Young Talent Time

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Young Talent Time was an Australian television variety program screened on Network Ten. It ran from 1971 until 1989 - for a total of 18 years. The series featured a core group of young performers - vaguely in the vein of The Mickey Mouse Club, and a weekly junior talent quest. The Young Talent Team regularly performed popular classics along with the top hit songs of the day. The program was the creation of host Johnny Young, and over the years, it gave many young performers their first taste of fame.

Some Young Talent Timer members have chosen not to continue their singing careers after their stint on the show was up, but many went on to have successful adult careers in show business as either actors or performers. Members of the Young Talent Team who found continued success after leaving the series include Tina Arena, Jamie Redfern, Dannii Minogue, and Debra Byrne.

Because the series ran for such a long time and featured young performers, Young Talent Time made an indelible mark on the psyche of several generations of Australian children, leading them to believe that if they tried hard enough, they too could be a 'star' like the kids they saw on television^{[citation needed]}.

One memorable aspect of the show was the regular closing number, where Johnny Young would sing the Beatles' song All My Lovin' (with which he had an Australian hit in the 1960s), accompanied by the entire cast, in an almost lullaby style, individually wishing all of the cast good night.

Late in the show's run, Young Talent Time launched an American based show, "New Generation", produced in Australia starring certain members of the Young Talent Team with a new American host named Michael Young. It was screened twice weekly in the US. Europe and Canada.

In its final years Young Talent Time struggled for ratings, and the decision by rival Nine Network to run the popular variety show Hey Hey It's Saturday against YTT proved fatal to the ratings, and the show was abruptly cancelled in January, 1989.

The cancellation of the show was a shock to the cast, crew and fans. Johnny Young had invested a large amount of money in building a studio complex in the hope of producing the show himself and selling it back to Network Ten^{[citation needed]}. The cancellation ended these dreams, and he was forced to sell his family home to settle debts. Young's stepfather and mother passed away soon after, and Young's marriage to wife Cathy dissolved. In 1993 his friend Terry Higgins, a former Young Talent Time director, was diagnosed as being HIV positive. Young accompanied Higgins to a Filipino clinic which offered the so called 'Ozone Therapy'^{[citation needed]}. The clinic turned out to be an illegal operation, and Young was arrested by police, forced to undergo a HIV test and threatened with deportation^{[citation needed]}. The tragic death of former cast member Juanita Coco in 1993 was another devestating event. Coco, aged 17, was a passenger in a vehicle involved in an alcohol-related accident.

Young Talent Time was filmed mainly at the studios of ATV-10 in Nunawading, Melbourne although the occasional show was filmed at TEN-10 in Sydney. Many of the episodes from the early-mid 1970s no longer exist as the tapes were wiped for re-use, being the official Network Ten policy at the time. Later episodes from the series were repeated by pay TV broadcaster Foxtel in the late 1990s.

A Young Talent Time reunion was held in 2001, in which many of the cast including Young were reunited in a television special.

In 2003, three performers associated with Young Talent Time were simultaneously in the United States Billboard Magazine Dance Top 10 – series regulars, Tina Arena with "Never (Past Tense)" and Dannii Minogue with "I Begin to Wonder", along with Kylie Minogue, who had made her television singing debut on Young Talent Time, singing with her sister Dannii.