Go!! first went to air on 4 August 1964, four days after ATV-0 Melbourne (now Channel Ten) began transmission, and helped launch the 0-10 Network on its journey targeting a younger viewing audience.
Go!! began life as a weekly show on Mondays at 7:00 pm with the timeslot soon changing to 6:00 pm Saturdays.
The original host was Englishman Alan Field who travelled to Australia with The Beatles tour and stayed on to launch ATV-0’s pop show (which was based on the English show Ready Steady Go!), soon making way for Ian Turpie.
The resident band on Go!! was The Strangers, and their guitarist John Farrar would go on to write a string of million-selling hits for an artist featured regularly on the show, Olivia Newton-John, including tracks from Grease(1978) and Xanadu(1980).
One of Australia’s biggest music stars, Billy Thorpe, caused a furore when he announced on Go!! during a discussion about drugs that he intended to take LSD and relate his experience on a future show. Concerned ATV-0 viewers rang the station, as did the police drug squad and the state health department.
Go!! host Ian Turpie went on to become the king of daytime TV game shows (and housewives heartthrob) in Australia, while Johnny Young (who replaced Turpie in 1966) went on to the hugely successful Young Talent Time in the 70s and 80s.
Most of the episodes of Go!! were subsequently destroyed when the Channel 0 archive ran out of storage space, although numerous fragments and several entire shows have survived. The exact amount of remaining footage is uncertain, but at least seven episodes from late 1966 are known to have survived in their entirety.
