Holby City

Like EastEnders, Holby is part of the Elstree battery farm of over produced output with 52 episodes per year of soapy plots.

Obviously it works out cheaper for the Beeb to have the show produced throughout the year, yet the quality of the show in my view has dropped since it launched.

And people wonder why Scotland Dumps it all over the place. At least Casualty is not that bad, with around 43 planed for this year.

I like Holby City. There, I said it.

(especially the way that whenever anyone calls for Raf, it sounds like there's a little dog on the ward)

According to Wikapedia, Holby City costs £370,000 per episode, is there any truth to this whatsoever?

Incidentally on tonight's Holby, there was a scene mentioning Jeremy Hunt and the junior doctor's strike. Is this similar to EastEnders where they can film a scene close to tx?

Sounds a bit low to me.

Right ball park. These are about 5 years old and for indies but give you a guide to the cost of producing shows in the various genres : http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/site/tariff_prices_for_independents.pdf

370k sounds a bit low these days for an hourly drama for peak-time. But they may achieve significant economies because of the high volumes produced, using the same locations and sets, and with long-running post-production deals etc.

Holby though will rely on prosthetics, and machine operators (to get those operations looking realistic, as well as making the machines beep when they are supposed to. Plus they use a single camera setup, so a saving on camera operators, but more time taken to re-do scenes from other angles.

Are you alright?

£19.2million sounds reasonable to me. Very little new set costs in that, some occasional location shoots, otherwise a regular cast and some guests, that sounds about right. This is why soap operas and telenovelas are popular amongst broadcasters, cos they can produce many episodes, for a relatively small per episode cost.

Exactly, and a year of Holby costs less than The Night Manager did.

These are the most recent published figures I can find, but I wouldn't imagine there has been much change.