Wonder World host gave us better kids’ TV

Simon Townsend, who passed away this week aged 79, hadn’t been a household name for a long time. His last noteworthy media gig was a media news program, TVTV, in the 1990s. Bedevilled in recent years by a serious stroke and the loss of beloved partners, Townsend was at best a figure of nostalgia for Wonder World, his kids’ television show that started in 1979 and continued on for much of the 1980s. For those with longer memories, he was also known for his brave stand against Vietnam-era conscription: as a 23-year-old, he was jailed in military prison for being a conscientious objector.

But if you’re a Gen X-er, chances are Townsend was an important figure in your childhood. Wonder World was a very different approach to kids’ TV, when it was dominated by cartoons and game shows. Wonder World was a news program for kids, not a serious one like the ABC’s long-running Behind The News, but fun, covering topics that kids would be interested in, in breezy five-minute stories by a team of reporters that initially boasted Angela Catterns (a personal icon of mine), Adam Bowen and Jonathan Coleman — the latter two have both, sadly, passed away, along with Edith Bliss, a subsequent recruit.

The light tone certainly didn’t prevent the occasional serious topic. In one episode, one of the male reporters — Bowen or Hugh Piper, I can’t recall which — ventured into a male prison to examine conditions and talk to inmates, including one who gently, haltingly stated that a young person coming in there would face people “who want to have sex with them”. How many 12-year-olds it terrified into a lifetime of rectitude isn’t clear, but I still remember the deep shock it sent through this young viewer.

Townsend seemed to give free rein to his reporters. Coleman didn’t hide his taste for Pythonesque humour — this was before his huge radio success as one half of Jono and Dano — and in time his reports became more like comedy sketches and character pieces. Townsend also eagerly provided a platform for Australian musical talent, with a music video spot in every episode (something picked up by the ABC’s Afternoon Show, hosted by young bespectacled musician, James Valentine, a few years later). As everyone has noted in the past 24 hours, Townsend was the first to show a clip by a youthful Sydney band “INXS” called, not coincidentally, “Simon”, and filmed rather clunkily with Michael Hutchence mugging for the camera in front of the Member’s Stand at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

The prevailing tone — whether in the content of the items or the way they were presented by the reporters, or in Townsend’s relationship with his audience (not to mention co-host Woodrow, the ill-fated bloodhound who would succumb to disease) — was one of treating kids as smart, curious people interested in the world. The viewers were people to be taken seriously (even if Townsend never took himself seriously); people who would welcome the occasional serious piece and who would enjoy Coleman’s often-surreal humour.

And remember, this was on Channel Ten, not the ABC: this was an era in which commercial television was prepared to invest in kids’ TV and do it well. True, a very different era — there were just four TV channels (until SBS kicked off, and it didn’t do kids’ programming), and when you got home from school, there was nothing happening media-wise except afternoon telly. So, you watched Wonder World, and its team of excellent reporters, every afternoon.

So, vale Simon, and perhaps the media era he represented. He joins the steady drip-drip of media figures from the 1970s onward who have passed away. If you’re Gen X, like me, you’re now reaching the age where the totemic figures of your childhood are regularly dying, along with a slowly growing number of friends, enemies and acquaintances (welcome to the club, I can hear Boomers saying). Time is a bastard like that, but we can remember the people who made us feel — at least for 30 minutes on a weekday afternoon — that there really was something wonderful about the world.

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