Reg Watson
TV producer
REG WATSON, who has died at 93, was a television producer who did perhaps more than anyone outside the US to popularise the genre of soap opera – having given the world not only Crossroads in the UK but also the Australian epics Neighbours, Sons and Daughters and Prisoner Cell Block H.
Neighbours in particular was a worldwide phenomenon, turning a fictitious Melbourne cul-desac into one of the planet’s most familiar addresses and making stars of Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, among others. In the 1980s its popularity on the BBC surpassed that of just about every home-produced drama bar Coronation Street, and helped to maintain the corporation’s audience level above the 50 per cent that Margaret Thatcher considered necessary to justify the continuation of the licence fee.
Watson was Australian but it was in the Midlands of England that he got his start in TV.
The medium had yet to reach Australia when, as an actor and radio announcer, he upped sticks and accepted an invitation from Lew Grade to become head of entertainment at the newlyestablished Birmingham end of his ITV franchise.
He found himself in 1956 installed at the former Astoria Cinema on Aston Road North, which was being converted into the Alpha television studios, to be shared between Grade’s ATV and the weekend contractor, ABC.
The studios were ramshackle, even by the standards of the time, and with neither company prioritising their Midlands output over that for London or the North, were considered something of an outpost.
Nevertheless, Watson conjured up Lunchbox, a daily miscellany of music and light comedy fronted by the actress, singer and future Crossroads star Noele Gordon, with a trio of musicians in tow.
The show was a hit beyond the Midlands, and constituted British television’s first daytime entertainment format. It was seen across the North in the earliest days of the new channel, until Granada dropped it in 1959.
Ironically, it was Granada’s success shortly thereafter with Coronation Street that gave Watson his biggest British triumph.
He had long wanted to build on Lunchbox’s success, and as early as 1958 had pitched ideas to Grade for a serial that would feature Ms Gordon.
Grade, the perennial showman, did not want anything as downbeat as Granada’s offering but could not ignore its success. In 1964, he green-lit a serial to be called The Midland Road, to be produced five days a week at the Aston studios. Watson changed the title to Crossroads shortly before it began.
The show was hugely popular with viewers, rivalling and sometimes beating its Northern counterpart in the ratings, despite not being seen in all regions. But critics and the Independent Television Authority reviled it, and its primitive production values became something of a millstone around ITV’s neck.
Perhaps as a result, after nine years and more than 2,000 episodes of Crossroads, Watson took an offer from the Australian entertainment producer Reg
Grundy to return home as his head of entertainment.
Born in Brisbane, he had grown up on a sugar farm in Queensland, attending Flying
Fish Point state school before getting work in a jewellery shop and as a performer with Queensland’s Unity theatre.
Installed at the Reg Grundy Organisation, he used his experience from that time to formulate a slate of productions that struck an immediate chord with their intended audience. Neighbours – sporting a theme tune by Tony Hatch, who had performed the same service for Crossroads – was based loosely on his own Brisbane childhood.
It was not an instant success, and was dumped after only a few months by its original network. Retooled and recast with younger performers by Channel 10, it became a juggernaut, with Watson at the wheel.
It went on to become the longest-running TV drama in Australian history and was seen in more than 60 other countries. It continues to air in Britain, on Channel 5.
Off screen, Watson rarely gave interviews. Unmarried, he retired in 1992 and was appointed nine years ago a Member of the Order of Australia for services to the media.