Midland produced soaps we’ve said goodbye to

As Doctors saw its last TV patients yesterday, a look back at some well-known and less remembered Midland produced soap operas…

Crossroads

In the sixties a motel was a pretty new idea in the UK and ATV decided rather than follow the usual format of a family saga in a street or town Crossroads would be set in the middle-class world of a motorway hospitality complex. The motel was located in Burbank, near Kings Oak, and saw the lives and loves of the staff and guests play out all over seen by motel owner Meg Richardson. The stories of her sister Kitty and her family also played a part in the early plots.

Cast included Noele Gordon, Jane Rossington, Roger Tonge, John Bentley, Ronald Allen, Sue Lloyd and Kathy Staff to name just a few of the 1000s who walked through the motel doors between 1964 and 1988 and again from 2001 to 2003.

Crossroads was the UK’s first half-hour daily serial and the only to copy the stateside daytime format of ‘true soap’ in this country. It also tackled groundbreaking, and at times taboo, storylines long before EastEnders or Brookside. However, its daily and American format didn’t sit well with critics who compared it to the very different twice-weekly serials, and it came off bruised. However, viewers enjoyed it and over 4500 episodes were made. Many of the ATV era however were wiped to save archive space, along with many other ITV programmes of the era.

“Is there anything I would have changed? Not really. It was fun while it lasted, and I shall always have happy memories of it.” – creator of Crossroads Peter Ling

Doctors

Originally produced at the legendary Pebble Mill Studios of the BBC Doctors began in 2000 and followed the lives of the staff at the Letherbridge based general practice. The series format was two-fold with often a ‘story of the day’ which focused on a patient plot while the ongoing staff and their adventures led the other theme.

Originally set at the fictional Riverside Health Centre the story moved to The Mill Medical Centre in 2004 following an explosion. The new name a tribute to the famous TV studios which it had launched from. In 2004 the series relocated to a Birmingham Based ‘drama village’ and concluded this week due to Beeb budget cuts.

As with any long running series 1000s of cast appeared in the show with regulars including Christopher Timothy, Diane Keen, Adrian Lewis Morgan, Ian Midlane, Elizabeth Dermot Walsh and Owen Brenman.

“We remain fully committed to the West Midlands and all of the funding for Doctors will be reinvested into new programming in the region. We would like to thank all the Doctors cast and crew who have been involved in the show since 2000. We know the crucial role Doctors has played in nurturing talent, and we will work to develop new opportunities to support skills in scripted programming.” – BBC

Family Pride

Family Pride was another serial from Central Television. It was shown locally on ITV in the Midlands while having a national audience on Channel 4.

Across two series the storylines followed the lives of three Asian families living in Birmingham including one who ran a haulage business and another a local convenience store which also brought in the lives of the staff and their families. Well known personalities were brought in including Gabrielle Drake, Zia Mohyeddin, Paul Henry, Susan Jeffrey and Rula Lenska.

Jupiter Moon

Produced at Central Television’s studios in Birmingham the soap however was set far, far away. Airing on BSkyB’s Galaxy Channel Jupiter Moon was British Satellite Broadcasting‘s only dabble into soap opera. At the time numerous television companies were in the running to make it, dozens of ideas were being sweated over. At Central Television former The Archers producer William Smethurst put together a long, detailed proposal. When he sent it off William added, for luck, a second idea for a sci-fi series that didn’t even fill one side of A4 paper – he called it: “Voyage Of The Ilea” The loves, passions, and courage of the students and crew of a space polytechnic as it ventures through the universe in search of scientific discoveries.

William Smethurst recalled, “John Gau of BSB wrote back and said that he loved it. When we met he asked why the ship was called the Ilea. I said that in a dark dream I had imagined Ken Livingstone as a senior statesman, naming the first European space polytechnic in honour of the Inner London Education Authority, so cruelly killed by Mrs Thatcher… John Gau said that the programme was a great idea and commissioned 150 episodes with a budget £6m.”

The spaceship set was the only accurately scaled prototype of a spaceship interior in the world. NASA had a design on paper, but the Central TV set was the only reality. Cast included Jason Durr, Lucy Benjamin, Richard Lintern, Faye Masterson and Kathryn Hurlbutt. The show was screened from 1990 to 1996 but was discontinued by Sky who had taken over BSB to form BSkyB.

The Doctors

The original medical saga from BBC Pebble Mill. While the studios were in Birmingham the setting for this general practice was a fictional surgery in north London. Running from 1969 to 1971 the lives of the doctors and their families took up just as much air time as the patients concerns, if not more so.

Cast included Nigel Stock, Bill Kenwright, Janet Hargreaves, Barry Justice, Richard Leech and Pauline Yates to name a few. The series concluded after three years, but Nigel Stock’s character, Dr. Thomas Owens, became the protagonist in the subsequent spin-off series, Owen, M.D. The latter show running itself for three years.

Janet Hargreaves, who later went on to appear in Crossroads recalled “We all thought The Doctors was a little more sophisticated and better produced over at Pebble Mill than the ATV counterpart, but of course The Doctors was only on twice a week, Crossroads was producing five episodes a week. It’s not until one does both types of soap you realise how much easier you have it in the twice weeklies. Both are hard work, but daily soap is incredibly hard work.”

Most of the episodes produced of The Doctors are missing from the archives; 139 of the 160 shows are thought to be wiped and no longer exist in the archives.