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| Logie Awards | |
|---|---|
| Current: Logie Awards of 2023 | |
 Gold Logie Award statuette | |
| Awarded for | Excellence in Australian television |
| Sponsored by | TV Week |
| Location | Sydney, Australia |
| Country | Australia |
| Presented by | TV Week |
| First awarded | 1959 (as The TV Week Awards) |
| Website | www |
| Television/radio coverage | |
| Network |
|
| Runtime | 3 hours+ |
The Logie Awards (officially the TV Week Logie Awards; colloquially known as The Logies) is an annual ceremony celebrating and honouring the best shows and stars in Australian television, sponsored and organised by the magazine TV Week. The event is telecast live and billed as "television's night of nights". The first ceremony was hosted in 1959 as the TV Week Awards.
The Gold Logie is the most prestigious award and the industry's highest honour; it's awarded to the Most Popular Personality on Australian Television for the previous year. The award receives much publicity and media attention. Awards are presented in 20 categories, representing both industry and public voted prizes
The event has been strongly associated with the Nine Network, who have hosted the ceremony on the most occasions, and TV and former radio personality Bert Newton, particularly in the early days, who served as a solo host of the ceremony on 17 occasions, with a constant run from 1966 until 1980 and as co-host on three other occasions. Over the years, the Logies have been hosted in Melbourne and Sydney. From 2018 to 2022, the ceremony was held on the Gold Coast before the 2023 ceremony was announced as moving to Sydney for the first time in 37 years.
History
Known from their inception as the TV Week Awards, the awards were instigated by TV Week magazine with the first voting coupons provided in the magazine in late 1958, two years after the introduction of television in Australia. The first awards were presented on 15 January 1959 on an episode of In Melbourne Tonight. Only Melbourne television personalities were nominated and awards were given in eight categories, including two for American programs.[1]
The most prestigious award in 1959 was Star of the Year presented to IMT host Graham Kennedy. The following year, Kennedy coined the name Logie Awards, to honour the Scottish engineer and innovator who contributed to the development of television as a practical medium, John Logie Baird.[2]
The Logie statuette was designed by Alec De Lacy, chief designer for Melbourne-based trophy makers KG Luke Ltd. The first Gold Logie, the equivalent of the Star of the Year Award, was presented in 1960, and again won by Graham Kennedy. The record for most "Gold Logie" wins—at five apiece—is a tie between Kennedy and Ray Martin.
The 2020 and 2021 ceremonies were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[3][4]
Logie institutions and milestones
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1960 | The ceremony, instituted the previous year as the TV Week Star Awards, now officially becomes known as "Logie Awards", in reference as an honour to TV inventor/engineer John Logie Baird, the name is chosen by entertainer Graham Kennedy, after he won what was known the previous previously year as the "Star of the Year Award", which itself would become the Gold Logie. |
| 1961 | The awards ceremony is televised for the first time, with the ABC screening the first half-hour of the awards in Sydney. |
| 1962 | Australian variety presenter, singer and actress Lorrae Desmond, later best known for her role in serial A Country Practice, becomes the first female star to win a Gold Logie, for her music variety program The Lorrae Desmond Show. |
| 1963 | The planned televised ceremony was cancelled due to the intended host, Tony Hancock cancelling a trip to Australia. |
| 1968 | There was no award for the Most Popular Female in Television. According to Bert Newton, who was hosting that year, "it appears no one was deemed worthy enough to receive it". He pleaded with the producers to never be put in that position again.[5] |
| 1973 | The media was invited for the first time to attend the Logies. |
| 1974 | Number 96 star Pat McDonald became the first "soap star" actress (not television personality) to win the Gold Logie. |
| 1975 | The Logie Awards are broadcast in colour for the first time. |
| 1976 | The first and only fictional character to win a Logie of any kind was Norman Gunston, who won the Gold Logie, with his portrayer Garry McDonald, accepting the award in character. |
| 1981 | The Logie Awards after being held in Melbourne for 20 years return to Sydney and are broadcast for the first time on Network Ten. |
| 1984 | The Hall of Fame Logie was introduced by TV Week, awarded to recognise outstanding and continued contribution to television by an individual or program with the first induction being television pioneer and producer Hector Crawford (see below, under Logie Hall of Fame). |
| 1988 | Actress and future international pop star Kylie Minogue became the youngest person to win a Gold Logie, aged 19 for her role as Charlene Robinson in soap opera Neighbours. |
| 1989 | The Seven Network screens the Logie Awards for the first time. |
| 1997 | Agro's Cartoon Connection won its seventh consecutive Logie Award for Most Popular Children's Program, ending the longest undefeated streak of the Logies of either show or person. |
| 2010 | Actor Ray Meagher became the oldest person to win an award, at age 66, for his portrayal of Alf Stewart in Home and Away. |
| 2006 | A new Logies category was introduced, named the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Outstanding Newcomer, to honour Kennedy's career and legacy and to commemorate the 50th year of continued broadcasting of television in Australia. |
