GTK (TV show)

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GTK was an Australian popular music TV series produced and broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The series title was an abbreviation of the phrase "Get To Know". The series 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GTK premiered in mid-1969 and ran until 1974, after which is was superseded by the even more successful weekly show Countdown.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. Because colour television was not introduced in Australia until 1975, much of GTK was produced on black-and-white film or videotape, although segments of programs ca. 1974 are known to have been filmed in colour.

Running for ten minutes per day and broadcast from Monday-Thursday, just before the main 7pm news bulletin , GTK's magazine-style format gave strong emphasis to Australian music and included interviews, film-clips, concert footage and a daily live-in-the-studio performance segment, specially recorded by GTK and featuring many notable Australian acts of the period.

It was thought for many years that most of the videotapes of the program had been erased during an ill-advised 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 (fortunately for posterity) much of the series was shot on film before being transferred to video -- including the unique live segments. Recent estimates from the ABC indicate that as much as 90 percent the series has survived, although sadly most of the first year of the show has been lost.

Recent discoveries have included exclusive GTK interviews with Pete Townshend and Marc Bolan and unique colour footage of Lou Reed's 1974 Sydney concert (including one of the earlist known films of Reed performing "Walk On The Wild Side") and his legendary Sydney press conference, which features noted Australian TV journalist Ian Leslie.