Bellbird

Launched in 1967 and running for a decade, Bellbird was Australia's first successful soap opera. Depicting the lives of simple country folk in a fictional town, the show only actually screened for fifteen minutes per episode as lead-in to the 7p.m. evening news and then only from Monday to Thursday. Featuring characters like farmer Joe Turner (Terry Norris) and his wife Olive (Moira Charleton), real estate agent Charlie Cousens (Robin Ramsay), local policeman Constable Des Davies (Dennis Miller) and his wife Fiona (Gerda Nicolson), the show also had the requisite bad guy in cattle station agent John Quinney (Maurie Fields). Reportedly, when one of the characters slipped and fell to his death off a wheat silo, TV Times received more letters from viewers in a month than they had for the previous 21 years of publication. And for the lads, hottie Judith Morris went on to drop her duds in the films In Search of Anna and Maybe This Time.