10 quick questions: nostalgic Australian children’s television

The Ferals, Heartbreak High and Ship to Shore Illustration: Guardian Design/Supplied/Guardian Design

With so many Australians currently in lockdown, the desire for comfort viewing is at an all-time high. Here in Melbourne, where we’ve just been sent back into our Covid burrows after a brief week in the sunshine, I find myself swinging between crying at the extremes of athletic performance at the Tokyo Olympics, and craving the sweet nostalgia of the golden age of Australian kids’ television.

Call it doom-streaming, call it a midlife crisis, but one thing’s for sure: nothing takes the edge off living through a once-in-a-lifetime event like remembering the good old days. Back when kids were free to wreak havoc on adult authority figures, achieve glory on the Nintendo, and ride their dirt bikes through the hills.

Now that so many of these shows are available to stream (the re-release of Heartbreak High on Netflix was a late save for the accursed 2020, with a reboot due in 2022) or have popped up on YouTube courtesy of well-loved VHS rips, a new generation of kids is being entranced by the TV Australians of a certain age grew up with.

Pit your knowledge against theirs with this quiz; there are no prizes, but feel free to crow about your results in the comments – it’s what Drazic would want.

1. After discovering a TV cable in the sewers, subversive icons the Ferals started their own TV station in the follow up series Feral TV. The boss of the network was a grumpy toad in a suit – which real-life media mogul was he modelled on?

   1. Kerry Stokes

   2. Sam Chisholm

   3. Kerry Packer

   4. Rupert Murdoch

2. Which cult series’ extended theme song featured the following lyrics: “Every now and then I'm insecure/ Let me show you life can be so pure/ Seize the day/ Wear a big happy smile on your face”?

   1. The Genie From Down Under

   2. The Saddle Club

   3. Ocean Girl

   4. H2O: Just Add Water

3. The theme music for the Australian-Spanish co-production Secret Valley was set to the tune of which classic Australian song?

   1. Bound For South Australia

   2. The Dog Sits On The Tuckerbox

   3. Botany Bay

   4. Waltzing Matilda

4. 

   Bad boy Drazic pressures Anita into shoplifting in episode 110 of Heartbreak High (to the tune of My Friend the Chocolate Cake’s Talk About Love, no less). What does he give her grief about stealing from the corner store?

   1. A pregnancy test

   2. A carton of menthols

   3. A family block of Cadbury chocolate

   4. A box of tampons

5. True or false: as part of the audition process for Ocean Girl, star Marzena Godecki had to jump off a pier into the ocean in Melbourne?

   1. True

   2. False

6. A*mazing was a, frankly, amazing kids’ gameshow hosted by James Sherry that pitted teams from different primary schools against each other in a variety of challenges including a video game battle. During the "Maze Run" and "Bonus Round" segments, what objects did the kids have to find in the eponymous maze?

   1. Keys and Nintendo controllers

   2. Letters and keys

   3. Numbers and shapes

   4. Keys and locks

7. What happened to Pete Twist when he patted Shovel the ghost dog in episode 12 of season 1 of Round The Twist?

   1. His pants fell off

   2. He started stealing pants off people’s clotheslines

   3. He turned into a dog wearing pants

   4. He was unable to stop saying “without my pants”

8. 

   Lift Off, which followed the adventures of a diverse bunch of kids who lived in a magical apartment block, featured an unsettling faceless doll called "EC". What did the letters stand for?

