Also:
- It's Saturday Night
- 2. An autograph before you go
- 3. A new kind of game show
- 4. A rising exasperation with the quantity of dirt
- 5. The whole thing suddenly fell apart
- 6. Synthetic propensity
- 7. It was destined to be an anti-climax
- 8. This is your show now
- 9. The awesome scale of our wastefulness
- 10. Hands up those who couldn't care less
- 11. Together We’ll Be Ok
- 12. Decide the shape of ITV in the 1980s
- 13. Alan is too commercial
- 14. It worked like a dream
- 15. Older men, doing school boy tricks
- 16. Killing the Golden Goose
- 17. People love us to be sexy
- 18. The manure is worth more than the cattle
- 19. They were big in the States and we noted that
- 20. I’m still aggressive and I’m still handing out the insults
- 21. A new style of lunatic humour
- 22. The Habitat-bean-bag-hessian-wallpaper brigade
- 23. Thoroughly sinful
- 24. All carrots should be scraped, sliced and cooked
- 25. Back then it was radical stuff
- 26. Whatever they do, we can do it better
- 27. You'll have to take us as you find us
- 28. Entertainment that keeps on the move
- 29. It's the public that has to pay
- 30. The last we saw of either of them was their sad faces
- 31. Just shoot the bastard
- 32. Britain could clearly be facing its darkest hour
- 33. Any enthusiasm we may have had for continuing discussions is waning
- 34. It was considered by LWT and then put in a bottom drawer
- 35. Watch the redoubtable Terry take off
- 36. I thought it might be terrible and I wouldn’t enjoy it at all
- 37. Kamikaze Mastermind
- 38. We haven’t moved into luxury
- 39. We are investing in people
- 40. Delivered impeccably
- 41. He has to allow you to do your bit
- 42. All the anticipation of the great emotive point
- 43. If you want Russ Abbot to do it, then you have to accept me and my ideas
- 44. Let’s get straight into this
- 45. Unedifying Greed
- 46. We’ve got the fucking lot!
- 47. Scope for humour and danger
- 48. Pure Megablast
- 49. There’s lots of killing, but not much else
- 50. I wanted to make sure it was going to be disastrous
- 51. Oh dear – Auntie’s playing bingo!
- 52. A Shrivelled Little Thing
- 53. I shouldn’t have accepted it
- 54. We would be the spoilsports
- 55. The Most Sexless Person In Television
- 56. They’d have strung me up if I hadn’t chosen him
- 57. Is there some way to play with the internal constituent parts?
- 58. The most important entertainment programme of my time
- 59. The plumply pretty female duo
- 60. The audience just sort of started to freeze on him
- 61. More pilots than British Airways
- 62. There's going to come a time when you'll have to go to the BBC
- 63. A slightly pretentious manifesto
- 64. Things Look Very Precarious
- 65. It’s no good doing all the same old people all the time
- 66. That’s just not funny Bobby, it's corny - just don’t do that
- 67. Well bottom’s not funny
- 68. We Are The Funnymen
- 69. The powers that be listened to Denis
- 70. Stretchers never go up stairs
- 71. I was in obscurity until this series
- 72. I don’t care if he doesn’t like me
- 73. There’s such a passion for nostalgia right now
- 74. I Heard A Seat In The Stalls Go ‘Gerdonk!'
- 75. This is your show, folks, and I do mean you
- 76. There’s good news for perplexed fans of 3-2-1!
- 77. Taking on Blind Date would be a real challenge
- 78. You wanna bet on it?
- 79. The yarns worked their tried and tested magic
- 80. The Charge-And-Shout Brigade
- 81. I sat for a moment in silence, then turned in my chair and left the stage
- 82. We just weren't allowed into UK terrestrial television
- 83. Beadle’s A Prick
- 84. The interviewer always has to know when it's best to keep his or her mouth shut
- 85. Can you come up with a good solution for the Murder Weekend mystery?