| 2016 | The Logies accepted for the first time nominations from locally produced digital content. Also in 2016, presenter Waleed Aly (whose parents where born in Egypt) became the first non-Caucasian person to win the Gold Logie. |
| 2017 | TV Week announced that after 30 years, the awards ceremony will no longer be held in Melbourne, due to the withdrawal of financial support by the Victorian government. The Logie awards ceremony will be instead held at The Star Gold Coast on the Gold Coast, Queensland for four years, with support of the Queensland Government.[6][7]
The decade of the 2010s was the first decade where no one won the Gold Logie award more than once. |
| 2020 | It was announced on the 29 April that the Logie Awards scheduled for 28 June 2020, were being cancelled outright prior to any voting or nominations taking place, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ceremony was set to return on 28 November 2021, but was again cancelled on 4 September 2021. It later took place on 19 June 2022.[8] |
| 2022 | The Logie Award for Most Popular Presenter is renamed as the Bert Newton Award for Most Popular Presenter, in tribute to Bert Newton, a television personality and presenter who was a Hall of Fame inductee.[9] |
| 2023 | The first time that an Indigenous person, Mark Coles Smith, was nominated for the Gold Logie. Kween Kong from RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under, became the first drag queen nominated for a Logie. 6 of the nominees for Most Outstanding Actress are from a subscription television network.[10] |
| 2024 | The Logies announced a major overhaul for the 2024 ceremony, whilst the Gold Category and the Bert Newton Award for Most Popular Presenter and the Graham Kennedy Award for Best Newcomer will remain the same, the previous "most popular awards" will be replaced by a "best of" category, the drama and comedy award will also be separated for Best Actor and actress as well as the drama and miniseries categories will also be separate, the new format echoes that of a similar style to the United States Emmy Awards.[11] |
Logie Hall of Fame
The prestigious Logie Hall of Fame was first introduced in 1984; former conductor, turned television producer and pioneer and founder of Crawford Productions, Hector Crawford was the first inductee. The induction was a posthumous honour for TV cameraman Neil Davis, actor Maurie Fields, conservationist Steve Irwin, news anchor Brian Naylor, journalist Peter Harvey and television executive Brian Walsh.
Kerri-Anne Kennerley was only the third woman to be inducted after Ruth Cracknell and Noni Hazlehurst. It has been criticised for its lack of women.[12]
TV programs
| Four Corners (1961–) |
| Neighbours (1985–2022; 2023–) |
| Play School (1966–) |
| Home and Away (1988–) |
| 60 Minutes (1979–) |
These are the only programs that have been inducted into the Hall of Fame.[13]
Nomination and voting procedures
Public voting
Voting for the Most Popular Logie categories is done using an online form, or by SMS (short message service) voting for the final nominees. Ten of the Logie Award categories are fan awards. In the past, the "Most Popular" Logies categories were voted by the readers of TV Week magazine using a coupon.
SMS (short message service) voting was introduced in 2006 for the Gold Logie. In 2008, Internet votes could be cast for the first time without having to buy a copy of the TV Week magazine.[14]
Before 2018, public voting usually lasted for four weeks, beginning in December or January, while the ceremony itself was in late April or early May. Since 2018, voting begins in March and the ceremony is held in July.
Industry voting
The Most Outstanding categories are voted on by a jury comprising members of the Australian TV industry peers. There were 15 categories in the industry awards at the Logie Awards of 2018.
Eligibility
To be eligible to receive a Logie, a program must be Australian produced, set in Australia and have a predominantly Australian cast. Although in other years there has been a Logie for overseas programs, these awards are no longer part of the awards. People eligible for a Logie must have appeared on an Australian-produced show that was broadcast on Australian television in the previous year.
There are long-held suspicions that network publicists engage in mass voting to rig the results. However, no hard evidence had emerged for this, other than the experiment by the satirical newspaper The Chaser, who attempted to have low-profile SBS newsreader Anton Enus nominated for the Gold Logie. They did so by getting their small readership to buy copies of TV Week and vote for Enus for the award. While the attempt failed (they came "reasonably close", to earning a nomination for Enus, according to a "TV Week Insider"), their failure gives some cause for the widespread derision in the industry (particularly the 'quality' end) towards the popular-vote awards.[15]
Community television, Channel 31, personalities and shows are eligible for nomination for Logies, however since their audiences are far smaller than those of the commercial channels and public broadcasters, they are at a tremendous disadvantage. For a time they had their own community television awards, known as the Antenna Awards. Despite this, in 2009 the Logies were dogged by minor controversy after organisers refused to allow an acclaimed community television show, The Bazura Project, to be nominated in the category of Outstanding Comedy Show, stating "As TV Week does not cover community television within the magazine, we are unable to consider individual programs on this platform." The ABC's Media Watch program first reported the story on Monday 9 March 2009,[16] with many media outlets covering the growing support for the community television program since.
Logies ceremonies by year
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