Out of the Blue

BBC commissions new Aussie soap

The BBC has commissioned a new daytime Australian soap after losing the long-running show Neighbours in a bidding war with Five. Out of the Blue will be set in the Sydney resort of Manly and opens with a group of friends in their 30s returning to their hometown for a reunion.

Hopefully it won't be an echo of Eldorado. I suppose the best time slots would be the current Neighbours times. Sounds very daytime-tv-esque.

I wonder why they couldn't just bring back Eldorado. The set is still there (I went there this year and the location still looks beautiful) and they could buy it back off the new owners for a rock-bottom price. I'm sure they could recruit one or two of the original cast too.

But they'll never dare do it for internal political reasons, for fear of denting Yentob's ego - he's the one who axed it.

Another new soap

Wasn't Eldorado getting good ratings towards the end? - it was just a witch hunt by the tabloids. They decided it was rubbish and should be axed.

Please no.

It had improved significantly in the ratings compared to its abysmal start. There had been a major revamp by this point (ditching the foreign language bits and recasting at least one character)

However I can't for the life of me see why the Beeb would want to revive what was deemed, essentially, a ratings flop. Die hard fans will disagree, of course, but to do so would be monumentally stupid, and not a bit arrogant. It would also suggest a total lack of original ideas - which a newly commissioned soap doesn't. Plus keeping it in Aus, and commissioning from producers with a decent track record in the soap and better-than-soap genre seems sensible.

Also, sadly, many of the original senior producers of El Dorado are now no longer with us.

It was rubbish and should have been axed

I doubt many people will watch a new soap opera when they can still watch the familiar Neighbours, just on Five instead of BBC One.

It would have to be stuck with for a number of years and promoted a lot to build up as big of a following as Neighbours does now.

Has Five purchased the total rights to Neighbours, or would it be possible for the BBC to air vintage Neighbours in the early afternoon slot?

True actually, the Spanish dialect was too strong for English viewers to understand. The BBC put millions into it which they've tried to sacrfice with sending EastEnders to Spain for their holidays over the years. I doubt it'll ever return now.

I think it was more the tabloids deciding the BBC should not be making such blatantly populist programming, whereas Jonathan Powell realised that with its forthcoming charter renewal BBC1 had to do something to pull in viewers and Eldorado was the result.

Whether the good ratings towards the end were because people knew it was ending and were tuning in out of morbid curiosity, or that they really were becoming hooked, we shall never know.

But as to why people hated it, my thoughts: 1) tabloid witch hunt; 2) some saw it as an ill-timed, preachy lesson in Euro-harmony; 3) the BBC tried too hard, and the result was bloody awful! Poor Tony Holland was particularly resentful that his original idea about ex-pats living in the UK had been hijacked by BBC bosses inserting pan-European characters left right and centre.

Anyhow, now we have one Aussie soap replaced by another, only this time commissioned by the BBC. How things have come full circle - the BBC wanted to commission a daytime soap in 1986, yet to buy in Neighbours was the cheaper option. Certainly Neighbours' fan base will follow it over to five, to the new soap's considerable disadvantage.

can't the bbc have a better daytime?

a nice cheap game show like wipeout this must be the cheapest in the world, where everyone could end up leaving with nothing!