Welcome, to our look at 2021. The title says a lot, but to warm you up for the announcements ahead: let's take a moment to remember that a significant milestone is approaching.
Saturday, December 26, 2020
2021: The Three Stream Dream.
Sunday, September 27, 2020
The 13th annual Kuttsywood's Couch guide to DST delays.
Welcome, to the 13th edition of this sites's annual DST guide.
This year, we are dealing with with a pandemic, with the potential to wreak havoc over all the things we hold so dear this summer.
But, I have also not forgotten about a cause that has become our mantra in a post-Kuttsy's Pitch world: the "Wheres The Doco" campaign: now just over a year old, with this years guide coinciding with the significant decision, to exclude Nine's television assets from this guide for a second year, potentially extending it to a third (although, I don't wish to do so, as hopefully this issue can easily be settled by the airing of a doco celebrating Nine's 60 years of TV heritage in QLD on a television frequency, sometime soon).
And, now we begin for the thirteenth time: our DST guide that has become a tradition.
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Content Survey Live: Part Five: Melbourne, an Hour A Day
Welcome, to Part Five of a week long mission, that is Content Survey Live. Today, we are now looking at 10 News First's Melbourne bulletin from Friday night.
In case you are reading this series out of order: Our best tip is to follow the links below, and make your way through.
Friday, August 21, 2020
Content Survey Live: Part Four: What Did Brisbane Do?
Welcome, to Part Four of a week long mission, that is Content Survey Live. Today, we are now looking at 10 News First's Brisbane bulletin from Thursday night.
Thursday, August 20, 2020
Content Survey Live: Part Three: Adelaide: News Upon the TorrenS
Welcome, to Part Three of a week long mission, that is Content Survey Live. Today, we are now looking at 10 News First's Adelaide bulletin from Wednesday night.
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Content Survey Live: Part Two, A Day's News Upon The Swan.
Welcome, to Part Two of a week long mission, that is Content Survey Live. Today, we are now looking at 10 News First's Perth bulletin from Tuesday night.
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Content Survey Live: Part One, Harbour City Hangover.
I thought I was having to wait until November to start this mission.
But thanks to Ten, it's being brought forward.
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Our 2020 Vision
This year, we will be launching some great initiatives, along with a major project that will return one of our past posts to new life, with new ideas. Let’s introduce the main initative right now.
Thursday, January 16, 2020
#WheresTheDoco Lives On?
It will live on, but I am hoping to get your support for something that should happen as a result of this.
I stand here, at the beginning of the second score of the 21st century, looking to the future.
Sunday, September 29, 2019
The 12th annual Kuttsywood's Couch guide to DST delays.
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Kuttsy's Pitch XI: The Wake.
Sunday, March 3, 2019
Vale: Billy J. Smith
This is indeed one post it feels like I am simply writing too soon. When we all heard the news on Wednesday afternoon, that we lost Billy J. Smith, from complications after a severe fall, at the age of 73, I naturally was shocked, as was many people.
This post is simply a celebration of someone who lived their life to the fullest, along with the ride, he all took us on as the sidecar to the motorcycle of his life, a life in the spotlight.
Friday, January 11, 2019
They Said We Wouldn't Make It: 2019 in a nutshell
Lock in this date: August 10, 2019. That will be the date (and incidentally, six days out from QLD TV’s sixtieth and six weeks after the tenth anniversary of Extra’s demise), the final (for the time being) Kuttsy’s Pitch in it’s classic form will come onto Kuttsywood’s Couch.
What is “Stand Up 4 The Northside” you may ask? It’s a intensive look at the issues that will dominate talk at the 2020 LGA elections, along with a few issues that, in our minds should get a look in at the same time: and it’s building off the momentum that #bris3xit should have driven.
