The story of how tabloid journalist Graham Cassidy’s vision for professional surfing had its first realisation with the debut of the 2SM Coca Cola Bottlers. Surfabout in Sydney in May 1974 is well known, but what is less known or documented is the story of the prime time television lifestyle series which took Surfabout to the next level and created the model for mainstream sports marketing more than four decades before Drive To Survive got the world watching Formula 1.

It’s a story that brings two wildly eccentric genii together to create magical and award-winning television moments which show that not only are surfers human after all, but they can be quite entertaining in and out of the water. The Nine Network’s six-part series ‘Surfabout’ only lasted two seasons, 1978 and ’79, but we were lucky to have even that, because it was a deal borne out of desperation.

Nearing the end of the summer of 77-78, television producer, David Hill, sat in the empty studios of TCN 9 in Sydney’s Willoughby smoking cigarettes and wondering when the axe would fall, as it surely must. After all, at the conclusion of the disastrous first season of Kerry Packer’s rebel World Series Cricket, for which he’d been hired as executive producer, an enraged Packer had sacked just about everyone associated with it, planning for a fresh start the following summer. Everyone that is, except for ‘Hilly’, the last man standing, or sitting as it were. 

Forced to stage their unofficial ‘Super Tests’ and one-day games at non-cricketing venues like the Sydney Showground and Melbourne’s VFL Park while the official Australian Cricket Board hosted a test series against India at the traditional ...