What’s in a tV name?
As Jeremy Clarkson reveals his comeback show’s title was changed to The Grand Tour, we look at hit series whose original monicker was very different
Daily Express Monday May 16 2016
WHEN Jeremy Clarkson and co were thinking about what to call their new car show for Amazon Prime they initially came up with the title Gear Knobs. It struck just the right tone for the former Top Gear presenting trio, embracing as it did a genuflection to where they came from, a spot of double entendre and a motoring reference.
Unfortunately it was kiboshed by lawyers because it was too similar to the name of the show they had left behind.
So it was back to the drawing board and titles such as Speedbird, No Limits, Dip Sticks and The Best Car Show… In The World were considered. But all were rejected in favour of the somewhat sedate The Grand Tour.
“The thing is,” says Clarkson, “we’ll be travelling the world hosting each episode in a different country from a giant tent. It’s a sort of ‘grand tour’ if you like. So we’ve decided to call it The Grand Tour.”
He and colleagues James May and Richard Hammond are not alone in agonising over a title for their television programme. Here we present some examples of hugely successful shows that could have been called something very different if wiser heads had not prevailed. It is no surprise to hear that the title of the most madcap and surreal comedy series that the BBC has ever made went through a number of different incarnations. These included Whither Canada?, The Nose Show, Ow! It’s Colin Plint!, A Horse, A Spoon And A Basin, The Toad Elevating Moment and Owl Stretching Time. The show’s creator Tony Warren originally called his new serial Florizel Street, inspired by a picture he owned of Prince Florizel hacking his way through a forest to reach Sleeping Beauty.
Very few people – if any – at Granada Television liked it however and Warren himself appears to have been put off the word Florizel after Agnes, the studios’ tea lady, said it sounded like a brand of disinfectant.
He was happy to leave the decision to the show’s producers Harry “Stuart” Latham, Harry Elton and HV Kershaw. They discussed the matter late into the night fuelled by a bottle of whisky, eventually zeroing in on that the street would have been built around the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and Edward VII’s coronation in 1902.
The trio put the decision to a vote and went home to bed. The next morning Kershaw was astonished to read a memo from Latham announcing the title as Coronation Street. Both he and Elton had a vague memory of voting for Jubilee Street. When David Crane and Marta Kauffman presented a sevenpage pitch to the American television network NBC for a series about the interlinked lives of a group of 20-something New Yorkers they wanted it to be called Insomnia Café.
After NBC bought the pilot the title became Friends Like Us. Meanwhile NBC president Warren Littlefield preferred Across The Hall. When the first show was made the name had switched again to Six Of One.
It was only when the show finally premiered on September 22, 1994, that it went out under the title Friends. Rowan Atkinson’s iconic rubberfaced klutz was only named after a number of other vegetableinspired ideas had been considered, including Mr Cauliflower. When scriptwriter John Sullivan delivered his proposal for a sitcom about a Peckham market trader to the BBC it was provisionally entitled The Readies.
But the Beeb’s head of comedy John Howard Davies preferred Only Fools And Horses, the title of a 1979 episode of Sullivan’s first hit series Citizen Smith. It was a truncation of the saying, “Only fools and horses work” and Howard Davies felt it better reflected the philosophy of the ducking and diving central character Del Boy. The much ridiculed – but top rating – soap opera about life at the Crossroads Motel in the fictional Midlands location of King’s Oak was originally called The Midland Road. Albert Square in the prime-time soap was based on Fassett Square in the east London district of Dalston and it was Dalston’s postcode that provided the working title East 8. The show got its final name after scriptwriter Tony Holland and producer Julia Smith realised they had been calling casting agencies for months asking whether they had any “real East Enders” on their books. The pilot of the show that turned Henry Winkler’s hipster the Fonz into a global icon was called New Family In Town. The title was changed to Love And The Television and then renamed as Love And The Happy Days.
When Ron Howard (Richie) became an overnight sensation as a teenager in 1973 film American Graffiti the show was taken up by ABC and went on to enjoy huge success as Happy Days. This blockbuster US series revolved around the wealthy Carrington family from Denver, Colorado, who had made their fortune in the oil business. Its initial title was unoriginally Oil. Phil Redmond, the creator of the now defunct soap set in a Liverpool cul-de-sac, originally called it Meadowcroft. He was ordered to change the name because another department had commissioned a comedy series called Meadow Lark. Not that Redmond ditched his original title entirely. In a number of episodes Brookside residents could be seen watching television series Meadowcroft.