- 86. He's not a goody- goody hero
- 87. The Sexism, The Dolly Birds, The Catchphrases
- 88. The feel of Saturday night
- 89. 1990 Who would employ an ex-alky with lowered self-esteem
- 90. It were a right smack in the face
- 91. Look Straight Into My Eyes And Everything Will Be Alright, That's A Promise
- 92. That's the last thing I was expecting, Jim
- 93. The characters and situations are real
- 94. Oh Man, There Go All My Women Fans
- 95. A Double Order of Talent
- 96. If there is an air of spontaneity about it, it’ll be genuine
- 97. NTV brings you ... empty rooms!
- 98. You’re BBC, you shouldn’t be here
- 99. If this doesn’t work out, we’re both snookered!
- 100. The humour of Beadle comes through humiliating people!
- 101. To allow such bilge on TV is an insult to the audience
- 102. Like a cup of cold sick
- 103. A litre of gin, ecstasy and crack cocaine
- 104. A reliable tent pole for Saturday evenings
- 105. It is in the cutlery drawer
- 106. Welcome to the new Saturday night
- 107. Congratulations, you have got the fucking Gen Game
- 108. The programme has done extremely badly and will be dropped after this series
- 109. Building the excitement and tension to a crescendo
- 110. He gives us our spirit of unity; we’d all like to strangle him
- 111. The worst programme currently on terrestrial television
- 112. I award the city state of Milton Keynes 100 credits!
- 113. There’s nothing that makes people scream, ‘Did you see that?’
- 114. It was of a standard frankly well below what the public would want
- 115. Waxing An Ape Is My Ambition
- 116. Don’t Get Mad, Get Even
- 117. The penalty shoot-out is the greatest ever endgame
- 118. 200 black boxes are strapped to the back of a cross-section of the nation
- 119. Better For You, Better For All Of Us
- 120. I mean who on earth thought that was a good idea?
- 121. I’m sure the tune was in there somewhere
- 122. This Time, You Decide
- 123. King of trash, that’s me
- 124. It’s about rejection now
- 125. They lost what Popstars was all about
- 126. Win the ads
- 127. A name in search of a series
- 128. Getting grief from the papers
- 129. I’m so pleased to be back on television
- 130. Saturday nights haven't been this interesting for 10 years
- 131. It’s the Usual Nonsense
- 132. The trip of a lifetime
- Epilogue: Why Haven't You Written a Series of Articles on Tuesday Night Telly?
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The Tripods first aired on 15 September 1984 accompanied by a level of hype that marked the series out for intense scrutiny right from the outset. Based on a trilogy of books written by John Christopher, itoffered up an intriguing recipe of science fiction, history and travelogue; ideal raw material for a television drama. “It’s an adventure story,” explained the author to the Radio Times. “For me it goes right back to my mother reading me to sleep at night with Swiss Family Robinson,and things like Coral Island which I read later.” The first television option on this “adventure series” had been taken up not long after the publication of the first book – ‘The White Mountains’ – in 1967. That first failed attempt had involved producer Richard Bates. It was an indication of the man’s determination that he was to be at helm when the drama eventually made it to our screens 17 years later.
“Other producers had tried to get the series off the ground in the meantime but none had succeeded,” recalls Bates. “I went first of all to Southern Television who had a strong children’s department under Lewis Rudd. Lewis commissioned the early scripts, assisted with the preparation of the budget and finally gave approval for production. But – horror of horrors – three months later Southern lost their licence! I had to start again.
“By this time I was at the BBC preparing a series I had developed with Lavinia Warner called Tenko. But I left this in order to set up another series I had developed called One by One only to leave this shortly afterwards at David Reid’s request to make The Tripods. You will recall that Doctor Who came to an end in the early 80s [sic] and the department was looking for a new sci-fi series to take the Saturday afternoon slot. So I was sitting in the right place at the right time!”
