Graham Kennedy height - How tall is Graham Kennedy?

He was awarded the A.O. (Officer of the Order of Australia) in the 2006 Queen's New Years Honours List for his services to the entertainment industry as an actor, comedian and presenter significantly influencing the development of the radio, television and film industries in Australia, and to the community..

He was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal in the 2001 Queen's New Years Honours List for his services to the entertainment industry.

After IMT was cancelled he started making movies and then returned to TV with Blankety Blanks (1977), a truly funny game show where the cast was the star and the contestants mere bystanders. As Kennedy aged he appeared less and less on the screen and his last major appearance was as a late night newsreader on the Nine Network.

Throughout most of his life Kennedy was apolitical. He did decide to support Gough Whitlam in the 1972 federal election, because he believed Whitlam would boost funding for the arts in Australia. However this support for Labor soured over cuts to funding local content and the television industry being flooded with cheap American programming. On 16 April 1975, Kennedy criticized the Minister for the Media, Senator Doug McClelland on the Graham Kennedy Show, publicly calling for McClelland to be sacked and the portfolio to be dropped. Producers decided to edit out his speech from final broadcast and Kennedy resigned in protest. Kennedy never voted for Labor again.

With his sidekick Bert Newton and aided and abetted by a range of brillant comedians including Joff Allen and a young Patti McGrath, now Bert Newton's wife, Kennedy pioneered live sketch comedy in Australia and kept IMT alive into the 1970s with his irreverent and often close to the mark humour and his famous anti-ads, genuine "live-read" commercials that Kennedy would turn into attacks on the sponsors or the product or both.

Born in Melbourne in 1934 Graham Kennedy remains an icon in Australian TV, an accolade earned from his hosting of the long-running In Melbourne Tonight (1957) or IMT on Channel Nine.