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!
Night and day was really a cult show which owed more to twin peaks than to coronation street. I think it could build up quite a folowing via repeats as the years pass.
That new Coldplay single 'Speed of Sound' reminds me of the opening to the theme tune for Night and Day.
Oh good, it's not just me then...
Night & Day, and indeed Crossroads, both failed because of ITV. N&D shouldn't have been on daytime anyway but the scheduling problem was rediculous.
Crossroads also failed because of ITV. MK II was never given a chance and MK III quite simply wasn't nessecary because a revamp wasn't required.
ITV committed suicide with XR by placing it up against Neighbours - a pile of s**te compared to Home & Away but nontheless popular s**te.
Dropping the Friday show was also silly as it knocked all the big weekend cliffhangers out of place.
It also didn't help that the first showing was at lunchtime, with the teatime show being the repeat. I never liked this when they did it with Home & Away, and I still don't like it with Neighbours. It means major cliffhangers etc get leaked before most people get to watch them!
After some dicking around, XR began to find itself but ITV called in Yvon Grace to reinvent the soap a second time. Now I know that many members here loved Series 3's short run but it was so far removed from Series 2 that it was NEVER going to work.
1. That sort of show doesn't work with your "H&A/Neighbours" teenage audience which one gets at 5pm!
2. The writing was awful.
3. The acting was sickeningly atrocious.
The conclusion I draw is that ITV didn't know their target audience well enough.
However, I still maintain that following the disasterous outcome of the Grace re-vamp, Pickard was 100% right to axe Crossroads.
Dunno. I know that Home & Away was bought in to replace XR on ITV. Which is ironic really as XR2 replaced H&A.
Home & Away was another show that failed because of ITV. Not failed, but it was ITV's treatment that ulimately caused Seven to give the contract to Five.
ITV committed suicide with XR by placing it up against Neighbours - a pile of s**te compared to Home & Away but nontheless popular s**te.
Didn't Neighbours get some of the blame for Crossroads' original demise in 1988?
Personally I would have thought NOT, as Neighbours until sometime in 1988 was only shown at 1.25pm and repeated at 9.30am the following morning, where as Crossroads would be shown at 5.15pm or 6.35pm depending in which ITV region you lived in. Also the final episode of Crossroads was shown at Easter in 1988.
But more people in 1988 watched Neighbours than Coronation Street. Also look earlier in this thread and someone mentioned that Crossroads got twice the audience that Emmerdale Farm got when XR was axed.
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.
Is it true that Hollyoaks is going off air for this revamp? Someone on Digital Spy said it would but im not convinced as im sure Channel 4 wouldnt want to risk viewers going elsewhere while it was off.
nwtv2003 posted:
tvarksouthwest posted:
Quote:
ITV committed suicide with XR by placing it up against Neighbours - a pile of s**te compared to Home & Away but nontheless popular s**te.
Didn't Neighbours get some of the blame for Crossroads' original demise in 1988?
Personally I would have thought NOT, as Neighbours until sometime in 1988 was only shown at 1.25pm and repeated at 9.30am the following morning, where as Crossroads would be shown at 5.15pm or 6.35pm depending in which ITV region you lived in. Also the final episode of Crossroads was shown at Easter in 1988.
But more people in 1988 watched Neighbours than Coronation Street. Also look earlier in this thread and someone mentioned that Crossroads got twice the audience that Emmerdale Farm got when XR was axed.
Why was Crossroads still shown at different times in different regions even up until the end in 1988? Same with Emmerdale Farm, it wasnt until 1988 that it got networked either.
The original Crossroads even beat Coronation Street in the ratings during different periods of the 1970s and was the 3rd most watched soap in the UK when it got axed, behind Corrie and Eastenders.
I suppose Emmerdale fans should be thankful Central were silly enough to axe Crossroads - as Emmerdale would have been the one to go with its ratings in decline. (Crossroads' were actually going up!)
ITV didn't axe Crossroads, Andy Allen Head Of Programmes at Central TV decided to end it. In an interview with the Crossroads Appreciation Society, the final producer of the original Crossroads, William Smethurst told them:
" It's certainly true that I was brought from the BBC in order to "relaunch" the programme as Kings Oak, with new titles, a new theme tune, and a team of top writers - and then the programme was killed off before the "relauch" had actually happened.
It's also true that despite all the changes by Phillip, and then the even more drastic changes that I made, the programme was always more popular than Emmerdale. I think we were no 4 in the ITV top ten in the week we were axed.
I think it was succeeding because the structure was better, the new characters were better (and better acted) than those they replaced, and because there was much more humour in the programme. But I would say all this, wouldn't I?
I know little of why it was axed. We had just been promised a weekend omnibus, as I recall. The view in Central was that Andy Allen surrendered the Crossroads slot in return for other slots that he badly wanted. When we talked, afterwards, he said, "Let's face it, Crossroads was never going to win any awards". There was a belief that he was so busy with other things that he was only dimly aware of the changes that were in the pipeline.
Why did Coronation Street have such a fine reputation, and Crossroads such a poor reputation? These things don't happen by accident, or by act of God. Granada took pride, over years, in ensuring that Coronation Street had fine writers and high production standards. Yorkshire fiercely defended Emmerdale, and has spent decades trying to overtake Coronation Street. Nobody at ATV, or at Central before Ted Childs came along as drama chief, cared about Crossroads."
