Emmerdale stars celebrate birthday
Former stars return to Woolpack to celebrate milestone for a soap that began life as an afternoon ‘filler’
SHOWBIZ: In the world of television, it was an event of such insignificance that the TV Times devoted only three paragraphs to the launch of Emmerdale Farm – but yesterday stars celebrated its 45th anniversary.
IN THE world of television, it was an event of such little significance that even TV Times devoted only three paragraphs to it.
Emmerdale Farm, it said, aimed to present “an honest and accurate look at modern life” through the prism of everyday Yorkshire folk.
Its real purpose was to help fill the afternoon viewing hours which had, after years of lobbying by the broadcasters, been freed by Edward Heath’s Conservative government from the ghetto of schools programming.
Yesterday, exactly 45 years after the opening twice-weekly episode went out, its first star recalled how little confidence in its longevity there had been.
“My first contract was for just 12 episodes,” said Frazer Hines, then a veteran of Doctor
Who, who had signed on as Joe Sugden, younger brother to Jack, the returning roué who had inherited the farm.
“It was just another job, really. But after a few weeks, one of the production assistants told us she had just seen the script for episode 26 – and all of a sudden we knew it could run.”
But he added: “Even then, the contract was still only for two years. They realised some of the companies could just take it off.”
In the days when ITV regions screened many programmes on different days, or not at all, the new afternoon schedule in 1972 was a rare example of co-operation, with drama, chat shows and the country’s first regular lunchtime news.
“Each weekday company,” Thames Television’s director of programmes, Brian Tesler, told TV Times, “has provided a programme that is appropriate to its own area. These are aimed at the daytime audiences, which are predominantly female.”
But Emmerdale, as it has been known since 1989 –the only programme from the schedule to survive beyond the 1970s – quickly found a broader audience and began to migrate, one region at a time, from afternoons to the peak-time evening schedule.
Today, the franchise is one of the most valuable in ITV, with six episodes a week and two visitor attractions in Leeds.
Mr Hines and his former costar, actress Malandra Burrows – both of whose characters were written out long ago – were at one of the tourist centres yesterday, the former car showroom in Burley Road in Leeds in which interior scenes used to be filmed.
A scale model of the fictional Emmerdale village has been built there, along with a life-size reproduction of the Woolpack pub and other sets from the series.
Mr Hines, a native of Horsforth, Leeds, who now breeds racehorses in Lincolnshire, said he had landed the role that was to dominate his life, on and off, for the next 22 years, on the recommendation of his former girlfriend – the actress Liza Goddard, whose father David was
Emmerdale’s first producer. “I was having Sunday lunch with her family, and he said he was going to do a 12-part series in Yorkshire for the housewives,” Mr Hines said.
“He was looking for someone to play the younger son, and Liza said, ‘He’s sitting right opposite you, dad – and if you don’t cast him, mum and I are leaving home’.” After two years, the popularity of the show had risen to such an extent, even tucked away at 1.30pm, that when Joe Sugden married his fiancée Christine TV Times had elevated the event to headline news.
IT WAS an inauspicious start. Denied the fanfare that accompanied the launch of the BBC’s EastEnders a decade later, Emmerdale Farm crept on air almost unnoticed by most of the viewing public.
It had been conceived, along with such longforgotten dramas as Marked Personal and Harriet’s Back in Town, as ITV’s way of filling up the newly available afternoon viewing hours, and its actors had been handed contracts less than three months long.
But its simple formula of a Yorkshire village and the farming families who lived there became instantly popular, and now, exactly 45 years on, many viewers could scarcely imagine television without it.
One might say it is a shame that in moving to prime time it has had to take on a harder edge, and that its diet of car and even plane crashes constitutes a sad commentary on modern life. But at heart, its downto-earth Yorkshire values still resonate – and that is something worth raising a glass to at the Woolpack.