Crossroads

I was never a fan. Despite the factory production-line acting and writing it gave simple pleasure to millions and that's surely a good thing.

Reviewers then as now enjoy indirectly mocking the masses for their lack of taste by mocking what the masses enjoy.

The very first producer of this Brummie based soap opera was a gentleman called Reg Watson . This name may not be recognisable but it will ring a bell at the back of your mind and when I say he moved to Australia and created a show called PRISONER CELL BLOCK H you'll know who he is now . And like PRISONER this soap based at a Midlands motel was total turd , but often highly entertaining . In fact both myself and many of my peer group would discuss the previous night's episode at school

Every episode starts on a cliff hanger opening : " What you mean you're having my husbands baby " . The actors freeze , but it not a freeze frame camera shot as you can clearly see the actors tremble in fright at their dialogue . The caption CROSSROADS flashes up and Tony Hatch's guitar theme tune blasts in - Ding Ding Ding - Ding Ding Ding Ding . Then the actors get back to what they were doing before . Very bizarre and there's another idiosyncratic revealing mistake in almost every scene and that's the actors waiting for their cue . When the action cuts from one location to another you can clearly see for a brief moment the actor standing still like a statue then they go on to pour a cup of tea or make a phone call etc

But it was the script and characters that made the show entertaining garbage . Shugie McPhee was a master chef and head of the kitchen and in one subplot tried to bring down the motel by contaminating guests food . In one memorable scene a big plastic spider finds itself becoming dessert . And there was Adam Chance who was Ken Barlow's only rival in British Soapland's least convincing hetrosexual character

For me and many others the real star was Benny the retarded oddjob man at the motel . If Channel 4 did a programme called 100 GREATEST RETARDED CHARACTERS IN TELEVISION Benny would win by a mile and unsurprisingly the more ridiculous plots revolved around him . Benny is maimed trying to stop a couple of joy riders , Benny is left 25,000 pound in a relatives will , and Benny is framed for murder . Don't worry he was innocent , it turned out the manager of the garage killed his lover , heard someone walk in and hid as Benny found the body then gasped " My god Benny what have you done ? " . Benny was something of a national institution and no amateur talent contest of the late 1970s was complete without an impressionist trying - And failing - to capture Benny's mannerism

I stopped watching it in the early 1980s and I heard that the producers at the time tried to make it a serious drama which caused the viewing figures to drop and led to its ultimate cancellation .

For about 25 years, this was British TV's best loved bad soap. Shaky sets, some over the top storylines and a host of okay actors revelling in the whole affair.

Set in a fictitious Midlands town, it centres on the staff and guests at the eponymous Motel - in the early days run by Meg Mortimer (Noelle Gordon) and later by Nicola Freeman (Gabrielle Drake).

The best characters included irascible Scots chef Shughie McFee (from The Great Escape); David Hunter (Ronald Allen from a Night to Remember) and Hammer veteran Sandor Eles (Countess Dracula) as a cliched chef.

Look out too for the late Jeremy Sinden (Donald's son) who went on to play one of the ill-fated pilots in Star Wars - a little movie he shot inbetween breaks from Crossroads.

However, head and shoulders above them all was scruffy, backward, lovable Benny Hawkins who never had much luck - his gypsy girlfriend was knocked down and killed on his wedding day - but with his woolly hat and good heart, he was the Midlands version of Forrest Gump long before Tom Hanks cornered the market in loveable simpletons.

The whole thing was repackaged and revamped as Neighbours, a show also boasting a Tony Hatch theme tune. At one point in the late Seventies, Paul McCartney and Wings even provided a rockier theme tune for this Seventies slice of nonsense, nicely spoofed as Acorn Antiques in Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV.

Like many people at the time of the original Crossroads Soap Opera i fell in love with it. But i did not notice any wobbly sets also i did not consider any of the acting was wooden. The story lines i thought were good.

To sum up Crossroads is a task which is practically impossible. The wobbly set legend is a strange one, we know when the show started it was filmed in a old cinema, so the sets were of a stage-production quality, but when Crossroads moved into ATV Centre (1970) those wobbles became no worse than any other TV show. (In fact I noticed a wobble in one of the sets on Coronation St a few months ago)

Was the 'so bad, its good' true? Well no, the cast and crew put in 110% into the programme, ATV were not exactly generous with cash, so maybe it did look cheap, however unless other soaps they were doing Crossroads five times a week on less cash than the rest so the fact they made anything at least half decent should be praised not knocked.

The show was a ground-breaker, but people prefer to knock it and insult its 17 million fans in the process. Crossroads made television history time and time again, yet how many people know of any of these feats?

Maybe the legend of the wobbles and the poor standards have actually stood the show well as even nearly 20 years after it disappeared everyone still knows of Crossroads.

Today compared with the poor Carlton version, the original Crossroads now stands out as a classic. The show boasted a host of stars, David Jason, Bob Monkhouse, Max Wall, Elaine Paige, Ken Dodd, Sue Nicholls and Johnny Briggs all stayed within the motel to name only a few.

The story lines at the time were said to be sometimes far fetched, but nothing compared to some that appeared later in Brookside or Coronation Street. Crossroads set the trend for real-life issue based plots, it also aimed to entertain. It was a family soap, something that is rare on television today. It wasn't afraid to be different, and it never gave in to the TV Critics, as Lord Lew Grade said, he made the show for the fans, not for the ATV cash generator or critics. Something ITV could learn from today. It might have been cheap but it was popular, and thats something many expensive shows have failed to be!