Recycled TV shows provide plenty of hits... and misses

FOYLE’S War is Britain’s most-missed television show of the current century, according to a poll published in this week’s Radio Times.

Indeed, the clever, tweedy 1940s ITV detective show, starring Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks, has once before been revived by popular demand.

Cancelled in 2007, another series was commissioned in 2010 and the programme’s second canter lasted till 2015.

Not that Foyle’s War is alone lamented. Life on Mars, Detectorists, Spooks and, of course, Downton Abbey are still mourned by millions.

Surprisingly, though, Foyle’s War only just edged out The Bill, the London coppers soap that had been plodding for 26 years when finally knocked on the head in 2010, and to widespread anger.

‘Times change,’ said an impenitent ITV, ‘and so do the tastes of our audience.’ But there is serious speculation that Foyle’s War may enjoy a comeback and some other hits are certainly returning: a new series of Happy Valley is on the slipway and a Downton Abbey film will soon be appearing at your local cinema.

But recommissioning a show with the same characters, the same cast and the same location is one thing. A complete reboot of past, remembered glories is quite another.

Porridge will always be Ronnie Barker and Richard Beckinsale; the 2016 remake was a quiet calamity.

The satirical and most quotable Yes Minister was a particular favourite of Margaret Thatcher’s and a glory of the 1980s. The 2013 remake could not touch it. And many view the pending broadcast of a new All Creatures Great and Small with gloomy apprehension.

It would be absurd to suggest that an old hit can never successfully be recycled. The 1995 BBC dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice was far better than an earlier, creaky 1982 version.

The current Poldark has likewise eclipsed earlier series, from 1975 and 1977 – though, given that we then had three channels, these had far higher viewing figures. And, of course, Doctor Who – brought so brilliantly back to life in 2005 – has been a rare BBC hit in a drama era dominated by ITV.

AGOOD example of Auntie’s faltering was the attempt to rekindle Upstairs, Downstairs in 2010 – originally a 1970s success for ITV. The BBC Wales version, a three-night Christmas special, won high ratings but a second sixepisode run in 2012 – with a lesbian sub-plot and other follies – bombed.

Critics who sneered that the central concept – a big house drama about the lives both of gentry and their servants – could never these days fly were shortly silenced by the sensational success of Downton Abbey. (Save in Scotland, where witless STV bosses chose not to show the first series.)

But this is a treacherous and often career-ending world. Of all television, drama is the most expensive to make and, to acceptable modern standards, very expensive indeed.

You can produce a chat show or even a cookery programme very cheaply, shooting a block of episodes in a day or two in a single studio and splashing out a little on your host.

Drama requires umpteen locations, hundreds of people, travel and accommodation, expensive actors and costumes and props and such costly

camera tricks as crane and tracking shots.

It is little surprise that practically all recent British hits have been co-produced with money from Australia and elsewhere.

And it is not always easy to predict a hit – and far less to replicate it. In 1976, the BBC screened an adaptation of two novels by Robert Graves – I, Claudius, the quietly murderous tale of how the first dynasty of Roman emperors poisoned, beheaded, starved or suffocated so many of their relatives and invariably came to sticky ends themselves.

I, Claudius was shot entirely on studio sets with huge rostrum cameras and only 18 extras and could have been as dreary as an earlier BBC flop, Churchill’s People.

But it boasted an extraordinary ensemble cast – Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, Sian Phillips, George Baker, John Hurt, Patrick Stewart – and a brilliant script by Jack Pulman, who shrewdly wrote the episodes not as bleak epic but as sustained black comedy.

I, Claudius was such a success that it was repeated in the two succeeding summers and also did very well overseas. The BBC now convinced itself that comparable historical costume dramas would prove no less magic money trees. But the result was a succession of unutterable turkeys, as the early Plantagenets, Renaissance Rome, and ancient Egypt inspired, successively, The Devil’s Crown (1978), The Borgias (1981) and The Cleopatras (1983.)

The Cleopatras in particular was so reviled by critics – as well as assailed for what was, even by today’s standards, much gratuitous nudity – that it has never been repeated, nor released on video or DVD.

MEANWHILE, Granada was producing such triumphs as Brideshead Revisited and Jewel in the Crown for ITV, and by decade’s end ITV found a veritable cashcow in Colin Dexter’s novels about Inspector Morse – a gift that has kept on giving in such reiterations as Lewis and Endeavour.

The BBC has had success with such long-running if formulaic shows as Casualty, Holby City, Silent Witness and Waking the Dead, but the strength and depth of ITV output by comparison – an entire channel, ITV 3, consists of nothing but high-end repeats – is daunting.

There has been another curious trend, most notably on the

BBC and in particular its ‘soft’ Sunday evening drama slot, of retreating to the recent past in such shows as Call The Midwife, Inspector George Gently and Grantchester.

This is not because there is a huge national appetite for Morris Minors and pre-decimal currency. It is because it is much easier to write exciting stories, with serious jeopardy and considerable legwork, in an age when people did not have mobile phones, social media or the Internet.

Crime drama, too, is much more entertaining when policemen can be more… robust. Central to the appeal of Life on Mars (and its 1980s-set sequel, Ashes to Ashes) is the gritty DCI Gene Hunt, who is never averse to kicking in doors or beating up the odd villain – and is a majestic stranger to political correctness.

Foyle’s War, of course, is gentler, dressier and more erudite fare. But its central idea – a lone and upright hero with a loyal sidekick, peering fearlessly into dark places in a treacherous world – is as old as Homer, and for far higher stakes than modern cop shows.

We know that the Nazis never invaded and that Hitler lost the war. Foyle and his society do not – but do know that its killers, when he has collared them, will go to the hangman.