All that glitters: What Gold Logie history reveals about Australian TV

On Sunday night another name will be added to the record books when the Gold Logie, awarded to the most popular personality on Australian television, is handed out at the end of the 64th Annual TV Week Logie Awards. History beckons for many of the nominees.

The Gold Logie is the top prize in the Australian TV industry. Credit: Monique Westermann

If the ABC’s Tony Armstrong wins the top gong, he’ll be the first Indigenous Australian to do so. Seven’s Larry Emdur could be one of the oldest first-time winners, and Robert Irwin one of the youngest.

Then there’s Asher Keddie and Sonia Kruger, two women looking to join the two-time winner’s club, while Julia Morris and Andy Lee both sit on zero wins from three nominations, hoping the fourth time might be a charm.

But before we look forward, it pays to look back, unpacking the curious and sometimes controversial history of the Gold Logie.

The first Gold Logie

The first Gold Logie wasn’t a Gold Logie at all; it was called the TV Star of the Year Award and handed out during the inaugural Logies held in 1959. It was awarded to Graham Kennedy and Panda Lisner for their program In Melbourne Tonight for the Nine Network.

Two years later, in 1961, the awards ceremony was televised for the first time, with ABC screening the first half hour of the awards in Sydney.

Graham Kennedy and Bert Newton on the set of In Melbourne Tonight, October 1964.

This was also the first time the awards were named the Logies, in honour of John Logie Baird, who created the world’s first live, working television system.

The 90s and the 00s: serial winners

Over the first few decades of Gold Logie history, no one person dominated the category year after year. Instead, awards were shared between variety talk show hosts (the most popular format in the 1960s and 1970s), with Graham Kennedy, Don Lane, Ernie Sigley and Mike Walsh notching up multiple wins.

Until Bert Newton went back-to-back in 1981 and 1982, repeat winners were a rarity. This changed in the mid-90s when Ray Martin went on a winning streak that kick-started a broader trend.

Only four different winners were named in the 13 years between 1993 and 2005: Ray Martin, 1993-1996, for Midday and A Current Affair; Lisa McCune, 1997-2000, for Blue Heelers; Georgie Parker, 2001 and 2002, for All Saints; and Rove McManus, between 2003 and 2005, for Rove Live.

Martin landed a total of five Gold Logies – a number equalled only by Graham Kennedy. However, the award shifted toward actors after the creation of the Commercial Television Production Fund in 1995.

The government pumped $55 million of funding into high-end local shows, triggering a flood of dramas on commercial networks, including All Saints and Blue Heelers, series that introduced audiences to Georgie Parker and Lisa McCune, respectively.

By the mid-2000s, Rove McManus had successfully tweaked the popular late-night format, turning Rove Live! into appointment TV. At that time, commercial television was still the dominant cultural force, and Rove’s weekly platter of celebrity interviews, comedy, and live music catered to a generation that was about to be consumed by the internet. Rove’s last of his three Gold Logie wins was in 2004, the same year social media platforms MySpace and Facebook were born.

Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everidge and Rove McManus on the TV show Rove Live.

In 2006, SMS voting was introduced for the Gold Logie, and in 2008, online votes could be cast for the first time. Previously, voters had to buy a copy of TV WEEK Magazine to vote. The change coincided with a more diverse pool of nominees and winners. In 2019, Hard Quiz host Tom Gleeson harnessed the power of social media, running a high-profile #GleesonForGold campaign that leveraged internet exposure into gold votes. The campaign paid off with Gleeson becoming the first ABC host to win gold since satirist Garry McDonald in 1976.

The gender imbalance

Since their inception, there have been 39 male winners, compared to 18 female winners, not including the years the Gold Logie was awarded for separate male and female categories (1962, 1967, 1970, 1971, and between 1974 and 1977).

The first outright female winner didn’t arrive until 1985, when Rowena Wallace was named the most popular personality on Australian TV for her role on Sons and Daughters.

The gender split of gold winners paints a picture of an industry long dominated by men. However, this is not strictly a historical issue. The Logies came under fire in 2015 when it was revealed that since 1984, the awards had inducted 27 men and four television shows into its prestigious Hall of Fame but only one woman, Ruth Cracknell, in 2001.

Hall of Fame inductees get a special edition Gold Logie to recognise their outstanding contribution to the industry. In response to women being overlooked, the hashtag #MoreLogieWomen started trending, with high-profile personalities, including Ita Buttrose and Eddie McGuire, calling for change.

Since then, two more women have been inducted: Noni Hazlehurst in 2016 and Kerri-Anne Kennerley in 2017.

A golden opportunity: What comes next?

The Gold Logie is publicly voted, meaning nominees reflect who audiences regularly see on television. As the industry pushes towards greater diversity on screen, that will likely result in a pool of nominees that better represent the country’s population, including women and people of colour.

Waleed Aly became the first person of colour to win the Gold Logie when he took home the prize in 2016.Credit: Scott Barbour

In its 64-year run, only one person of colour (Waleed Aly) has won the Gold Logie, while four others have been nominated (Mark Coles Smith, Lee Lin Chin, Melissa Leong and Tony Armstrong). Incumbent winner Sonia Kruger is only the third woman to win gold in the past 15 years.

The Logies have long been divisive, but love them or hate them; they are one of the few measures we have to determine what we as viewers (in the case of the Gold Logie, especially), believe is worthy of merit on Australian TV.

The 64th TV WEEK Logie Awards will be broadcast exclusively on Channel Seven and 7plus on Sunday 18 August with comedian Sam Pang as host.

Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at [e-mail] or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.

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