Crossroads (soap opera)

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Image:Crossroads.jpg

Crossroads was a British television soap opera set in a motel near Birmingham. It was first broadcast on ITV between 2 November 1964 and 4 April 1988.

Contents

ATV series

Crossroads first aired five days a week, until the ITA decreed that it would go to four airings a week in 1967. In 1979, it moved to three times a week.

The location of the Crossroads Motel was a fictional outskirt of Birmingham, "King's Oak" (there are real suburbs Kings Norton and Selly Oak). The main character in the original series was Meg Richardson, the motel's owner, played by Noele Gordon.

Other major characters included the chef Carlos; the postman Vince Parker and his waitress wife Diane; and the charlady Amy Turtle (played by Ann George, she was later satirised by Julie Walters as "Mrs Overall" in the Victoria Wood spoof Acorn Antiques). Mrs Richardson's children were Sandy, played by Roger Tonge and Jill, played by Jane Rossington. Mention of the characters cannot overlook the village-idiot character Benny Hawkins, whose trademark was a woolly hat worn all year around; the disagreeable shop-keepers the Grices; or the postmistress Miss Tatum, introduced as a narrator who was never seen except for her hands, tatting. Other key performers in the programme were Ronald Allen and Tony Adams.

While Crossroads had many fans (most notably Mary Wilson, the wife of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson), it also had many vocal detractors who criticized it for everything from its amateurish actors to its "wobbly sets". However, it still received high ratings and survived for as long as it did on its large fan base. This even extended to British troops serving in the Falklands War in 1982, who nicknamed locals 'Bennies' after the character played by Paul Henry.

The show's detractors often forget that until the early 1970s most of the show's storylines had been deliberately tongue-in-cheek.

Crossroads was made by ATV until the company lost its broadcast franchise at the end of 1981 and was relaunched with new management as Central. Very few archive recordings exist because ATV wiped and re-used most of the videotapes. However, Network Video issued a DVD with twelve of the original ATV episodes (including Meg's 1975 wedding) in 2005.

Central TV series

To public outcry, Noele Gordon was sacked in 1981, probably for reasons connected with internal politics and the planned image of the show after the switch from ATV to Central Television. Crossroads carried on with the same name and many of the same characters until about 1985, when it was remodelled slightly and renamed Crossroads Motel. In 1987, in a final bid to reach defecting viewers, the stories of the villagers surrounding the motel were told, and the show was given yet another name change, becoming Crossroads: King's Oak.

It was finally cancelled in 1988. The last, specially extended, episode was broadcast on Easter Monday, 4 April, with Jill riding off into the sunset with lover John Maddingham. As she left her motel behind for a new life in the West, she was asked what she would name the new motel she would be running. She remarked, "I always thought Crossroads was an awfully good name."

Crossroads Locations

A number of real life hotels doubled up as 'Crossroads Motel'. The most notable of these were, The Golden Valley Hotel in Cheltenham which made its debut in 1982 as the post fire motel and later 'Penns Hall Hotel' in Sutton Coldfield, which featured the famous lake. Both of these hotels remain open to this day

Carlton series

Crossroads was subsequently revived as a Carlton Television production with a more glossy format (Carlton having bought Central and acquired the rights to all ATV programmes) in 2001. The relaunched series returned in March 2001 and was broadcast at 5pm on weekdays on ITV1. The only familiar characters to reappear were the cleaner Doris Luke (Kathy Staff), Jill Richardson (Harvey) and her ex-husband Adam Chance (Tony Adams). Initial reactions from the critics were favourable but the lack of any real links to the past, and the controversial killing of Jill turned many fans of the original series away. Despite this the series did pick up a respectable number of viewers to become one of ITV's higest rating daytime shows. Unfortunately the producers used a break in production to re-vamp the show once again. (The show was off-air from August 2002 - January 2003)

The re-modelled series included guest stars such as Jane Asher, Kate O'Mara, Lionel Blair, Les Dennis and Tim Brooke-Taylor. However all of the storylines left from the previous August were ignored and barely even mentioned meaning that yet again the fans were left with a series that bore little resemblence to their memories.

Eventually after a few months the falling ratings led to "the axe". The storyline of the final episode (broadcast in May 2003) was the revelation that the glamorous hotel had been a dream, and the staff were actually supermarket workers.

The "dream ending" idea had been used by other series in the past, notably St. Elsewhere and The Brittas Empire.

Trivia

  • During its original run the show was usually only 20 minutes long excluding commercials. To save time, there was no opening title sequence, simply a title caption superimposed over the start of the first scene, accomanied by a brief snatch of the theme music.
  • The show's closing titles originally consisted of two superimposed roller captions, one vertical and one horizontal. As one credit would roll off screen vertically the next would roll on horizontally, and vice-versa, thus symbolising the show's title. Despite being enjoyable to viewers (as a departure from the normal single-direction scrolling credits), this was always cumbersome to execute and was eventually dropped in the late 1970s.
  • Until the 1980s the show would always end with a brief post-credits scene in which a character would speak a single line of dramatic dialogue, before the final bar of the theme tune played over the closing ATV logo.
  • In the 70s, Wings recorded an alternative arrangement of the show's theme music which was meant to be played over the closing credits whenever the show ended on a particularly dramatic cliffhanger. In the event this idea was apparently forgotten, and the two versions were played more or less at random.

External links

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