ITV's Worst Sitcoms

I vaguelly remember an ITV sitcom called Days Like These. It was the British remake of That 70's Show. It was shown in 1999 and was set in 1970's Luton. Only 10 of 13 episodes aired:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_Like_These

Mind Your Language, Came back for another series 4 years later,

I think the worse ITV comedy has to be this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBH8kCB8O80

Days Like These was so bad it's amazing they ran ten episodes. Another dire comedy, again the title escapes me although it might have been In For a Penny, was set in a public lavatory. That was around 1971 or 72.

They had huge hopes for Days Like These, so much so that there was some sort of clause in the contract that meant the original US series, That 70s Show, could never be screened on British TV so we couldn't make comparisons (one of the many faults of Brighton Belles) and they refused to show the cast any episodes. Of course, it flopped so badly that within eighteen months Channel Five screened the US version.

There was a Sam's Game reunion the other week as co-stars Ed Byrne and Tristram Gemmell both appeared on the same episode of Celebrity Mastermind. That was written by Paul Waite, whose other ITV sitcom Get Real I was thinking about the other day, because he created it with Alan Davies, who was going to co-write and star, but Alan got so sick of interference from the suits - I remember him saying they removed a joke about drugs from the script but said that if they got another series they could do a whole episode about drugs, despite Alan saying that it wasn't drugs he was interested in but just that one joke - that he quit and Waite ended up writing it on his own. Then they kept it on the shelf for ages and flung it out at 10.40 in summer 1998, and the final one ended up at 11.40.

The last episode of Babes in the Wood was never shown, it was replaced by a news special about the Diana inquest and never rescheduled. For the best, really. In Mark Lewisohn's Radio Times Comedy Guide it mentions how this went through about a million revisions* based on the views of focus groups, originally it was going to have a completely different cast - including Dani Behr - and a slightly different premise. There was also a long feature about its production, as part of a big piece on TV comedy, in the late lamented men's magazine Deluxe where they talked about how ITV had put so much effort into it, they started trailing it over a month before it started with quick teasers, which was quite novel at the time.

* The Persuasionists seems to have undergone a million revisions, there was a pilot on BBC3 about three years ago with a completely different cast and without a studio audience, and the series we've got now is totally different. And a lot of use those changes were, eh?

High Stakes (with Richard Wilson???..no me neither) - a whole second series was filmed and never aired - it went straight to DVD release - six years after it was meant to air.

There's an interesting article about it from the warm up man from the recordings, seems that was a lot of fiddling aboutafter the recordings too: http://www.chortle.co.uk/correspondents/2010/01/15/10343/how_the_bbcs_brutal_edits_are_ruining_comedy
It should certainly be much better given who's involved

my dead dad

some guy can't go anywhere without the ghost of his dead dad following him about and causing all sorts of problems

tea for two was about orphaned siblings being raised by their grandparents, or was that a BBC one

My dead dad was actually an STV production for channel 4. Aired in the 1990s, so really is a channel 4 show.

That was a BBC one, called Next Of Kin, with Penelope Keith. 1995-6, says IMDB.

(God, I'd forgotten it was so long ago!)

"Tea for Two" was the theme tune.

Yes, so was series two of Frank Skinner's Shane, though guest star Matthew Kelly apparently told Frank "at least we got paid". High Stakes was awful, exactly what ITV shouldn't be doing, a terrible middle class Radio Four type thing about bank managers. Nobody was going to watch that after Heartbeat. ITV sitcoms should be big and brash, and even though I don't much care for Benidorm, at least it's a recognisably ITV show.

Sometimes you wonder how some series still exist in the archives & others don't?