   1. Everyone Cares

   2. Even Children

   3. Excellence Counts

   4. Every Child

9. Which infamous character did actor Greg Carroll play in Ship To Shore?

   1. Harry Crump

   2. Hermes Endakis

   3. Gavin Garney

   4. Louden De Clair

10. True or false: the Round The Twist theme was performed by Grace Knight of Eurogliders.

    1. True

    2. False

Solutions

1:C - Kerry – the toad one – once stated that he’d one day like to see himself “sitting in the big boss's chair of the ABC”. Watch your back, Ita Buttrose., 2:B - The show was a huge international hit, and the filming of the third season alone was estimated to have injected $9m into the Victorian economy. Also, in extremely pure news, apparently the stars still catch up IRL., 3:D - Fun fact: evil property developer William Whopper was played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played both Toecutter AND Immortan Joe in the Mad Max films, 4:B - “You got minty cigarettes!” he exclaims. Earlier, when Drazic reveals that he’s nicked a box of Peter Stuyvesants, Anita can’t believe it. “That’s the trouble with you middle-class kids,” he tells her. “You never really know what’s goin’ on. You’re so … safe.” Drazic and Anita’s combined haul would set the average durry-smoker back roughly $600 in today’s prices. The moral of this story: don’t smoke, don’t steal, and don’t date bad boys who say “rack off”., 5:A - Godecki was a ballet student when she scored the role of Neri at the age of 16, and trained in ocean swimming and scuba diving to portray the water-loving alien. She also appeared as “Beautiful Girl” in a number of episodes in Round The Twist’s second season, including the iconic Nails., 6:B - It was no small feat to find the objects in the show’s extensive set. The show’s production values put some of today’s “two desks in front of an LED screen” efforts to shame. Former production assistant Matthew Smith spent two years “hiding all of the letters and the keys in the maze, as well as operating the dry ice and smoke machines”., 7:D - I tried to count the exact number of times Pete says “without my pants” in the episode – drolly titled Without My Pants – but I lost count around the 20 mark … without my pants., 8:D - EC was designed so that any child could imagine themselves as being represented by it. “I think that doll gave a lot of people nightmares,” former cast member Luke Carroll told ABC Throwback, but he added that the young cast loved their puppet costar. “I used to always look forward to rocking up to set. It was always a competition to see who was going to get EC for that scene because we all loved EC so much.”, 9:B - In an interview with news.com.au in 2014, Carroll recalled Hermes’ less-loveable incarnation in the initial scripts: “It was supposed to be a drama adventure and I thought, ‘Hermes comes across like a paedophile’. So I made him funny instead and it really panicked the ABC and all sorts of people until they showed it to some kids and the kids couldn’t stop laughing.”, 10:B - It was performed by Tamsin West, the young actress who played the original Linda Twist. It’s also now stuck in your head, isn’t it?

Scores

1. 10 and above.

   You never got over the time that A*mazing came to your primary school but didn’t pick you. Your earliest TV memory is of the theme song to Secret Valley and you’ll never forget the moment Nick died from a brain aneurysm on Heartbreak High. Your YouTube account is full of carefully curated playlists of ripped episodes of your favourite shows, and you may or may not have thought about applying for a job at the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.

2. 9 and above.

   Your bedroom featured more than a few Dolly Prince of TV posters, and you always made sure to be front and centre for A*mazing. You think that Round The Twist definitely went off the rails after season two, but you admit to wishing they’d reboot The Ferals since you’ve grown up and realised capitalism is a bust.

3. 8 and above.

   Your bedroom featured more than a few Dolly Prince of TV posters, and you always made sure to be front and centre for A*mazing. You think that Round The Twist definitely went off the rails after season two, but you admit to wishing they’d reboot The Ferals since you’ve grown up and realised capitalism is a bust.

4. 7 and above.

   Your bedroom featured more than a few Dolly Prince of TV posters, and you always made sure to be front and centre for A*mazing. You think that Round The Twist definitely went off the rails after season two, but you admit to wishing they’d reboot The Ferals since you’ve grown up and realised capitalism is a bust.

5. 6 and above.

   You watched enough TV back in the golden age, but only if you finished your homework first. You aged out of Ocean Girl by its second season, but couldn’t help but sneak a glimpse of it when your younger sibling[s] watched it.

6. 5 and above.

   You watched enough TV back in the golden age, but only if you finished your homework first. You aged out of Ocean Girl by its second season, but couldn’t help but sneak a glimpse of it when your younger sibling[s] watched it.

7. 4 and above.

   You watched enough TV back in the golden age, but only if you finished your homework first. You aged out of Ocean Girl by its second season, but couldn’t help but sneak a glimpse of it when your younger sibling[s] watched it.

8. 2 and above.

   You were either too young or too old to appreciate the golden era of Australian kids’ TV, or maybe you just weren’t allowed to watch it. Either way, your idea of “remembering the good times” when it comes to kids’ TV begins and ends with occasionally standing in the dairy aisle at the supermarket and catching yourself thinking about whether or not a kid would starve were it not for Snak Pack (hint: they would).

9. 3 and above.

   You were either too young or too old to appreciate the golden era of Australian kids’ TV, or maybe you just weren’t allowed to watch it. Either way, your idea of “remembering the good times” when it comes to kids’ TV begins and ends with occasionally standing in the dairy aisle at the supermarket and catching yourself thinking about whether or not a kid would starve were it not for Snak Pack (hint: they would).

10. 0 and above.

    You were either too young or too old to appreciate the golden era of Australian kids’ TV, or maybe you just weren’t allowed to watch it. Either way, your idea of “remembering the good times” when it comes to kids’ TV begins and ends with occasionally standing in the dairy aisle at the supermarket and catching yourself thinking about whether or not a kid would starve were it not for Snak Pack (hint: they would).

11. 1 and above.

    You were either too young or too old to appreciate the golden era of Australian kids’ TV, or maybe you just weren’t allowed to watch it. Either way, your idea of “remembering the good times” when it comes to kids’ TV begins and ends with occasionally standing in the dairy aisle at the supermarket and catching yourself thinking about whether or not a kid would starve were it not for Snak Pack (hint: they would).