Funky Road had the same producer, Bernie Cannon, in addition to Stephen MacLean and Albie Thoms. GTK and its successor Funky Road co-existed with the weekly show Countdown for a brief period. GTK ran until 1975, after which it was superseded by Funky Road.
Birch produced and directed GTK until the end of 1970, when he moved to the US and then to the UK, from where he conducted interviews and sent the filmed material back to GTK in Australia. GTK premiered on 4 August 1969 and was an immediate success on the network, achieving higher ratings than Bellbird within three weeks, and Watts quickly authorised the show to continue running throughout the following year. Writer Stephen MacLean, who also worked at the surf/music magazine Go-Set, worked on the show. He was given the go-ahead to start production and continue until the end of November, when the network went into summer break programming. Ric Birch, aged 24, the ABC-TV network's youngest ever television director, devised a program that would attract teenage viewers, and in less than six weeks, made four pilot shows. Watts needed to come up with a program only ten minutes long that would run Monday to Thursday before Bellbird. Watts understood that if ABC TV started a program at 6:30 pm, viewers would have an alternative to watching the commercial news broadcasts and it would of course lead them to watch Bellbird, then ABC news and This Day Tonight. Bellbird finished at 6:55 pm and across Australia, each state would then insert local news into the schedule until 7:00 pm when the ABC's iconic national news started, followed by the extremely popular current affairs show, This Day Tonight. ABC TV had been running an American sitcom across the 6:30 pm to 6:40 pm timeslot, after which Bellbird, a very popular soap opera about an Australian country town, began. Because ABC-TV was non-commercial, 30-minute American programs only ran 24'30" without ad breaks, which created a programming problem at 6:30 pm when the commercial networks started their news broadcasts. Ken Watts, the ABC Director of Television, had a problem at 6:30 pm. Officially, it was said that GTK was created by the ABC to address the perception that the Australian youth audience was being poorly served by commercial radio and TV, and that international music and especially Australian popular music was being ignored by commercial TV and radio at that time.
The series title was an initialism of the phrase "Get To Know".
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