Couch Potato was an Australian children's television show broadcast on
ABC TV in
Australia and a staple of
Classic ABC.
Airing on Sunday mornings, it was a "wrapper" show linking three or four animated or live action shows aimed at older pre-teen and young teenage audiences.
The show debuted on 17 March 1991 and ended on 24 June 2001.
Originally intended to be an educational program for children,
Grant Piro was asked to host by an Adelaide producer of the
ABC. Ten episodes were initially filmed, based on science experiments in conjunction with the education department at the ABC.
According to
Grant Piro, "a producer and I decided to hijack the program. We said, 'how about we try and make it a bit more anarchic?’ We decided to break some of the ABC's rules and see how much we could get away with and we ended up breaking a lot of rules over the next six years. Couch Potato stopped being educational and became more about comic sketches and I think that's where the appeal took off[1]”.
In February 2005, Couch Potato had a spiritual successor in a similar show called Rollercoaster which aired on weekday afternoons and Sunday mornings until 30 January 2010.