Brian Henderson: the man on the telly
Brian Henderson’s role in shaping the nation’s culture in the second half of the 20th century had almost nothing to do with reading the news.
In 1956, Bruce Gyngell famously uttered six words – “Good evening, and welcome to television” – to launch the medium.
Two years later, Brian Henderson spoke just five – “Hi, come on into Bandstand” – and changed it forever.
Henderson’s role in shaping the nation’s culture in the second half of the 20th century had almost nothing to do with reading the news – which he did in an unbroken run from 1957 to 2002.
With Bandstand coming from the Sydney studios of TCN9, Henderson demonstrated the power and influence television was soon to have. When Gyngell spoke just days before the start of the Melbourne Olympic Games, he reached the elite of Sydney and Melbourne who could afford the means to view it, perhaps fewer than 20,000 families.
By the time Henderson introduced us to Bandstand, he was the most popular figure on television and new stations were dotted around most capital cities. Importantly, many more viewers had bulky receivers sitting on four spindly wooden legs in the corner of their lounge rooms.
Gyngell had been to the US and witnessed the success of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. He copied it, but kept the content largely local with the “Bandstand family” – a group of unthreatening Australian artists who were rotated through the program from week to week.
They would come to include Col Joye, Olivia Newton-John, Johnny O’Keefe, The Delltones, Peter Allen, Johnny Farnham, Judy Stone, Little Pattie, John Laws and, crucially, the Bee Gees. Later, benign early versions of Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs and The Easybeats would join them.
By the time Bandstand expired in 1972 – helmed by Henderson all the way – it had become the most significant show on Australian television. The jury is still out on whether it had more impact than its celebrated colour successor, Countdown.
Henderson’s reach through the demographics of Australian television viewers was unprecedented. Breaking with his orthodox newsreader persona – but still with a tie – he looked not at all out of place running through the line-up of stars with a show “that swings all the way”.
Henderson often included his gentle tenor in the shows and sang some hits, even chancing his hand at the controversial blackface standard Jimmy Crack Corn, but no one in Australia seemed to notice or mind.
“I always thought I could sing,” Henderson told an interviewer in 2018, perhaps facetiously. “Eventually I ended up singing quite a few times on Bandstand.
“Well, I was running the show, so you know, I said I wanted to sing and they’d say, ‘Yes, Brian, you can sing’.”
He also made his own records, spoken-word “songs” with a conservative, almost Billy Graham-like message. One single was called What Is A Square: “Square is another of the good old words that’s gone the way of love, modest or patriotism. Something to be sniggered over or downright laughed at ...”
It was perhaps mawkish then. It remains corny today. But Henderson and Bandstand changed television. And Australian music.
Back then each capital city had its own stars and separate music charts. You could top the charts in Brisbane, as The Aztecs did, and be barely known in Melbourne or Adelaide. National tours by artists and bands were not common. But a spot on Bandstand meant national exposure and it was the making of many early artists.
A regular on Bandstand was singer Normie Rowe, who recalls the revolutionary impact of Henderson’s show.
“I started off as a little kid watching Bandstand with my brother and sister,” he says. “Their teenage years was all about shows such as Six O’Clock Rock and Bandstand, but it lasted so much longer.”
Rowe says that, without the exposure such shows gave, artists “didn’t have a life”. Bandstand was “the flagship”. And you didn’t need Australian content rules; Henderson just assumed Australians wanted to see homegrown talent.
“Brian was always a gentleman,” he says. “He was always incredibly well liked, right across the board. When I appeared on his shows he was always an incredibly generous person.”
Joye and Henderson became best mates, but Joye was always aware that Henderson’s news-reading day job was what anchored his fame.
“He was the best in the world at what he did,” Joye said in an interview to a mark Bandstand’s 60th anniversary.
The same interview also dispelled the myth that Henderson was an unworldly God-botherer. Henderson admitted Joye had once “made me go to a strip club”. Joye said the visit was “all part of growing up”.
“We walked along Macleay Street (near Sydney’s Kings Cross),” recalled Joye. “And I said this is it here, Brian, and he said ‘Don’t go in yet, there’s people looking’. We went down and it was all dark, there was a couple of girls spinning around poles and all that, doing that kind of thing, and halfway through the first dance ... the music stopped and the lights all went on and (there was an announcement) – ‘Ladies and gentlemen we’ve got some dignitaries in here tonight, Brian Henderson’ – and he was apoplectic.”
Henderson was born in Dunedin, on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island – the son of a bus driver – but he had been in Australia so long that he no longer makes the list of that city’s alumni.
The family moved to the old gold-mining town of Bannockburn, in Central Otago, where Henderson’s father ran a pub. But the youngster contracted tuberculosis just as the disease was peaking in New Zealand at the end of World War II. Effective treatments were only just being developed so he was kept in an infirmary away from other hospital patients. It is reported that he created a small broadcast system there to entertain the residents.
On leaving hospital and school he found work at a Dunedin radio station, later transferring to Wellington. He moved to Sydney in 1953 and was employed on air at the NSW Council of Churches-owned 2CH (decades later the station would be bought by Henderson’s mate John Singleton).
Henderson arrived aged 22, long before the modern-day New Zealand accent formed. His nasally tone sounded very local when he started reading news for Channel 9 and some commercials in Sydney at the weekend beginning in January, 1957, only months after television had been born here.
Bandstand arrived the following year and by 1964 Henderson was anchoring the nightly news in Sydney.
He made his mark delivering the news in an undemonstrative style, reading from sheets of paper – scripts – that he had edited himself, with none of the puns that often trivialise modern bulletins.
He took complete responsibility for the words he broadcast. All newsreaders on today’s networks dress formally, but Henderson’s mostly unchanging style was positioned midway between dapper and debonair.
Television and rock’n’roll crashed on Australian shores as a concurrent tidal wave in 1956 and he was perfectly placed to take advantage of it.
Pop music shows sprouted across radio and television all over the country: Platter Parade, Teen Beat, TV Disc Jockey, Accent on Youth, Teenage Mailbag, Your Hit Parade and Teen Time.
Only one, Bandstand, made it to adolescence. Henderson, then aged 27, was chosen by Gyngell to host it. He was also executive producer.
Soon pitched at Australians “aged between eight and 80”, and with Henderson’s reassuring presence, it prefigured the variety shows that would dominate ratings for the next two decades – and beyond, if you include Hey, Hey It’s Saturday.
Ironically, with the success of Countdown, Nine revived Bandstand in 1976. Hey, Hey host Daryl Somers kicked it off with an exclusive ABBA performance and interview. It bombed.
Henderson was already a national name before starting his extraordinarily long stint reading news on Sydney’s Nine. For almost 40 years his understated style – the Buddy Holly glasses went eventually; the rims became a little thinner and were not always black – and effortlessly polished delivery won ratings consistently for his station as he stamped himself as the face and dependable voice of the network.
He read his last bulletin on November 29, 2002, aged 71.
Ray Martin, Australia’s second-best television presenter, had this to say about Henderson that day: “(He is) the best newsreader Australian TV has ever seen. He reads news bulletins perfectly and he’s word-perfect in his pronunciation of tongue-twisters and faraway places. You want crisp, accurate information. When Brian tells you, well, that’s the way it is.”
And that’s the way it was.
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