The BBC’s decision to pitch The Tripods into what was still considered by many as the “Doctor Who slot”, ensured that comparisons were to be made between the long-running science fiction series and the BBC’s new, much publicised production. More significantly though, regardless of John Christopher’s assertions to the contrary, the series would come to be considered an out-and-out science fiction drama. This misconception was not helped by the press (which predicted The Tripods “was the future of television science fiction and that it would be to the 80s what the now passé Daleks had been to the 60s,”) or by the cast. John Shackley (who played Will, one of The Tripod’s main characters) professed to be a long-time science fiction fan, describing with glee the original Star Wars trilogy as “nine hours of pure megablast”.
The Tripods, like Doctor Who before it, found itself up against a new big budget American action show on ITV. The A-Team had begun transmission the previous year and had been a substantial success both in America (where it had been the only major hit out of the 45 new shows created in the States that year) and in the UK. “We are not looking for Emmy nominations, but to get the blood pumping,” asserted the presidentof the NBC TV Entertainment Division, Brandon Tartikoff. “In that respect, The A-Team has exceeded my expectations.” The series’ popularity could be attributed (according to Tartikoff) to the “crazy times” in which we lived. “The A-Team are underdogs, outcasts of society at a time when there are a lot of depressed people – the unemployed and those who are experiencing a poor quality of life. The show is for them. It’s escapist – fun to watch”. “The show isn’t working just because we are flipping jeeps over,” added executive producer Stephen Cannell. “People are getting a kick out of the characters, who have specific attributes that make them funny”.
Meanwhile, the characters in The Tripods,were failing to entertain the British audience. Although reaching a series high of 9.5 million,the seriesaveraged out at a mildly disappointing 6 million viewers. This compared poorly with The A-Team, which at the time was at the height of its popularity and able to boast 16.6 million viewers. “The big mistake that the BBC made when they adapted the John Christopher trilogy was the over-ambitious length,” reflected critic John Molyneux in 1994 “quite simply there is not enough material in each of the books to make three series of 13 episodes”. “The department badly wanted a long-running serial and my brief was to adapt each book in 13 episodes,” concurs Bates. “Looking back now I think that was probably a mistake but we took up the challenge. Inevitably this meant expanding some incidents and indeed this did reduce the tempo of the series.”
Audience expectation too, seemed to work against the show. The pre-publicity ensured that (quite reasonably) viewers expected the series to centre on the nefarious activities of the Tripods. Yet the focus was on the coming of age of the central character, Will. This meant the Tripods were peripheral figures throughout the first series, with their occasional appearances shoehorned into the plot. While a second series was commissioned and broadcast, the arrival of Michael Grade as BBC1 controller in 1984 signalled the end for The Tripods. Not only was it failing to attract a significant audience, but it was proving to be extremely expensive to produce, with the below-the-line costs coming in far higher than budgeted. The Tripods was cancelled while in pre-production for the third and supposedly final series.
Next Monday: There’s lots of killing, but not much else
Glenn Aylett
July 30, 2018 at 11:23 am
Perhaps the BBC would have been better employed spending the money wasted on The Tripods, which was rather boring and short on action, on improving Doctor Who. Doctor Who was developing a following in America with repeats of seventies shows, but the current series were becoming cheap looking and old fashioned. However, with the failure of The Tripods and Michael Grade’s dislike of Doctor Who, the veteran show was doomed just as it had the opportunity to become a massive success in America.
Richard16378
July 30, 2018 at 1:37 pm
Especially after the boost in popularity Dr Who had after the 20th anniversary.
The Tripods might have worked better with less episodes per season, or the 3 books adapted over 2 seasons.
Glenn Aylett
July 30, 2018 at 2:30 pm
@ Richard 16378, Doctor Who was still enjoying decent ratings in 1984 and Michael Grade moved it back to its rightful home on a Saturday, but probably because he remembered the show flattening LWT when he was controller, it could have been revenge time and one of his last acts as controller was to kill the show by moving it opposite Coronation St. Also the show had a chance to rejuvenate itself when the far more likeable Sly Mc Coy took over from Colin Baker( the worst Doctor ever), but the BBC let it die.