Was the same on Tuesdays with Soldier Soldier and Peak Practice filling the schedule for a good chunk of the year. ITV seem to even be stepping away from 8 episode and 6 episode runs now with most dramas commissioned as 4 parters to run across a single week, but there is certainly space for more returning drama across BBC1 and ITV now. Indeed since Downton Abbey ended Call the Midwife is practically the only show I can think of which now returns in the same slot year after year.
Well, BBC1 do quite well in terms of ensemble dramas like this with Silent Witness and Death In Paradise, and all channels really could do with schedule staples like these, not to make the schedules boring and samey, but to have something they can count on to act as insurance, to encourage new talent in front of and behind the camera, and bring audiences to the channel so you can promote and launch new things off the back of it.
Silent Witness and Death in Paradise are also good examples of programmes that have successfully navigated major cast changes, as London's Burning, Peak Practice and Heartbeat also did very successfully. There are lots of very good dramas at the moment, but a lot of them either involve the same person writing them all, or they're based entirely around a particular lead, so they're always going to have very limited runs. There should still be those, of course, but it would also help improve the range of drama if you also had some long runners that could run for several weeks of the year, every year. Of course it didn't always work, Soldier Soldier's ratings absolutely plummeted when Robson and Jerome left for example and it was soon axed, but you get the general idea.
Polly Hill at ITV did say a few years ago she was interested in doing story-of-the-week dramas, citing The Good Wife as an example of the kind of thing she'd like to do, where it didn't matter so much if you missed an episode. Sadly nothing seemed to come of that.
When I was a kid in the seventies, I always knew when the weekend was over when Songs of Praise came on the telly, this was around seven o'clock time, followed by All Creatures Great and Small, I also remember a programme called World About Us, which I think went out on BBC2. In the early eighties it was always Bullseye, and then Sunday Night at The London Palladium.
For all everyone says that All Creatures was the ultimate Sunday night show, though, only two series were ever actually first shown on that night, the first ever series in 1978 and the first revived series in 1988. All the other series were on Saturdays, and indeed the second series in 1978 was shown opposite Brucie's Big Night and absolutely thrashed it, I know the story is always that the Big Night was beaten by Larry's Gen Game but for most of its duration it was opposite All Creatures. Actually that autumn 1978 Saturday night line-up on BBC1 of Doctor Who, Larry's Gen Game, All Creatures and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em must be one of the all-time great Saturday line-ups.
I have memories of The Wonder Years being a Sunday evening staple that we would watch as a family in front of the telly in the early 90s; towards the end of the decade we'd have moved on to the Simpsons on Sky One.
I was always aware of the Sunday evening drudge slot on BBC One and largely steered clear...
The suggestion is always that American Football took off in Britain because C4 showed it on Sunday teatimes, when the opposition was the God Slot. Actually if you look at the C4 ratings from the late eighties and early nineties, they always did really well on Sundays, and The Waltons and Little House on The Prairie on Sunday lunchtimes always used to get in the C4 Top Ten because the other options were politics or religion. The Money Programme always used to rate really well for BBC2 on Sunday teatimes as well, it was always one of the more accessible current affairs programmes but it helped it was pretty much the only secular show on air. I know in America that one reason why 60 Minutes continues to rate so well is because broadcasting regulations means it has a cushy slot and virtually no competition, a bit like the God Slot.
As you say, Sunday teatimes was the regular slot for The Simpsons on Sky One for many years, and that Sunday teatime slot was so big for Sky One for such a long time, they used to launch loads of new shows there. They seem to have stopped bothering in that slot now though, with The Simpsons now shuffling around all over the place.
I remember in Andy Gray's autobiography, written about fifteen years ago before all the unpleasantness, he talks about Bryan Cowgill, the distinguished TV sports producer, being a consultant in the early days of Sky Sports and Gray says "His ambition was to show football opposite the God Slot - it hasn't happened yet, but it would be massive if it did", seemingly failing to realise that the God Slot was actually abolished back in 1992.
Actually the reason Sky chose 4pm on Sunday for their main Premier League slot came about because on 1st March 1992, in the last few months of the ITV deal with the top flight, a live Spurs match due to kick off at 3pm was delayed by over an hour because of a bomb scare, so it ended up drifting much later into the evening, and got ITV's biggest football audience of the year. And loads of people complained to the Radio Times as it meant Highway got cancelled on St David's Day.
The only BBC show from my childhood that I associate with Sunday is That's Life - use to be able to stay up late sometimes to watch it. Such an odd show when you watch it now, but it worked at the time and was amazingly popular. That dour brass band theme tune though, that's when you really knew Monday was coming
Yes, a very odd show, the nearest thing to a tabloid newspaper on TV mixing hard news and investigative journalism with daft jokes and stupid vox-pops. As you say, it certainly worked at the time, though it was a right anachronism when it finished. I wasn't old enough to see it in its pomp but I did watch it in its dying days when it moved to Saturdays, and it was entertaining but a bit strange, of course Esther ran the whole show so it was entirely based around her interests and ideas, however odd they were.
Esther is one of those people in TV who used to get big audiences so had a lot of freedom to do what they liked, and certainly it's not hard to find stories from people in TV production who couldn't stand her, as she would interfere in everything and tell everyone else how to do their jobs, but she also inpired massive loyalty and other people worked with her for years, a bit like Biddy Baxter. I think it was Richard Marson who said a new make-up artist started and Esther breezily told her to go down to Debenhams and find some nice nail varnishes for her.
There's some fascinating stuff in Paul Armstrong's book about editing Match of the Day, because as a BBC trainee, he did a three month attachement on Hearts of Gold, and he says Esther was an incredible person to work for as she had incredibly high standards and just wanted people to do things and wasn't interested in knowing how they did them as long as they did. He talks about how they were going to surprise someone who was a Celtic fan and someone suggested to get the Celtic team on, and she said "Well, get them on then", and then when Armstrong suggested that he would be particularly pleased to see the Lisbon Lions team of 1967, she went "Well, get them on too", and expected Armstrong to just go ahead and do that, not in the slighest bit concerned about whether it was possible or not. He did, by the way.