The series title was an abbreviation of the phrase "Get To
Know". GTK is one of several significant popular music programs
produced by the ABC, and like the later establishment of Double
Jay, GTK was created to address the perception that the
Australian youth audience was being poorly served by commercial
radio and TV and that much important international music and
especially Australian popular music was being ignored by
commercial TV and radio at that time.
GTK premiered on 4 August 1969 and ran until 1974, after which
it was superseded by the even more successful weekly show
Countdown. The first series of GTK was directed by noted TV and
event director Ric Birch, who was at the time the youngest
director in Australian television. Because colour television was
not introduced in Australia until early 1975, most of GTK was
shot on black-and-white film or videotape, although segments of
programs ca. 1974 are known to have been shot in colour.
GTK ran for ten minutes and was broadcast daily from Monday to
Thursday, at 6.30 pm just before the ABC's popular rural soap
opera Bellbird. GTK's magazine-style format - which gave strong
emphasis to local Australian rock and pop music - included
interviews, reports, music film-clips (music videos) and
occasional footage of local and visiting international acts in
concert.
GTK (1969-74) aimed to introduce 'new teens and twenties … to
the world of trendsetting fashions, records, movies and events’.
The first program included a profile of Sydney rock band The
Cleves and most episodes featured a live performance filmed for
GTK at the ABC’s Gore Hill studio in Sydney.
A feature of every episode - and one that makes GTK a unique
document of that period of Australian music - was the daily
live-in-the-studio performance segment, especially recorded by
GTK. These segments featured hundreds of notable and
lesser-known Australian acts of the period. The band chosen as
featured group for the week would often record their own 'cover'
version of the GTK theme (composed by Hans Poulsen), which was
played at the start of each of the programs.
Certainly the nightly viewers, always devoted and dismayed in
equal parts, were served up the readily familiar likes of Zoot,
Axiom, Doug Parkinson In Focus, Autumn, Jeff St John, Sherbet,
Country Radio, the La De Das, Blackfeather, Billy Thorpe, Chain,
Hush, Max Merritt & The Meteors, Russell Morris, Daddy Cool,
Spectrum, and Flake, but they were also exposed to new,
challenging contemporary acts such as Company Caine, Captain
Matchbox, Pirana, Tamam Shud, Bakery, Sun, Third Union Band,
Syrius, Glenn Cardier, Kahvas Jute. Band of Talabene No Sweat,
Gungan Dim; Mother Earth, Human Instinct, Langford Lever, Duck,
Jeannie Lewis, Friends, Wendy Saddington, Wild Cherries, Band of
Light, Gary Young's Hot Dog, Moonstone, Mighty Kong, Home,
Buffalo, King Harvest, Headband and Carson.
These live performance segments were filmed in Studio 21 at the
ABC's Gore Hill complex, which had originally been used for
drama during the early days of live-to-air production. Groups
were called in early on Monday mornings, and four songs/pieces
were recorded, with one segment broadcast each day. Another
aspect that makes this GTK footage important is that many of the
bands were asked to play material from their live repertoire -
including cover versions - rather than their current or recent
hit song/s, since it was felt that the groups would perform
these better and because it would show off other facets of their
music. It is believed that because these live performances were
filmed (and later transferred to videotape for broadcast) most
of this footage was preserved, despite the fact that many of the
broadcast master tapes were later erased.
It was thought for many years that most of the videotapes of the
program had been erased during an ABC economy drive in the late
1970s, but recent discoveries at the ABC, notably during and
after the closure of the old Gore Hill studio complex in Sydney,
have revealed that much of the series (including location pieces
and in-the-studio performances) was shot on film and then
transferred to video. Recent estimates from the ABC indicate
that as much as 90 percent of the series has survived, although
regrettably most of the first year of the show was only
videotape, which has since been erased.
Recent discoveries have included Mick Jagger discussing his role
in Ned Kelly (1970), an exclusive GTK interviews with Pete
Townshend and Marc Bolan and unique colour footage of Lou Reed's
1974 Sydney concert (including one of the earliest known films
of Reed performing "Walk on the Wild Side") and his legendary
Sydney press conference, which features noted Australian
television journalist Ian Leslie.
GTK's final show was broadcast in late 1974 and was superseded
by the highly successful ABC pop music show Countdown (1974-87).