30 years after the completion of Main Line Electrification, between Caboolture and Rockhampton, and 21 years after the introduction of tilting trains on the Rockhampton-Brisbane route we ask whether it is now feasible to start planning for the future: a passenger-only rail line between Brisbane and Rockhampton that can achieve speeds of up to 140km/h average (cutting Brisbane-Rockhampton travel times down to just 4 hours and 30 minutes: inc. stops in major centres only (with the increased frequency (and better connections), compensating for the removal of Mt Larcom (bussed to Rockhampton), Miriam Vale (bussed to either Gladstone or Bundaberg), Howard (bussed to Maryborough West), Cooroy, Nambour and Landsborough (replaced by a Maroochydore long distance station), and potential shift of Moreton Bay’s QR Travel station to Petrie from Caboolture) which would not only push the potential of narrow gauge rail, but open up opportunities (with the right improvements north of Rockhampton, inc. possibly a Rockhampton rail bypass and electrification) to eventually run a daylight rail service from FNQ to Brisbane (that is, leaving Brisbane at sunrise, getting into Cairns at sunset, with a potential second benefit: development of a regional rail service for North Queensland.)
Thus, in 2019: the same weekend as the Logies, we will announce a people’s Hall of Fame class, of 2019. Four women, four men inducted as part of the “People’s Australian Television Hall of Fame” and it will be decided by the people, not by a industry that is rapidly losing sight of the past.
The “People’s Australian Television Hall of Fame” will be the one huge legacy we will hope to take out of Queensland TV’s sixtieth year. And, we want our fellow TV reporting sites (e.g. TV Tonight and BlackboxTV) to support the concept, so we can work in concert, to bring this concept to life.
And remember: The P.A.T.H.O.F success is a long one, and it will begin with one small step.
Saturday, September 29, 2018
The 11th annual Kuttsywood's Couch guide to DST delays.
This year, we are dealing with another major big switch: the "Great Summer Sporting Switch of 2018", which will see cricket and tennis, switch positions on the dial, and see Ten struggle to sell a summer sans sport to a dwindling audience: which incidentally, has plenty of ideas on how to increase it, in the latter part of Kuttsy's Pitch X: the first mainline post in three years to gain traction faster than the spinoff series: probably because everybody is sick of politics after the machinations in Canberra lately. So, here we go.
Sunday, August 12, 2018
Kuttsy's Pitch: #Bris3xit
Reason: the investment in the last ten years in toll road projects (whose tolls didn’t recoup the fanciful figures that were predicted early on) to try to unchain the centre of Brisbane’s traffic issues, along with laying the groundwork for another inner city transport project: Brisbane Metro bus tunnels when outer suburbs needed the investment more.
Meanwhile, in the outer suburbs: councils who have become landed gentry due to rapid urban sprawl and council area changes in the last twenty years, are now struggling, to maintain their position, as their local council interactions and the like makes the front page: just ask anyone in Ipswich or Logan, and for that matter: Moreton Bay, as these growth areas are now beginning to forge their own identities, away from the commuter city identity that has risen since the late 1990s.
Thus, it is now time for Kuttsy’s Pitch to look at the possibility of a “BrisExit”: the transformation of the current bloated BCC authority to a much leaner model (along with delivering devolved authority): beginning with the development of five new 21st century strategies which can become acts of parliament, that can be utilized together to deliver a “BrisExit” model, that appeals to all. After all, it’s a natural move to aim for politics: based on the success of Kuttsy’s Pitch’s looks into public transport fares in December 2014, and into the state of 4BC/4BH in October 2017.
Friday, August 10, 2018
Kuttsy's Pitch X
Friday, June 29, 2018
Kuttsywood’s Couch’s TENfor10: The 10 biggest QLD TV/Radio stories of our first 10 years.
Welcome, to a post that is celebrating a milestone. 2018, marks Kuttsywood’s Couch’s 10th birthday, and we found it fitting: that we’d visit a formula, this site has made successful twice (first in August 2009 (and still is this site’s highest viewed post) and again in May 2013 as part of digital switchover), lengthy lists: although, this time: it isn’t a top 50 marathon, instead this post is a simple top ten, that has taken over twelve months to collate, and nearly 120hrs of constant finetuning, to get to this point, upload, for all to see and look back on. Sit back, fasten the ol’ seatbelt, as we begin this trip down memory lane, as we go all out… as we look back at the last ten years that we have been around, with the stories of our own home town, both on the box and on radio, while also looking to the future.
