Originally Posted by Steve Williams:
“That's right, this is in Will Wyatt's book, they ended up £38 million short, partly due to a cock-up where they added twenty million quid of the BBC1 budget on education resources but they forgot to take it out of the resources budget so it was down twice. I remember one of the results of this economy drive was that 100%, the youth show with Trevor and Simon, had its second series cancelled at the last minute.
Summer 1993 was dreadful, they were repeating The House of Eliot on Saturday nights and apparently it was getting under two million viewers (it says in Fuzzy Monsters, although I question whether anything could go that low in 1993). It was good for me though because I remember the Beeb repeating a load of alternative comedy shows that summer, like Fry and Laurie and the first series of Alas Smith and Jones from ten years before, and it was only a few years after I'd been allowed to stay up late so most of them were new to me.
Only one of the Who repeats was in black and white, because the colour version of the episode had been wiped, But I remember in the first issue of SFX (the only issue I ever bought) in 1995, they did a feature about all that had happened to Doctor Who since it ended in 1989, and the chances of it coming back, and the 1993 repeats were apparently of pivotal importance, I remember them saying "Good news - Alan Yentob moves from BBC2 to BBC1 and so do the Who repeats!" in the assumption he was a fan.
In Will Wyatt's book (I'll quote the whole of this book in due course), it points out that Westbeach was actually the other soap that was being considered with Eldorado, and initially they all preferred Westbeach, before the pedigree of Eldorado and the ability to flog it abroad convinced them otherwise. But as you say, Westbeach eventually resurfaced as a conventional hour-long drama.
Seaforth is also in the book, they had high hopes for it and Alan Yentob really liked it, he watched the first episode and told everyone it was going to be a smash hit, but it didn't rate so well and was too expensive so it was finally axed. That Independent story was on the front page and Wyatt says it comes to something when the decision not to recommission a drama series becomes front page news. I remember the Radio Times doing a piece around th time speculating about whether it would return and discussing which dramas had and hadn't been axed, I remember it announced Grushko was never coming back (surely the archetypal miserable BBC1 early nineties drama, a police series set in Russia).
Not helped by it being flung from pillar to post during Euro 96, a mistake they repeated two years ater with Berkeley Square, the nanny drama that was shoved all over the place, 8pm one week, 10pm the next, on a Saturday one week, proving it was just ridiculous to schedule a twelve-part serial during a World Cup.
I used to watch quite a lot of Specials because it was before Points of View. I remember the credit every week in Radio Times rather portentiously stating "Created, Written, Produced and Directed by Brian Degas and Harry Robertson". Perhaps if someone else had been involved, it might not have been so rubbish. I doubt the Beeb thought much of it though as it was flung out on Wednesdays at eight, their worst slot on their worst night, and when they showed football one week it was dumped at 10.30.
All old, that, wasn't it?”
I wish the BARB data went back as far as 1990 so we could see how the channels preformed in this era...would be interesting for ratings fans!
