Reg Grundy, the titan of Australian television By Michael Idato Reg Grundy, left, and some of his successes, Scott and Charlene's wedding on Neighbours, Prisoner, and Wheel of Fortune.
Reg Grundy's name is synonymous with Australian television for one very good reason: without his pioneering brilliance, and his powerful understanding of what television viewers wanted to watch, television as we know it would almost certainly have not come about.
Although his company's logo - a tumbling icosahedron - has not been seen on television for a long time, the fabric of his work still echoes through Australia's television schedule, decades after he helped lay down the building blocks of the business. 
In the 1950s, Grundy began to build a business built on game shows, beginning with the the most famous one of them, Wheel of Fortune, which he produced and presented, first on radio, later on television.
In the ensuing decades he founded an empire with the game shows Blankety Blanks, Sale of the Century, The Price is Right and Family Feud, and later the Australian dramas Neighbours, Sons and Daughters, The Restless Years, The Young Doctors and Prisoner.
It is a testament to Grundy's vision that two of those - Family Feud and Neighbours - are still on Australian TV screens; three, in fact, if you include the Foxtel remake of Prisoner, Wentworth.It is also telling that two of them - Family Feud and Wentworth - won television awards on the eve of his passing.
Grundy's vision for Australian ideas was global. And local. It was born at a time when local TV screens were packed with imported programming - American westerns, comedies and variety shows, mostly - and when there was little momentum to develop local content.
And Grundy's company, under his guiding hand, broke barriers by selling not just program tape, but ideas as well. Notably, he steered foreign- language versions of the iconic dramas Sons and Daughters, The Restless Years and Prisoner, pushing back against the idea that Australia's natural place in the television food chain was only to import formats from bigger countries. Many of those remakes, including Sweden's Sons and Daughters adaptation Skilda Vrldar and the Dutch remake of The Restless Years, Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden, became huge hits that would long outlast the originals.
And yet Grundy's greatest success was not in knowing how to navigate the boardrooms of the world's biggest broadcasters, although that environment would prove to be a native habitat for him, but in understanding the little guy, and what he (or she) wanted to watch.
Some of Grundy's greatest successes - such as Prisoner - would prove to be jewels in the crown. Its foreign versions, such as Germany's Hinter Gittern, were hits.
And a remake, Wentworth, has gone on to become Australian cable TV's most successful drama. While others, such as the medical drama The Young Doctors, became infamous for never winning an award. Grundy, curiously but perhaps unsurprisingly, was unaffected.
He loved all his children equally. More meaningfully, at a time when television offered only male action heroes, Grundy's programs gave birth to Australia's strongest women: Sons and Daughters' Pat the Rat, Prisoner's Joan Ferguson and The Young Doctors' Grace Scott were uncompromising, unyielding superwomen.The actress Colette Mann, who starred in the Grundy's drama Prisoner, and now stars in another Grundy original series, Neighbours, paid tribute to the veteran executive's courage in creating strong television roles for women.
"He really was the man who changed roles for women in television in the late 1970s," Mann said.
"He gave the green light to Prisoner and to the beginnings of so many careers."
The chief executive of Fremantle Media Ian Hogg described Grundy as a national treasure.
"[Reg's] legacy to Australian entertainment is insurmountable," Mr Hogg said. "His visionary ability to know how to connect Australian families through some of this country's most loved programming has stood the test of time.
Ten Network executive Rick Maier, who worked as a script editor and writer on Grundy dramas such as The Young Doctors, The Restless Years, Neighbours and Prisoner, said Australian television owed everything to pioneers such as Grundy, and his contemporary Hector Crawford.
"When Australian voices and faces were still to be heard on our screens, Reg brought us home-grown game shows and serials," Maier said.
His company was long ago absorbed into the larger Fremantle Media Australia, responsible for a slate of programs including The X Factor Australia, Family Feud, Neighbours and Wentworth.