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Project Ether: Ten years on... and many happy returns.
Transmission… coordinates, 27.4698° S, 153.0251° E: Brisbane Australia, logging into the ride of your life. Hope someone out there can find us, in the cosmos beyond. 3742-4756-6782. CONTACT.
Welcome to Project Ether… A brand new day, a brand new era: at the dawn of Kuttsywood’s Couch’s tenth birthday. The child born of TV Tonight, and one Brett Debritz’s blog is hitting the tin milestone, with many great initiatives, in the year to come. The first of these, has already launched. You are seeing it right now.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Chermside's Crossroads
Sunday, October 1, 2017
Kuttsy's Radio Pitch
Saturday, September 30, 2017
Kuttsy's Pitch IX: Ether Road
Wait, how did the VB ad somehow get into this… Welcome to Kuttsy’s Pitch IX: Ether Road. Right now, we are counting down the days until the Ether rebirth of Kuttsywood’s Couch, but there is still issues at hand that can make Seven and for that matter: the industry sweat.
The 10th annual Kuttsywood’s Couch guide to Daylight Saving delays in Queensland.
Happy 10th birthday, to a institution on this site: and thanks to the DST Update series on Kuttsywood’s Couchcushion from 2011-15, as well as the 2012 Vision post on the subject (on the 20th anniversary of the 1992 QLD DST referendum) our most written about subject. This year deals with the last remains of The Big Switch: Southern Cross losing Northern NSW, for the only WIN Bruce Gordon got this year in the television game of chess. The evolution of this guide, has seen so much happen: Who would have thought in 2008, that in 2017 we’d have no programming involving a home viewer vote, leading into summer? It simply doesn’t have the X-Factor anymore, it simply Danced it’s way off the networks dartboard, like a Idol Big Brother. And of course, we are leading into the Commonwealth Games just under 200 days away. But we have this reminder, that the whole reason why early April was chosen for the Commonwealth Games: so the DST question (either QLD having to adopt it for 2017-18, or eastern states shortening theirs) wouldn’t need to be raised: when it should have been.
Let us begin with the guide for 2017/18.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Vale: Melody Iliffe.
Some sad news to report: Melody Welsh, later Melody Iliffe, left this world, on September 21, 2017. Below, we have this reading from the late Bruce Mansfield (clip from 3AW's Youtube Channel), of a Henry Scott Holland poem: "Death Is Nothing At All" (originally written upon the passing of King Edward VII in 1910) that this site will use, whenever a big name departs us from this life, and heads to the next, along with our tribute.
Melody Welsh's road to success, began as a production assistant, within the Jim Iliffe-hosted Channel Niner's, in the early 1960's. A major change in her career, would beckon in 1964: being brought in, not just as Australia's first female television newsreader, but to form the first example of a male-female news presenting duo in Australia: sitting alongside Don Seccombe, to read Nine's 6pm news in Brisbane. It was a natural ratings success, and led to a unique Logie being awarded for her newsreading, at the 1965 Logie Awards, in Melbourne: at St Kilda's Palais De Danse, which stated: "Acknowledged Ability, in A Man's Domain". The newsreading career continued on and off, (while eventually marrying Jim Iliffe (becoming Melody Iliffe) and raising a family) until the dawn of the 1980s, with one notable pairing being part of the QTQ weekend newsteam, alongside Ron Markland...
...before stepping away from the newsdesk: just as a new generation of women was stepping up in Brisbane's TV newsrooms: in particular: Kay McGrath, and Robin Parkin (who'd come across to Nine in the late eighties) across the hill at TVQ-0, Donna Meiklejohn (who went from the ABC doing QLD pieces for Nationwide, to Seven, eventually reading the 6pm news with Frank Warrick and Nev Roberts as part of a shortlived three person anchoring combination in 1987, followed by a run as Seven's US correspondent) along with Brisbane-bred Jo Pearson, in Melbourne for ATV-10, bringing the station to the very top of the news ratings.
to the predecessor to the Commodore 64: the VIC-20:
even VCR's and stereo systems to a Queensland moving towards the future at a breakneck pace.
