Soaps - will they last?

Well in the last 10-15 years the only new soaps that have survived have been Family Affairs, Hollyoaks (which started as a once a week teen drama) and Doctors (also a drama which has been turned into a soap).

I think the only reason Family Affairs has survived is because its on FIVE, if it was on ITV im sure it would have been axed.

Then we have Families and Eldorado.

Families was very good, they just gave it the wrong time slot.

Eldorado was bad to begin with, but they corrected the errors and it was good fun.

Both of these series ended in the summer of 1993.

I actually found Eldorado quite watchable on the UK Gold re-runs a few years ago but the clichés people come out with about it were right - poor acting, difficult to relate to the characters etc.

Yes I'd forgotten about Hollyoaks, although like Jez I wouldn't have classed it as a soap. I used to really like it in the mid 90s but it's been crap for many years now in my opinion.

Ah I've remembered another recent disaster-soap - Night & Day! Never watched an episode of it in my life though so I can't really comment on that one.

I watched Night & Day for quite a while, then itv moved it to the late slot on Thursday Nights, that ruined it for me. I taped it for a while but then I lost trck of it.

They should have left it on at teatime.

Night & Day wasnt a bad programme (certainly nowhere near as bad as Crossroads Mk2 and 3 were, and critics loved it) but it was treated very badly by ITV - they didnt know how to market it because it was so different to anything else they had shown. Plus, and I know Im generalising here, but it required the viewer to actually think whilst watching it, and ITV daytime audiences arent really well renowned for doing that. N&D could have continued as a late night drama, but the ridiculous time slots and schedule changes are what eventually killed it.

Was N&D possibly one of the last risk taking commisions made by ITV before it became the state its in now, and its 'failure' one of the reasons ITV wont take risks now?

CLI ALERT!!! ITV DAY ALERT!!! ITV are taking more risks than ever before!

I used to enjoy Night and Day - I hope ITV3 show it some respect and show it again in its entirity in a fixed slot!

Never seen Eldorado so cant comment on that.

Hollyoaks were really good from the start up until about 2001, then it went downhill. Should have kept it at 3 a week, thats what suited it best.

I started watching Night and Day at the start but by the time it moved to the late slot id given up on it, I could never really get into it.

Yes Thames Television made the mistake of continuing "Minder" without Dennis Waterman, although the first series with Gary Webster was good the following two weren't especially due to budget limitations of Thames beacuse they were no longer part of ITV.

BTW would we consider Holby City & The Bill soaps seeing as they are on non stop like Corrie, EE, etc.

I also find it strange that Doctors is considered a soap seeing as it goes off air for several months at a time

I always thought that Series 8-10 were quite good, granted they weren't as good as the Waterman era episodes. I think the Budget thing might be a bit of crap, the show had always been made by Euston Films, a subsidary company of Thames Television. They must have had alot of money, as it always had good actors and at the very end of Series 9, which was made and shown in 1993, they shot two episodes in Austraila.

If you have Minder Series 10 on DVD, there's a George Cole interview saying, that after Series 7 (1989) George Cole was asked whether he would want to do another series, without DW, he said yes.

Plus I think one of the other reasons why Euston Films decided to call it a day was due to Leon Griffith's death sometime in the early 1990's.

That new Coldplay single 'Speed of Sound' reminds me of the opening to the theme tune for Night and Day.

Night and Day was a brilliant drama - ruined by ITV trying to make it a soap. If it been scheduled properly in weekly hour-long slots it probably would have done very well. It had the surreal appeal of shows like Footballers Wives, but was 100 times better!


As for Hollyoaks - it's not been as good as it can be this year, though there have been some outstanding storylines such as the disappearance of Tom Cunningham. It does the business though for C4 - it's the highest rating non-news programme in the 6.30pm slot, with 2.5m viewers each day. A big revamp is planned for the autumn.