WEDNESDAY 6th APRIL AT 8PM ON ABC

Tonight, Julia Zemiro travels to Queensland to meet the Queen of Australian Television Kerri-Anne Kennerley.

This episode was originally scheduled to air in March, but was rescheduled after Kennerley’s husband John suffered a head injury.

Kerri-Anne Kennerley has spent 50 years on Australian television screens. She meets Julia back where it all began - in the Brisbane coastal suburb of Sandgate. But the house in which she grew up, built by her father’s own hands, no longer stands.

Kerri-Anne describes a typical Queensland childhood, one of four children in a close-knit family, and of how she was the ‘annoying’ youngest sibling who always wanted to tag along with her brothers and sister.

She reveals that she wanted to be in show business for as long as she can remember. Before the family had one of their own, she used to walk over the hill in her pyjamas to watch television through the electronics shop window, all the while dreaming of being on the tele herself.

Kerri-Anne and Julia then jump into a 1970s Valiant Charger to drive to a seemingly unchanged Sandgate State School.

And next, it’s on to Sandgate Town Hall to meet her sister Jan, where Kerri-Anne complains of the injustice of being made to wear hand-me-down fancy dress costumes while their mother created a prize-winning masterpiece for Jan.

The town hall was also the first place Kerri-Anne ever performed in public, recreating routines by her favourite comedians, and miming to ‘My Boomerang Won’t Come Back’ with her school friends. They end the day at Channel 9 studios, where at the age 13, Kerri-Anne pestered her way to a television debut. She tells Julia about the highs and lows, from battling chauvinism to her long reign as daytime queen.