Packer's gamble finally takes his dynasty off the air, by Doug Conway - The Canberra Times - 28th October 2008

Any seismological activity in the Hunter Valley this week should be dismissed as Kerry Packer turning in his grave.

The Big Feller lived and breathed Channel Nine.

His father bought it, and his son has sold it.

It was Kerry, in the three decades in between, who made it what it was.

Packer and Nine were synonymous from the earliest days of television, but not any more after James Packer ended the family's half-century association with the network.

By pulling the plug on PBL media, James Packer has also ended a media dynasty stretching back to his great grandfather, Robert Clyde Packer, a newspaperman involved in founding Smith's Weekly in 1919 and the Daily Guardian in 1929.

His son, Sir Frank Packer, another newspaper buccaneer, established The Australian Women's Weekly and later The Daily Telegraph before setting up TCN-9, Australia's first TV station, which began transmitting in 1956. His son, Kerry Packer, took over the empire on Sir Frank's death in 1974.

Nine was a jewel in the crown of the $7billion empire Kerry bequeathed to James on his death in 2005.

But James was quick to sell off media assets to make a business out of what, for his father, had been a pleasure gambling.

Kerry Packer had turned Nine into Australia's top-rating network as he turned himself into the nation's richest man. Nine was The One, and so was he.

Kerry Packer himself once sold Nine, in 1987, but only because a swaggering Alan Bond made him an offer simply too good to refuse $1.05billion.

Three years later he bought his own network back from a near-bankrupt Bond for less than one-third of what he had sold it for.

Packer pocketed over $700million and remarked, with an endearing mixture of elation and sadness, ''You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime.''

Packer had Bond's cheque framed and hung it on the toilet wall at his Sydney office.

It was Nine, and specifically its wish to televise cricket, that turned Kerry Packer into an international name.

Frustrated by officialdom, Packer decided to provide his own bat and ball, sign up 50 of the world's best players and televise his own matches on his own network.

His World Series Cricket revolutionised the game in the 1970s, and the way Nine covered it revolutionised sport on the box.

Many of today's cricket millionaires have Kerry Packer to thank.

Coloured clothing and day-night matches were Packer innovations: they made one-day cricket the game it is, leading to its even shorter and richer version of Twenty20.

When Packer died, Cricket Australia ranked him alongside Sir Donald Bradman as ''one of the giants who have influenced the shape of Australian cricket''.

None of it would have happened without television.

Channel Nine formed the centrepiece of the Packer dynasty, but the tool could also be a toy.

Television folklore recounts how Sir Frank Packer once regaled guests at a soiree by phoning his station and ordering executives to interrupt programming and re-run footage of one of his horses winning earlier that day at Randwick.

When Kerry made a similar hands-on intervention, few were left laughing.

He prided himself on knowing what viewers wanted to watch, and once rang up Sydney's TCN-9 to order Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos, hosted by Doug Mulray, off the air. After inheriting the family business empire, James Packer took less than a year to announce an audacious $4.5billion deal to sell PBL media assets, including half the the Nine network and its ACP magazine stable.

It marked a shift in emphasis from the ''old media'' of TV and print to the new fields of internet and gaming. James Packer's net worth is now less than half what it was a year ago. AAP

(Credit: The Canberra Times)

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