‘babies’ onto the world stage. He has enjoyed much critical and financial success. Indeed, his success is legendary.

I have been truly privileged to have known Reg and his beautiful wife and life partner, Joy Chambers, for many years. I am constantly amazed at his youthful exuberance for life and his unending curiosity for new adventures, whatever and wherever they may be. But, despite his enormous public success, at the end of the day, Reg Grundy is and always will be a very private man. Reg started out as a boxing and sports commentator for radio station 2SM in Sydney in the late-forties. In the late-1950s, Reg developed an idea for a revolutionary radio game show entitled—how could anyone ever forget—Wheel of Fortune. This was a chocolate wheel quiz show that many Australian families routinely listened to in the late-1950s until Reg took his idea to the fledgling television station Channel 9 in 1959—and the rest, as they say, is history.

It is perhaps difficult today to remember that commercial television really only started in Australia in earnest with the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, so it was a very raw and new medium in the late-1950s, and it must have taken a lot of intestinal fortitude for the owners of TCN 9 to contemplate buying such a totally new programming concept even though it had enjoyed great success on radio. Even in those days the two mediums did not necessarily mix in terms of programs moving seamlessly from radio to the new world of television.

Hard as it is for some of us who operate daily with news grabs and the 24-hour media cycle to imagine any other media world, from all reports it was truly different in the early days of commercial television. The time pressures were different and not as demanding, but the one thing that was common to both eras was that only quality and popular appeal paid off. This was the special market that Reg Grundy created and made his own—and it paid handsomely for the man who started it all, as it should have. In the ever-intensifying game show market, Reg created more hits, including icons such as I’ve Got a Secret, Temptation, Family Feud, Concentration, Blankety Blanks and, of course, that seemingly never-ending river of gold for Reg, Sale of the Century.

Millions of Australians feel they know this very private man because they routinely watched his family entertainment if not every night then certainly every week. After perfecting the genre of game shows on television, Reg decided to expand his original programming matrix. In the very early 1970s he started producing dramas which became not only long running but also cultural icons—iconic shows such as The Young Doctors, Prisoner and the truly incomparable Neighbours. We now call them ‘soapies’ or ‘soap operas’.

These shows might have been created and produced by an Australian man who was ‘the salt of the earth’, but bear in mind that he sold them worldwide. Generations of young people growing up in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and Asia also became great fans of Reg’s ‘babies’—and they are still running. That is the sort of long run that everyone in show business can only dream of, particularly the incomparable history of Neighbours, which has lasted for over 30 years. It is an outstanding record, and the responsibility for it belongs to one man, Reg Grundy, a media mogul long before those whom we have latterly so described.

Reg Grundy’s contribution to the development of Australian culture is why he was acknowledged with the award of Companion of the Order of Australia in 2008, along with his award of an OBE in 1983 for services to Australian television. Of course, all through those years, Reg employed hundreds if not thousands of young Australian actors and actresses and gave them fame and fortune through his programs.

Reg’s career has been truly outstanding not only in the field of television production and television series production but in the quieter field of philanthropy. He has provided support to organisations as diverse as the National Institute of Dramatic Art, of which he is a life governor; the Taronga Zoo Foundation, of which he is patron; St Peter’s College in Adelaide; St John and Elizabeth Hospital and Hospice in London; the Australian Wildlife Conservancy; and Legacy.

Reg is also the author and photographer of The Wildlife of Reg Grundy published in 2005, and breathtaking wildlife photography remains one of his true passions. I am very privileged to have a set of truly outstanding photographic prints taken by Reg in the trademark black and gold monogrammed RG folder on my coffee table at home. It is something I treasure.

Despite selling his Grundy Worldwide Group in 1995, he was awarded a Golden Nymph Award in Monte Carlo in 2003 for his outstanding contributions to international television production, which followed an International Emmy-Founders Award given to Reg in 1996 for outstanding contribution to international television. Further back in 1993, Reg received the Gold Logie for Lifetime Service to Australian Television amongst many other awards he has deservedly received for his achievements in the television industry.

For the last 37 years Reg has been blessed with the unstinting support and love of his very clever and beautiful wife, Joy, whom I described earlier as his life partner. Their marriage and their life together are a living testimony of what it means to be soul mates, and they are true life partners who share everything and support each other no matter what.

So, in keeping with that sentiment, it is my privilege to congratulate Reg Grundy on his already remarkable life, which is so full of creating and giving to others, and to wish him a very happy 85 years young that he is celebrating with his beloved family and friends.

Reg—you are already a hero and now you are definitely a legend.