Programmes Certain Companies just didn't like

Alan Yentob and Eldorado springs to mind, axing the show was one of the first things he did when he took control of BBC1 in 1993.

The whole Cannon and Ball thing was certainly LWT of that era under Greg Dyke and co. It was known that's Dyke really wanted to make the schedules more upmarket. This was also that time when ITV dropped Darts, due to the image of the sport at the time.

Well, maybe, though he was hugely popular at the time. I remember the pilot of Beadle's Hotshots was first shown in June 1994 and did not much, but then in December they repeated it in the regular You've Been Framed slot on Sunday, in between Heartbeat and London's Burning, which was a slot where even the test card would have got ten million viewers, and it got a huge audience - which was probably why it was then commissioned for a series.

The mid-nineties were a bit of a bad period for Beadle, mind, because Beadle's About was axed in 1996 (and was dropped mid-run because it was rating so badly, with the last few flung out several months later), then Hotshots was axed in 1997 and he was dropped from You've Been Framed in the same year, so he went from three ITV series to none within eighteen months. Still, he never moaned about it, because as everyone is always quick to point out he was the nicest man in the world.

Indeed, and Tarby was dropped as well, though of course Cannon and Ball still appeared on LWT via the shows they made for Yorkshire, so as far as the audience were concerned there was no difference. But Yorkshire were guaranteed to have X hours of shows on the network so there wasn't much LWT could do about it.

I'll shut up in a minute.



I think this is a simplistic argument, and not especially fair either. I think it's certainly fair to say that when Michael Grade left, C4 had got a bit too mainstream - I remember just as he was leaving they showed Alan Bleasdale's adaptation of Melissa and I remember people arguing that it wasn't C4 enough and could easily have worked on BBC1 or ITV. And though Harry Hill was badly treated, a lot of the entertainment was getting old and mainstream and there weren't enough new ideas coming through. Last Chance Lottery sums up the last days of the Grade era, it was just the most desperate attempt to replicate Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, and you had The Girlie Show as well of course. There were too many old formats - like Whose Line Is It Anyway - knocking around as well.

Obviously not everything under Jackson's watch was brilliant but you had things like the cricket, which was a proper innovation nobody saw coming, plus new talent like Graham Norton and Sacha Baron Cohen got lots of support, and shows like Grand Designs were launched which were popular but a bit more stylish. And they bought a bit smarter as well, they used to buy endless US sitcoms for the sake of buying US sitcoms and filling slots, whereas now they kept the good ones but didn't bother with the crap ones like Caroline In The City, and bought things like Sex And The City instead.

I watched loads of C4 in that period. There were some bad shows, the same as any era, but it's daft to blame one person for the entire failings of a channel.

Although I'm quite happy to do that now with Jay Hunt.

I think HTV's Nuts and Bolts was more recent than that.

About 2000 I think.

I repeat my previous statement

Sky One wanted to commission Series 4 of Games World for 1995/96 but the producers Hewland International felt the portfolio had too much bias on the declining gaming sector this was why original Games World ended.

In 1996 Sky One under David Elstein commissioned a daytime magazine show called 1 to 3, when Elisabeth Murdoch replaced Elstein at Sky she wanted to focus on peak time output so she canned 1 to 3 before Christmas.

I used to love a game show on Sky One called Spellbound with Paul Coia, why did Sky axe it in 1996?

Declining gaming sector? I hope someone got fired for that gross misestimate - that's around the time the original Playstation came out! Sega was declining (neither the Saturn nor the Dreamcast were very successful). Gaming as a whole? Exactly the opposite.

And it grew even bigger with the advent of the PS2 and Xbox, and later with last gen platforms.

You clearly can't ignore the growth of the gaming industry - and that is where the said producers didn't follow what was happening in 1995 - especially with 3D visuals becoming more commonplace.

Back on topic - Don't Scare The Hare was hated by many critics and ratings dropped so badly (by episode 2 it was apparently, about 900,000) that the BBC dropped the last three episodes - and moved the show to an earlier time slot.

That's not quite the topic though - unless CBeebies had rejected it and that's how it ended up on BBC1.