During the 1980s it was decided for some reason that escape me that we couldn’t have any fantasy on television because it was too silly and expensive. All science fiction and escapism was ruthlessly banished from the schedules and we were force fed by executives depressing soap operas in the same way that today they force feed us reality TV. Unable for years to machinate kitchen sink drama as depressing as Coronation Street the BBC finally pumped all its money into Eastenders cancelling many popular programs (Dr Who) in order to produce a ratings grabbing drama in a do-it-or-die big financial gamble. And we’ve had this tripe shoved at us ever since…
To cut a long story short for those too young to have endured the 80s the then 4 channels then became engaged in a war to fill the schedules with as much depressing drama as possible (because reality TV was yet to be invented). But forward to 34 years later and it’s not all as spiffing down the square anymore....
For as HD television has seemingly made fantasy programs much much cheaper to film it’s also made conventional dramas such as Eastenders much more expensive. While Doctor Who can now interact with ever more interesting aliens and planets who are entirely digital down Albert Square they’re still reliant on back lot sets. I remember back in the 1980s a programme about the back lot set of Eastenders where we were informed (or lied to in the pretence that they hadn’t wasted a fortune) that the BBC already owned a few streets over at Elstree studios anyway and had adapted these cheaply into the original Eastenders set.
However, by 2015 these sets had started to be deemed as not good enough and in May’s Britain there’s no hiding the details of public expenditure anymore… so... After spending several million changing all their cameras and equipment to be HD the BBC faced the embarrassment that the only stuff they actually filmed in HD was rubbish like the News. Yes, it seems apparently the BBC cannot not film Eastenders in HD because the public might realise that the exterior sets were rubbish and wobbly (funny they never used to have these problems with Doctor Who). Therefore a fortune has been spent re-building the existing set for HD. Your TV may be HD ready but BBC drama was not.
In about 2014 ITV completely rebuilt the Coronation Street set ready for HD TV but times is harder down t’Beeb. And so faced also with spiralling costs maintaining the old sets as plywood front after plywood front rotted the BBC decided to spend a fortune rebuilding the set for Eastenders once and for all – this time in real brick. I don’t know why … surely some old buildings falling down almost exactly represents the real world housing shortage of the real London… but there we go. And as the BBC is a public body subject to FOIs we also know exactly what they’ve spent on this (£86m) mainly because the National Audit Office has written a damning report.
The BBC’s reasoning for the rebuild largely revolves around arguments such as the fact that the plasterboard houses might look too plasterboardy in HD but can it really make that much difference? Reading the report carefully other issues are more likely the reason. For example … it’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s watched (or been forced to endure by living in shared accommodation) Eastenders over a long period of time that Walford is an entirely closed world. In the real world the Queen Vic would have long ago become a Weatherspoons or been converted into yuppie flats but this would make storylines in which characters casually offer to sell it to each other as a result of criminal blackmail threats unworkable. But let’s not worry about that – that’d be like worrying about which brewery it’s attached to. In 2019 competing against large scale TV epics like Game of Thrones it’s becoming increasingly clear that viewers will no longer accept a set of 3 or 4 streets and a square that suddenly stops dead so that when characters walk off one side they must reappear on the other like in an Escher painting. Of course no one ever really did but in the age of 4 channels there was no competition so we just had to suck it up. So more fake streets are required. Interestingly while all the problems of sci-fi have been reduced by digital effects and greenscreen they can’t use these techniques on Eastenders. The depressing sets – like stunts in James Bond films – must for some reason all be done “for real”.
And so the BBC has decided in its wisdom that a bigger set is needed and made of real bricks not plasterboard fronts. Of course with the average house in London now costing £600,000 for a semi-detached you could theoretically buy 143 new homes for the cost of the new Eastenders set but that wouldn’t solve the problem because the correct type of bricks to colour match the original plywood and plasterboard fronts of the old set have to be selected and these bricks then look conspicuously new and have to be aged to look as near to the originals as possible. So a huge amount of money is being spent on making a new more realistic set look like the old unreal obviously fake one.
The public wont accept all the sets of a soap opera suddenly changing anymore as happened when Neighbours was sold between networks in Australia in 1985. “Seven” infamously destroyed all the sets to make life hard for their rival “Network Ten” who brought the franchise. Of course viewers in Australia barely noticed this because there was a gap in broadcast but when the BBC ran the series back-to-back there was a remarkably sudden change in interiors that created a lot of complaints from viewers who had not previously realised that the program was fiction. The BBC solved this problem by writing to viewers “sorry, it’s compete rubbish but we can’t change it so suck it up”. A similar solution to the Eastenders debacle is unfortunately not possible however as it is an in house production…
To be fair the report makes clear that there will be long terms financial savings from the project so maybe it’s not all that silly. However, with the sets going over budget the BBC may need to make cuts elsewhere and there’s some interesting reading about the costs of “human resources” on the programme which if I was a soap star would have me looking over my shoulder a lot in case my real life starts to resemble Arthur Fowler’s…
And sure enough a brief view of recent reviews shows a lot of complaints about "younger characters" (because the oldies cost too much so have been laid off / killed off?) and rubbish storylines as cheaper writers have been dragged in... Still who cares... at least it will look a million dollars. Or $105m. As in the ultimate irony a drama about looking down on the working classes is creating a lot of work for people with working class jobs ... like building.
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