Sometimes a piece of television news can only be met with strangled cries of exasperation. Or in my case, the thud as my head hits the desk in weary resignation.
And so it is with the release of ITV’s latest dynamic plan for regeneration and revival - a daytime spin off from The Royal set in the present day called… The Royal Today.
I’m just going to say that again:
A daytime spin off from The Royal set in the present day called… The Royal Today.
Have they gone stark staring mad?! Look, I know The Royal (and its parent show Heartbeat) is still immensely popular and clearly earn its keep in the ratings, but enough is enough. Why this obsession with brand and siring yet more series on the back the one name?
This seems to sit at odds with ITV’s current ethos as it attempts to steer away from tried and tested formula shows to attract a more desirable audience for its advertisers (witness the success of Primeval as a huge step in the right direction).
But here we have a scheme that dilutes the creativity inherent in the TV industry. Clearly ITV has identified a gap in the daytime schedules, and I’m up for a proper job daytime soap as much as the next commissioning editor. So why not lay down the challenge to the rich seam of indie producers out there to come up with the goods? Actually, let’s not bother. We can just knock off The Royal, bring it forward a couple of decades, call it The Royal Today and then we can sod off for an early lunch. It’s just LAZY!
Or perhaps there is a fear of stepping into the unknown where this genre is concerned. After the failures of both Crossroads and Night and Day, one can understand the trepidation, and looking further back, when was the last new, successful soap created in the UK? I’ll let Doctors scrape through on a technicality, but it’s hardly an inspiring state of affairs, is it?
Have our commissioners lost their bottle so much that they’ve misplaced the ability to take a risk, to have a punt on something new that just might be the next big thing?
I’m not just pointing the finger at ITV here. The BBC are just as guilty with Holby Blue, Rogue Spooks and the industry that is becoming Doctor Who (but we love that, so it’s all right!). What next, MFI: Holby?
So come on, let’s get it together and fight for telly to be original and imaginative and challenging, not a homogenised wasteland of the same old same old.
And as a side note, Executive Producer of The Royal Today, Ken Horn, was quoted in The Sun:
“The new show is like M*A*S*H* without the cynicism.”
I really hope that’s a joke, because the only come back to that is: you should be so lucky.
Will The Royal Today star Martin Clunes and Caroline Quentin and other 'unofficial golden handcuff ITV regulars' too? ITV are always going on about how they are changing and they never do. They say they're getting new faces and then up pops Martin Clunes in something again. They get told they need to own their own kids shows and then they just dump ALL kids shows. They go on about how many new dramas they are making and then they go and cut the budgets and the dramas that turn up look like something they've done before anyway, so you don't bother watching them. And they get rid of the only things that you did tune in for like Bad Girls. I don't understand how ITV still exists. It must be literally for the people who watch Corrie and Emmerdale and GMTV and the rest is just filler.
Back to basics should be the order of the day especially with television drama. Crossroads failed because it didn't go back to the original formula, God knows why it was ever pulled in the first place.
The comissioning of 'The Royal Today' amplifies the point that itv1 believes that those of us from the south obviously have something better to do than watch telly. "It's only northerners who sit around all day watching tv" they chant, "so let's only make programmes about people from leeds, manchester and the surrounding rural areas. no-where else or the northerners will get confused and not know who to trust". Thank god for itv3. It's the only channel showing anything decent. It takes me back to a day when television was run by creative people and not a bunch of pandering zombies.
After watching the Royal today i was disappionted, thought it was bad acting, and didnt like it at all. and that stupid building that is next door to the real building looks horrible..give me the old royal any day.