The concept, regular cast and crew were mainly recycled from the IMT days, with Brian Rangott leading the GTV band for live musical performances.
On the show of 3 March 1975 (his first seen in colour), Kennedy imitated a crow, saying "faaaaaaark", during a live read of a Cedel hairspray advertisement by announcer Rosemary Margan.
[5] In 2002, in The Age newspaper, media writer Jonathan Green reported that the crow call segment was in fact pretaped and that the controversy was probably just a pretext for other issues.
[8] In the first commercial break, Kennedy addressed the opening comments off-air with the studio audience, wondering if the network would cut the remarks, and stating that if they did, he would repeat them live on the ABC current affairs program This Day Tonight.
In the wake of the controversial McLean Report, the Whitlam government was taking major steps to open up the radio spectrum with the introduction of community broadcasting and the ABC's new rock station, 2JJ, but it had done nothing to address the low levels of local content on Australian TV.
The problem was compounded by the Whitlam government's far-reaching 1973 decision to reduce tariffs across the board by 25% in the first move towards today's highly successful "free trade" policies.
It has also been suggested that, with a federal election looming, Nine used the crow call incident as a pretext to remove the politically vocal Kennedy, who was known to support the ALP.
[10] During Kennedy's 60th birthday special, Ray Martin visited the GTV-9 videotape archive shelves and purportedly held up the cassette case of the offending crow-call program.