Melody leaves behind, three children: Chris, Ingrid and David, and eight grandchildren: Kayla, Dominic, Hannah, Katie, Genevieve, Ryan, James and Benjamin: all destined to take the Iliffe family name well into the 21st century, a family name, for so many years was a household word in Queensland.
Melody Iliffe: May your legacy live forever, in that next room.
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Moreton Bay Rail... Reality
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Kuttsywood's Couch's 9th annual guide to Daylight Saving delays on FTA in Queensland
Monday, August 29, 2016
Kuttsy's Pitch VIII: #BringRickTo7
Thursday, June 23, 2016
The Big Switch.
Saturday, May 21, 2016
The 2016 Relaunch Spectacular
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Kuttsy's Pitch VII: Unlucky7
“Ladies and gentleman, well may we say God Save the Queen: because nothing will save 7 News Brisbane in 2015. #itstimeVII #kpitchVII #1in21” Posted to Twitter upon BTQ losing 2015. 21-1, 25/7/15
Friday, October 2, 2015
Kuttsywood's Couch's 8th annual guide to Daylight Saving delays on FTA in Queensland
"... because of a lack of content to fill it, especially as ratings last year ended with very little first run content to warrant weekly updates: as well as the changes concerning NRL and V8’s, not to mention Queensland’s slowly inching towards the reality that within a year or so live streaming of content online from the southern states will be part and parcel of life: however the DST guide will return in 2015 as well as the long held tradition of horse tipping on Melbourne Cup Day will remain in memory of Doug Murray..."
Thursday, January 1, 2015
#Shout2015: a year in preview.
So we kick off the celebration of the “Lifestyles of The Rich and Vocal”, with a preview of the year to come.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Kuttsy's Fare Pitch
Sunday, September 21, 2014
The DST Source’s 2014 Daylight Saving Delay Guide
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Kuttsy's Pitch VI: The Big Time
Welcome to the sixth edition, of a tradition. Five years ago this month, Seven last won a week at 5:30 at night in SEQ: (Kuttsy’s Pitch ignores any claim by Seven that this drought was broken in late May this year due to the poor ratings performance both before and after Million Dollar Minute had repeatedly tried to give away their top prize), and most critically, today being 5000 days since the end of Seven’s only major attempt to try and steal Extra’s audience with a original local product in late 2000: Local Edition. Accordingly, this post is published 5000 days to the minute the final episode of LE finished: not August 20, like in past years.
Monday, August 4, 2014
Are we there yet? GC 2018 Commonwealth Games transport.
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Shaking Up The Dial
Thursday, December 26, 2013
2014, goes big time on Kuttsywood's Couch
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Kuttsywood's Couch's 6th annual guide to Daylight Saving delays on FTA in Queensland
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Moving Up The Dial
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Kuttsy's Pitch V: The Pitch To The Future
Sunday, May 26, 2013
50 Great QLD TV Moments: in Analogue
This countdown, has been widely sourced: and is a look back down memory lane, for those who can remember the change to colour, or QLD's Commonwealth Games win just two years ago. This is a countdown that is as historic as it is lengthy. This will easily be the longest post you've ever read on this site, but it has to be long to do it justice.
