ABBA Bang A  Boomerang

ABC TV Australia 8.30pm Wednesday 30 January 2013 ABBA: Bang a Boomerang tells the inside story of Australia's colossal 70s  crush on the Swedish supergroup ABBA and their music, and how this  unequalled and enduring fan-worship changed them and us forever.  ABC's innovative music program Countdown and its host Molly Meldrum  were instrumental in bringing ABBA to a burgeoning mid-70s television  audience looking for something different. It was due to Countdown that  Mamma Mia was released as a single, first in Australia and then the world,  and the ABBA phenomenon was born. Viewers were going into record  shops wanting to buy the single. Molly rang RCA records asking about the  release of Mamma Mia and was told there were no plans to do so.  "We then played it again in defiance and they had no option but to release  it... it was lucky, it went to number one," Meldrum said.  ABBA: Bang a Boomerang digs deep into heartfelt memories, cardboard  cartons of memorabilia, face-to-face encounters, local pop icon recounts,  lavish personal and public ABBA museums and Australia's rich media  archives to relive a moment of collective national 'craziness', when we did  literally go ABBA mad. The result is a warm, bright, captivating engagement  with ABBA's time Down Under that will remind us all of the band's impact  and how our open-hearted embrace of all things ABBA would eventually  define us. One in three Australian households owned an ABBA record -  from Prime Minister Fraser to eight year olds around the nation, we were  hooked even if some of us didn't want to admit it back then and we didn't  realise the crush would be for keeps.