Still Open All Hours

Indeed, I would have thought the ratings success came more from curiosity at reviving something which ended 28 years ago than anything else, whether or not a continued series will still work is an entirely different matter, particularly when there hasn't been that much positive said about it.

The BBC tried relaunching Upstairs, Downstairs in the same way a few years ago, by having a Christmas trilogy and using the success of that as justification to commission a series - but that didn't work either (which disappointed me as I loved the revamp, I like to believe that had it got picked up for a third series charting WW2 it would have hit it's stride in the same way the original did when covering WW1) as the initial trilogy, whilst successful, ultimately didn't stir up enough interest to support anything more being done.

A new Open All Hours may work better if they tout it the same way Only Fools was in it's later years - regular episodes ended in early 1991, after that it was comprised entirely of Christmas specials - but those Christmas specials all ended up commanding much bigger audiences than it did when it was in it's prime in the 80's. A yearly outing for Open All Hours over the next few Christmases I can see working well, but I doubt whether a revival of a weekly series after this many years is going to be anything other than a flop.

Planet Brekkie strikes again, most of the viewer reaction was much more positive than negative.

Only it wasn't that successful and lost over 1m across the run and anyway the series was planned and preliminarily commissioned before the mini series even aired unlike OAH. OAH did a massive 4-5m better in the official ratings. Nonsense comparison.

Where have you got your numbers from? Every source I've seen gives about 9M for the first episode in the 2010 UpDown trilogy, and about 12M for OAH. That's not 5M more. And whilst UpDown did drop over the trilogy, it didn't drop by over a million viewers.

And whilst there may well have been preliminary work done on the idea of a full series of UpDown (just like there would have to have been prelim work done on a new series OAH too) the new series wasn't confirmed until 2 months after the trilogy aired - and certainly no production work was done.

Seems like a perfectly valid comparison to me - the beeb bring back an old series which hasn't seen a new episode for decades as a Christmas special. It does well in the ratings but not so well in the critical reviews. They then take the ratings as a basis on which to commission a full series, which due to the need to actually produce it means there will be a long gap before it gets aired. They ignore the possibility that many of the people watching the Christmas special did so only through curiosity at seeing what a 21st century version of an old programme would be like and incorrectly assume that they'll be able to hold that audience for a whole series. The series then (sadly) flops.

The only piece missing with OAH is it hasn't yet aired in order to flop.

I believe by the time the series has aired this will prove to be a perfectly legitimate comparison.

It could be that many of the viewers were of an older age group and the BBC has a duty to deliver programming for all of the nation not the instant gratification generation and trash TV group who mainly use twotter and twofacedbook. The idea behind Christmas viewing schedules is a family serving of entertainment. It seemed to work.

I think for a long time, television was too scared of the more traditional style sitcom following the success of shows like The Royle Family and The Office. If the success of Birds of a Feather, Mrs Browns Boys and Miranda is anything to go by, this will work. There is a place on television for this sort of entertainment, and it's obviously very popular with the masses.

It makes me laugh when you see TV critics pouring snobbish scorn on such programmes in the broadsheets. There was a time when TV critics were the subject of the same sort of scorn by others in the industry, when TV was seen as a poor medium in comparison to the rest of the arts.