And there goes another part of my childhood:
The veteran children’s television star Simon Townsend has died aged 79, shortly after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.
The former newspaper and television journalist launched Simon Townsend’s Wonder World! on Channel Ten in 1979 with mascot Woodrow the bloodhound. The groundbreaking show made him a household name in the 1980s, delighting young audiences with magazine-style stories which covered a wide range of topics including mental health, bullying, grief, social justice and war.
He always signed off with “and remember, the world really is wonderful”.
Wonder World ran until 1987 clocking up almost 2,000 episodes, winning five Logie awards and stellar ratings for Ten. […]
He later found himself at odds with broadcasting authorities as he pushed to produce shows that never talked down to children.
“Simon often found himself in a stoush with Australian children’s television regulators, fighting to maintain his show’s boundary-pushing ethos and preserve his children’s TV rating,” his family said.
I don’t suppose many other kids TV hosts in this country have been court-martialled, too; Townsend was famously a conscientious objector during the Vietnam bullshit long before he was on TV, and suffered accordingly. Also, he was famously a stroke survivor, though I didn’t know until today that he had his first one in 1976… so he was already a stroke survivor before Wonder World was a thing. It was quite a life, and another part of my own early life that’s gone…
