Bert Newton, an instant hit who became Australia’s most enduring TV personality, dies aged 83

Once the youngest radio announcer in Melbourne, Bert Newton evolved to become the most enduring media personality in the country. His prolific, multifaceted career across radio, television, stage and screen spanned more than six decades and intersected generational divides. Bob Hope once described him as “the Bob Hope of Australia”.

Newton, who has died aged 83 while undergoing palliative care in Melbourne after several years of poor health, led Australia through the early days of television on a diet of frothy, vaudevillian entertainment. Few over the age of 40 would fail to recognise his distinctive round face, broad toothy grin and immaculately groomed hair, usually atop a tuxedo – he went through 40 dinner suits in 18 years – hosting the Logie awards or razzing floor manager Belvedere on his long-running lifestyle show Good Morning Australia. For much of his career Newton nimbly shared the talkshow limelight, either as the “second banana” to Graham Kennedy or as “barrel boy” to Don Lane, who nicknamed him Moonface.

Newton has hosted more Logie awards nights – 19 – than anyone else, a feat made possible by the ease with which he could ad lib and perform for three hours of live, unscripted television. In his 2014 biography Bert, Graeme Blundell described Newton as “a jester in a well-cut dinner suit”, and his hosting of the awards as “something remarkable” that came to be admired by television’s inner circle. One later host, Wendy Harmer, compared the experience to “chainsawing off an arm”.

Albert Watson Newton was born on 23 July 1938 in the Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy, the youngest of six children of Joseph (Joe) and Gladys. Joe, who had returned from the second world war with malaria, was often ill and died when Bert was 11. Despite poverty, Bert had a happy childhood with his widowed mother and grew up enjoying the news, stories, music and a sense of community their Bakelite wireless set brought into the home. By the time he was seven, Bert had set his heart on a career in radio, and began writing radio plays while attending St Joseph’s Marist Brothers college.

An opportunity through the Boy Scouts to become a junior announcer led to Newton’s first job in radio as a 15-year-old, with 3XY, making him the youngest announcer in Melbourne radio history.

But by 1957 Australians could not get enough of television, and 19-year-old Newton could see the writing on the wall. Kennedy was already hosting an evening program on Channel Nine. Newton had secured a job with Channel Seven as a booth announcer but it was not until his mother woke him one morning, wielding a copy of the Sun, that he learned he would be compering The Late Show, starting that night, and in direct competition with Kennedy.

View image in fullscreen

“She’d read it in the newspaper; they’d forgotten to tell me,” he told Blundell. “So I learned early in the piece that things can change very quickly in television and that it was going to be a very interesting and enjoyable ride.”

Newton was an instant hit, especially with women, who phoned his home up to 40 times a day, asking his mother what colour his eyes were and what car he drove.

After being wooed to Nine in 1959, ostensibly to host a daytime program, Newton found himself playing a double act with Kennedy on In Melbourne Tonight, giving audiences live television as they had never seen. The pair riffed off each other, unscripted and unrehearsed, chaos and laughter ensuing, Newton playing it straight to Kennedy’s more vicious comedy. While not every show was as successful as the first, the pair became stars, launching a lifelong personal and professional partnership that ended only with Kennedy’s death in 2005.

With stardom came media scrutiny and, as the handsome bachelor, Newton was often under the microscope for the array of women in his life. In 1962 he became engaged to the TV personality Susan-Gaye Anderson but it was called off after two weeks. The frenzied pace of being one half of a superstar team was playing havoc with Newton’s life and in 1964 he was admitted to a psychiatric unit where he was treated with experimental LSD, later saying it was “the most ghastly experience of my life”. The breakdown prompted him to resign from Nine and, when he eventually returned, it was to start from scratch.

“Before my illness, I’d had this instinctive feeling that there was only one me ever and that I could never be replaced,” he said. “But I learned that, as long as the show goes on, new people are found. The king is dead, long live the king.”

Newton did eventually marry and move out of home at 36. He had met the singer and dancer Patti McGrath when they were both children in radio and their 1974 wedding in Melbourne, with Kennedy as best man, was mobbed by thousands of fans.

With audiences eager for fresh varieties of entertainment during the turbulent 1960s, Newton found a niche hosting expansive, glittering, special-occasion TV productions for Nine. What began with beauty pageants and beach girl quests turned into a prolific association with the Logie awards, which saw him shoot the breeze with a bevy of bemused international stars including Muhammad Ali, Rock Hudson, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett and John Wayne. While Newton won four Gold Logies over his career and was inaugurated into the Hall of Fame, the Logies also signalled the end of his era. In 2018 and amid the #MeToo movement, Newton was vilified for inappropriate on-air comments about Kennedy and Lane and for referring to himself using a gay slur.

For a time in television history, it seemed Newton was everywhere. In addition to TV quiz and variety shows, he launched several eponymous talkshows and spent eight years working alongside Lane. He also appeared on stage in various productions, including three years with the musical Wicked. He featured in four films, wrote an autobiography and recorded several singles, as well as The Bert and Patti Family Album in 1977. In 1979, Newton was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire and, in 2006, a Member of the Order of Australia.

“He hasn’t ‘just survived’; he’s remained creative when many people his junior haven’t,” Andrew Denton said in a 2004 interview. “Bert doesn’t play it safe. He is defined by the vaudeville tradition. It’s their ‘bushido’ – their warrior code. They perform no matter what.”

Newton is survived by his wife, Patti, his children, Matthew and Lauren, and six grandchildren.