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I watched the final series of Byker Grove and it was as bizarre as that tweet makes it out to be. In fact if you go back to the TVF thread at the time you can find me talking about it. I remember wondering why it wasn’t more talked about given the strange transformation from drama to science fiction.

When I first learned about Byker Grove‘s final episode, I figured it must be Wikipedia vandalism. Christ knows what the audience thought at the time, though by 2006, I was 27, and my tastes had switched to more grown-up viewing, such as internet pornography. It seems to have been pretty normal right up until the very end, with the penultimate couple of shows centring on the Grove being sold off, in the classic Evil Property Developer bit, plus a story where “Hayley learns the shocking truth about her disappearing father.” Unless the shocking truth is he’s a werewolf, nothing would’ve prepared the viewers for what was to come.

There are warning signs of its cack-handed pretension from the very title of the episode, DEUS EX MACHINA, literally rendered onscreen in the **** Papyrus font from Avatar and your geocities website of Final Fantasy midis. We open on the camera moving through the Grove, past a tableaux of frozen characters, in poses typical of such Mannequin Challenge shots; hula-hooping; dropping trays of drinks (everyone always drops stuff right before they get Bullet-Timed); the air filled with a flow of spilled milkshakes, juggling clubs and paper planes caught mid-flight; all set to the music of Gollum’s Song from The Two Towers.

The Grove’s manager, Akili, walks through, seemingly untouched by time. “It’s started,” he says. “What’s started?” thinks a statue-child. “I can’t move,” another. “Of course you can’t,” adds a third, “they haven’t written anything yet.” Yes, the cast of Byker Grove, after 343 episodes of rote storylines about crushes, have suddenly hit on the horrible truth — they’re just characters in a TV show; a TV show that’s about to be cancelled because of “the people who make us do what we do,” aka the writers.

The fact they’re frozen because there’s no script suggests this is their normal, between-episode state; paused, yet fully-conscious, locked in the limbo that exists between the end credits of one episode and the start of the next. Poor PJ must have been silently screaming with paint in his eyes for days, to say nothing of the surely-agonising months-long gaps between series. And now, they’re faced with that deepest of existential human horrors; not just that nothing matters, but that nothing’s real, especially not you.

I didn't see the episode at the time, but just found this: https://franticplanet.wordpress.com/2019/07/16/great-moments-in-pop-culture-byker-grove-nukes-the-fourth-wall/

Yes I've read that before I think - definitely my the most lasting memory was the white room and the idea that the 'creators' had given them a stack of blank paper to write their own ending. That article says that this only happened in the final two episodes - could have sworn it was longer than that but obviously not.

I also remember I was half expecting Ant and Dec to make a cameo but they didn't. Then I wasn't expecting anything in the last Grange Hill and Todd Carty turned up. Though it does remind me that Grange Hill got a bit lighter in its final series too, bringing back the 'Chicken Man' theme, which I guess was all part of how CBBC at the time was targeting a younger audience, with BBC Switch catering for teens.

Don't BP usually take the summer off?

Richard Marson says in the 50th book that in 2004 when the show went 5 days a week (on CBBC channel at least) one thing they negotiated as part of it was to bring the summer break back again. (5 days a week of course only lasted about 18 months but the summer break remained as the budget kept being cut).