Quote:
Originally Posted by glenluceskies
From working for the Nine Network for several years, I saw the conduct of ACA first hand throughout most of the 1990's, and I could tell several stories on what I saw. But one comes to mind immediately....
When ACA did a story on an alledged Sydney "dodgy" television repairman Mr Benny Mendoza and subsequent bombardments of promos labelling him a dishonest television repairman, he suicided three days later in his garage. This is well documented.
After much public back-peddling and spin-doctoring from Ray Martin, ACA and the Network, I was personally approached in the maintenance/engineering department approximately 2 years after this tragedy, by an ACA cameraman and ACA reporter asking me to induce a fault in a television for them to take to a local television repair centre - to repeat exactly the same story. I (and other techs) refused to do this, explaining that inducing an artificial fault in a TV could has the potential to cause further faults downstream in the TV, which may lead to the TV tech spending (justifiably) more time on the repair. The reporter could not comprehend this.
The best satirical representation of ACA/TT was Frontline by Working Dog Productions. Despite what the programs and their publicity machines said at the time, Frontline nailed the behavior of these tabloid programs perfectly. I urge anyone who wants an insight into how ACA/TT conduct themselves, get a copy of Frontline - especially Series 3.
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Hi Stephen
This is a but off topic but back in the early days of TV there were very few "technicians" who could actually repair a TV or any electronic gear for that matter. The repairers were basically "tube jockeys" If you knew where the horizontal Output tube was, the eht rectifier, the syncseparator, the RFamp and a bottle of cleaning fluid for the Channel selector turret you could fix 99% of TV faults without knowing what you were really doing.
I don't know if you were at channel 9 in the B&W days but keeping those Marconi IO cameras going must have been a handfull. I ended up with them and had them running for about 6 years at home till I gave them to Channel ten for their museum.
Barry
