Working for Simon Townsend

What the boss was really like, from the people who made the show.

Simon Townsend did not think of himself as a boss. He thought of himself as a journalist who happened to have a studio, a crew, and a bloodhound. The people who worked for him remember it a little differently. They remember a man who knew exactly what he wanted, who could have a memo under your nose before you had your coat off, and who handed a surprising number of them the best job of their lives. When he died in January 2025, a lot of them said so out loud, on the record. This is what they said.

Simon Townsend at his typewriter, 1970 — Simon Townsend at his typewriter in 1970, nine years before Wonder World went to air. He always saw himself as a journalist first.

The boss

"Possibly the greatest job I've ever had"

Angela Catterns was one of Wonder World's first reporters, and in those early days part of her job was picking up Woodrow. Decades later, talking to ABC Radio Sydney after Townsend died, she did not reach for anything diplomatic. "He was delightful of course, but he really knew what he wanted, he wasn't about to compromise and he was actually a lovely boss," she said. "It was possibly the greatest job I've ever had in my life."

She also remembered where he was willing to take a children's show. "I remember doing stories with young people about the death of a parent, and I did a story with two young women who had cerebral palsy," she said. "There were a lot of beautiful issues that mainstream TV wasn't really serving up to young Australians at that time."

Angela Catterns's profile ABC News tribute

The Wonder World team at a Christmas party, among tinsel and champagne — The Wonder World team at a Christmas party. Many of them call it the best job they ever had, and the alumni have stayed close for forty years. From the reunion archive, supplied by Angie Vaughan.

What he asked of everyone

The rule

Never talk down to children

If there was one law on Wonder World, this was it. His family put it plainly in the statement they released when he died: the edict to everyone making the show was that they never talk down to children. He fought anyone on the team who forgot it. Kids got the real story, told straight, or they got Simon in a mood. Most people chose the real story.

From his family's statement, January 2025

The break

The groundbreaking force

Amanda Keller was a researcher on the show before she was Amanda Keller. When Townsend died she wrote: "I was a researcher there, and was lucky enough to work alongside some of the most talented people of my generation. Many of my closest friends today are from those days. I'll be forever grateful to the show, and to the groundbreaking force that was Simon Townsend." A fair few careers started in that building.

Amanda Keller, in a tribute published by TV Tonight

The gamble

He took a gamble on a 19 year old

Maurice Parker went on to produce the show, but he started as a teenager nobody had heard of. "He took a gamble on a 19 year old with no television experience. For that I'm forever grateful," he wrote. "Simon was my mentor, friend, and inspiration." That was the pattern, not a one-off. Hand someone their first real job, then give them the room to get good at it.

Maurice Parker, in a tribute published by TV Tonight

The most striking gamble of the lot was a cameraman fresh out of film school named Andrew Lesnie. Wonder World was his first job. He went on to win the Academy Award for shooting The Lord of the Rings. His story has its own spot over on The People Who Made It.

The man himself

Two things everyone who worked for him brings up. The first is the memos. Typed, pointed, constant. They have their own story over on Stories From the Crew, and yes, they followed him home, taped to the bedroom doors of his own family. No one was spared.

The second is harder to label. His family called it an "unapologetic self-belief", and said it was the driving force of his whole life. It is the same self-belief that put him in jail in the late 1960s, rather than fight in a war he did not believe in, long before any of this. He brought it to work every day. You can read where it came from in his biography.

And he never lost the appetite for it. In 1984, five years and several thousand stories in, he told a reporter that people in the industry kept asking him how long the show could last. "All I know is that I'm enjoying making the program as much now as I was in 1979. It's my life," he said. That same year he signed Network Ten's longest contract to date, three years, on a show that had only ever run from one year to the next.

A 1984 farewell letter on Simon Townsend letterhead, signed 'Your adoring employer, Simon Townsend' — A 1984 farewell letter to a departing staffer, inviting her to a luncheon "after your meritorious tour of duty". He signed it "Your adoring employer". The memos had a softer side.

The last word

Loud, passionate and full of laughs

When he died, on 14 January 2025, his family said he spent his final days "surrounded by his family and a mix of journalists, writers, actors, political activists and Italians", and that "the conversation to the last was loud, passionate and full of laughs". Anyone who ever sat in a Wonder World production meeting would recognise the scene. He ran a newsroom the same way he left the world. Talking, arguing, laughing, and absolutely certain that the world really is wonderful.

More on the show: how it all came together on How Wonder World Was Made, the credit roll on The People Who Made It, the reporters who fronted it on the reporters page, and the crew's own behind-the-scenes memories on Stories From the Crew.

Sources

Quotes are reproduced from the public tributes and interviews linked above, in the words of the people who gave them.

← Back to the Wonder World hub