On Sunday nights at 6pm, for most of my childhood, our family would gather in front of the TV to watch Countdown. All four ratty kids would fidget incessantly, yelling at each other to “shaddup”, before settling down to inhale the latest music clips and live performances.
I would marvel wide-eyed and dream of dancing along like the teenagers in the studio audience, who usually looked slightly confused, as if they’d been bussed in from a nearby shopping centre to make up the numbers on the promise of a free bag of mixed lollies. Like half the performers, the audience seemed to have no idea what they were doing there. But everyone had great hair.
Countdown was my weekly dose of fantasy. Our family lived in a small town called Red Cliffs, more than 500km from the nearest capital city. We didn’t have a music store (and the internet was still years away from being available at home).
But we had Countdown. It was our connection to the outside world. Glamorous Elton John and his bizarre glasses visited our lounge room from London, raunchy Madonna from New York, and sexy Duran Duran from a yacht or hairdressing salon somewhere in the Bahamas, and that bloke who looked like Ian from accounting who got lucky, Phil Collins, made regular visits. A cavalcade of stars, it seemed at the time.
Countdown provided my formative music education, too. I will never forget watching AC/DC’s Jailbreak clip, peering from behind the couch in fear as bombs went off around a scary-looking skinny bloke wearing jeans so tight it looked as though he’d smuggled a small ferret that was busting to get out via the zip, while he told us about getting out of the big house. It may explain my penchant now for blokes who look as though they’re on their first day on parole from Long Bay jail.
When 40 Years of Countdown screened on Sunday, my social media feeds were dripping in nostalgia. It was nice to see that I wasn’t the only one who taped the show religiously on a tape recorder, pushed up to the TV speaker. Those were hi-tech, heady times.
Pre-teens aren’t known for their critical thinking, so Countdown may not have been as consistently wonderful as my hazy memory recalls (and let’s be honest, today’s version would probably be full of One Direction and Katy Perry performances that would drive most of us completely nuts). But it was a shared experience. Kids made parents watch, and most kids watched, unless they were one of those households that chose Young Talent Time instead. Our house didn’t associate with those houses.
Shared TV experiences aren’t so much a thing now days, unless you count sporting events and reality TV show finals. Television itself is such a different beast; entire households tuning in for one program is almost unheard of. Most of us watch our own things on our own devices in our own time.
It is sad to think that there won’t be anything like Countdown again. TV execs are the first to say that no one watches live music on TV anymore. That it doesn’t rate. And they’re probably right.
But given the groundswell of support for Countdown, surely it might be the time to try again? Plus, if something like this isn’t made available on the box soon, the kids of today are going to struggle to find something to get all misty-eyed over in 40 years – unless they collectively remember the white wine tears that Mum shed while watching The Bachelor, or the elation they felt as the final bathroom was revealed on the 74th season of The Block.
