The Seekers' Earliest Surviving TV Spot, Unseen for 60 Years, Is Online
Sixty years off air, eight minutes back on screen. The earliest surviving television appearance by The Seekers has been found, digitised and put online.
The black-and-white footage shows Judith Durham, Keith Potger, Bruce Woodley and Athol Guy lip-syncing to "A Closer Walk with Thee" and "Myra". It aired on 23 March 1964 on GTV as part of In Melbourne Tonight, the live variety show hosted by Graham Kennedy, and had not been broadcast since, according to the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA).
The group sent the 16mm film to Britain as a promotional reel for The Grade Organisation, the U.K. talent agency. That reel is what survived. Guitarist and vocalist Potger later donated it to the NFSA to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the launch of television in Australia, and the archive has now catalogued and shared it as NFSA ID 1844668, National Film and Sound Archive.
It is a glimpse of a band just before everything changed. In 1965, "I'll Never Find Another You" made The Seekers the first Australian act to reach No. 1 on the U.K. singles chart, the weekly ranking of best-selling singles compiled by the Official Charts Company. They returned to the top later that year with "The Carnival Is Over", Billboard reported.
The run continued in the United States. "Georgy Girl" was nominated for an Academy Award for original song and reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, the U.S. singles chart. In 1967 the group played to a crowd put at 200,000, described as still the largest concert audience in the southern hemisphere, and were named Australians of the Year. They entered the ARIA Hall of Fame, which honours Australian recording careers, in 1995.
What makes this stand out is how much work one tape did. NFSA senior curator Simon Smith described the 1964 reel as arguably kickstarting the group's international success, a reminder that a short TV slot could carry a new act across the world before streaming, playlists or social video existed.