We now begin the countdown, at #50: when how we got interstate and international news in QLD changed forever, with one major event, 35 years ago.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
The end of a analogue era: TVQ-0/10
The end of a analogue era: BTQ-7
The end of a analogue era: QTQ-9
Welcome to a updated version, of the 2009 QTQ 50th post, to commemorate the end of analogue television in Brisbane on 28/5/13. It includes a extension to the present day, along with some other updates, to reflect modern events.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Ten-demonium
This site often asks the hard questions. Now here's one that could have titanic shifts in the Australian media, and could possibly spark a rash of changes throughout the television industry. What would happen if the Ten situation got worse, and what is the remedy? It's this question that is now simply a case of Ten-demonium... It's the Ten-demonium that could see the Ten we all know head towards another 1990-style situation: when the network underwent costcuts but couldn't prevent it going into recievership. But it is a tale that has taken many turns, especially as Ten's demographics keep changing, all while their bread and butter for so many years, the youth: are increasingly turning to the internet first. This Is...
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Five Years On: A preview of Kuttsywood's Couch in 2013
Sunday, September 30, 2012
The 2012 Vision-Part 3: Simply The Best-A Broncos dynasty
This post is dedicated to John Miller, ex. 4BC, State Affair, 4BK, who passed away on September 7, after a fall at his home two weeks earlier. He was 59. He will be missed by the Brisbane community both in television and radio circles.
Welcome, to the grand finale, of the 2012 Vision, on NRL Grand Final day 2012. As we look forward to the Melbourne Storm and Canterbury (two teams who have made history as the two clubs who took the quickest time to win a inaugural premiership after being admitted into the top flight of rugby league in Australia: Melbourne won their first premiership after two seasons in the NRL in 1999, and Canterbury won their first premiership after three seasons in the (then) NSWRFL in 1938) going out on the grand stage at Stadium Australia, and trying to etch their names in rugby league history, there are probably many Brisbane Broncos fans, who are remembering this year, due to one match, that sparked a dynasty. It was 20 years ago this weekend: that the Brisbane Broncos won their first premiership, in the Sydney competition (as it was then).
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Kuttsywood's Couch's 5th annual guide to Daylight Saving delays on FTA in Queensland
Welcome to a post that in it's five years of existence, has evolved to become a tradition and is well loved by all readers. This post also kicks off our 5th birthday celebrations, albiet two months early as part of our Super Weekend: tomorrow being the final part of the 2012 Vision: Simply The Best, a Broncos Dynasty. To help out with keeping the spirit of the first 2012 Vision post, on daylight saving this year alive, we will adopt a hashtag that is designed to be a wakeup call. #embraceDST is the unifying force, to get Queensland to join it's southern state counterparts: in not switching public holidays, but in switching our clocks ahead 1 hour. Earlier this year, I went to Miami, in the US, a city around the same distance from the equator as Bundaberg, yet they are on the same timezone all year round, as New York and Washington DC. DST means that the "Cruise Capital Of The World" isn't hampered by timezones during peak tourist season, like our tourism industry is. We begin this years guide: with a quick wrap of each channel's fixed offerings, although the floating offerings will be on the DST Updates starting next week.
Monday, August 20, 2012
Kuttsy's Pitch 4: Beyond "20 Years of Hell"
You have seen the teasers on Twitter since June... and it is now here: the tradition is back for it's 4th instalment. Welcome to Kuttsy's Pitch 4: Beyond "20 Years of Hell". It was on the previous instalment of Kuttsy's Pitch, in 2011, I coined the phrase "20 years of hell", in direct reference to 7's long term issues at half past five in south east Queensland outside weekends. It in-turn inspired, the post "20 years of hell at half past five", a definitive history of Extra, intertwined with 7's various moves in the preceding two decades. But this instalment, is designed to help give "20 Years of Hell" a definitive end.
These ideas are only theoretical.
Friday, July 27, 2012
The race begins: GC 2018 Comm Games broadcast rights.
Normally, I'd save a countdown, for the "DST Update" over at the "Couchcushion", but this seems apt. We are now 2077 days away from the event that will elevate the Gold Coast's stature to becoming Australia's "sixth city", the 2018 Commonwealth Games. I'm posting this, as a sort of "form guide" for the upcoming dogfight for the broadcast rights (along with the needs for the technical backbone), as it will likely be a major bidding war, for what will be, the first Commonwealth Games on Australian soil, since digital switchover in 2013. The first runner up to the mark: subscription television.