Reginald Roy Grundy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reg_Grundy

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-09/reg-grundy-dies-aged-92-at-be...

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/may/09/reg-grundy-obit...

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2016/05/09/media-mogul-r...

https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/31552188/reg-grundy-dies-age-92/

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The producer behind Neighbours, perhaps Australia’s most famous television export, Reg Grundy got in on the ground floor of the industry and never looked back. In 1956 when television started in Sydney and Melbourne, Grundy was a familiar voice to radio listeners in Sydney on 2SM and then 2CH, first as a sports broadcaster and then as a morning disc jockey. He was also compering an afternoon give-away quiz Wheel of Fortune. It was modelled on an American radio program on which people related their good deeds and were rewarded with a charity fetestyle prize-laden spinning wheel. Locally made television programs were very thin on the ground and when Grundy took Wheel of Fortune to Frank Packer’s TCN-9 in early 1959 a new world opened up for him. He went on to build a television production powerhouse that outlasted Australian rivals such as Crawford Productions and achieved astonishing and unique success both at home and abroad. Reginald Roy Grundy has died in his Bermuda home after a short illness. He was 92. Born in Sydney to Roy Grundy and Lillian Lees, his parents met while working in a chocolate factory. They and their only son moved to Adelaide but returned east at the start of the World War II. He worked briefly in women’s fashions at David Jones but enlisted shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in 1941. He remained in Sydney throughout the war and was discharged with the rank of sergeant. The moustache he first wore during war service stayed with him for the rest of his life. In 1947, Grundy made his first radio broadcast – giving out the cattle and pig results at the Royal Easter Show – and eventually scored a sports broadcasting job with 2SM, mainly boxing and wrestling, at Sydney Stadium: he was the first Australian to make a direct broadcast of a world title bout in 1952 when bantamweight Jimmy Carruthers beat Vic Toweel in South Africa. Grundy had become something of a celebrity around Sydney courtesy of Wheel of Fortune but Frank Packer had become bored with the show and pulled the rug from beneath him in 1960. Television was only a month old in Brisbane so Grundy went north. The big-talking southerner impressed the neophytes at QTQ Brisbane who bought his spiel lock, stock and barrel and the Reg Grundy Organisation was born. They used to say Grundy’s wealth was founded in the motel rooms of the US west coast. Throughout the 1960s, Grundy took his annual holidays in Los Angeles where he would disappear for days watching daytime quiz shows and then dash back to Sydney – to beat the Australian networks buyers – and unleash an avalanche of similar programs. ‘‘Consciously or unconsciously, I’m a plagiarist,’’ Grundy admitted in 1980. ‘‘I try to be tuned in to what will work, to make a product that will appeal to a mass audience. That’s one of the rules of the game.’’ Within six years of starting RGO he had a lock on the television game show industry, producing 22 half-hours a week. When tallied, television stations across Australia were screening 89 hours of his programs a week. Over the years the Grundy roll call included Concentration, Blind Date, The Marriage Game, The Numbers Game, I’ve Got a Secret, Blankety Blanks, Perfect Match and even an Australian Rules show for Melbourne tastes, The Big Game. In 1977, he produced ABBA: The Movie with Stig Anderson and then produced many successful television soaps and games shows. Among them: Temptation morphed into Great Temptation then Sale of the Century. His first soap opera was The Class of ’74. Aimed at the early evening teenage market, it opened the floodgates for Grundy. Later came Until Tomorrow, The Young Doctors, The Restless Years, Prisoner, Sons and Daughters, Waterloo Station and, of course, Neighbours, the show that gave the world Kylie Minogue. Neighbours is still running. Some regard it as Australia’s most powerful tourism promotion. He was the first to sell an Australian drama to the American market: Prisoner. A television station in Los Angeles owned by former cowboy film star Gene Autry bought the jail soap opera and it took off with the Middle East, Latin America, Canada and Britain buying the series. In 1987 Grundy also became the first to sell an Australian quiz show to Britain, Going for Gold. There were a few bombs – Taurus Rising (1982) and Bellamy (1980) – but they were few. Grundy’s ace was to stick to original scripts, retain the copyright of every show the company devised and not go into debt. If his early career consisted of purloining (for a price) American quiz show ideas Grundy returned the favour, starting up a US branch of Reg Grundy Productions. NBC picked up his daytime game shows, Time Machine, Sale of the Century and Scrabble. Bruce Forsyth’s Hot Streak was aired in 1986 by ABC and NBC ran Scattergories in 1993. In 1995, he sold his Australian based organisation to Pearson PLC, now Fremantle Media Company. A mogul who kept his private life rather private, Grundy married in his 20s but divorced. In the 1960s his mother and his daughter Kim lived with him as he built his empire. In 1971, he married Joy Chambers, a model/actress from Ipswich. The young Queenslander met when Grundy four years earlier when she was a panelist on the Brisbane edition of one of his quiz shows I’ve Got a Secret. She also went on to appear in Grundy’s blockbuster soap operas, The Restless Years, The Young Doctors and Neighbours. The couple moved to Bermuda in 1982. They lived with the rich and famous. Ross Perot, Michael Douglas and Robert Stigwood were neighbours. There were other homes in London, Los Angeles, and Sydney. Grundy was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1983. In 2008 he was made associate of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. He was awarded a PhD by the University of Queensland in 2004.