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Crossroads is not a programme, it is a vacuum. A hole in the air, abhorrent to nature.

Nancy Banks-Smith, 1971

IF YOU WANT TO explore the fundamental differences between two cultures, take a look at how they handle their low entertainment. The soap opera, for instance. Its early American incarnation carried titles which were expansive, portentous, quasi-Biblical: Days of Our Lives, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Guiding Light. British afternoon serials, meanwhile, got the most humbly domestic of names: Honey Lane, Castle Haven and, most utilitarian of all, Crossroads.

An attempt by ATV to move into US-style daily serial territory, Crossroads was the culmination of Reg Watson’s quest to find a solid vehicle for his daytime star Noele Gordon. Hazel Adair and Peter Ling were hired to fashion a genteel Midlands milieu set in the fictional Warwickshire village of King’s Oak, paying special attention to the nearby Crossroads motel. Gordon was the motel’s widowed owner Meg Richardson, the head of a tiny dynasty including her son Sandy and hapless daughter Jill, and assorted managerial staff. Beneath the matinee idol leads were the Dickensian comic foils, led by line-fluffing cleaner Amy Turtle, later joined by short order cook Shughie McFee and simpleton handyman Benny Hawkins. Cast regulars and intransigent guests conspired to commit adultery, grand theft, murder, suicide – just about every misdemeanour aside from smoking, which was beyond the pale for a teatime slot.

Dispensing with ITV’s standard twice-a-week soap model, Crossroads went daily, its production team ripping through five twenty-minute episodes a week. (From 1967 they got Mondays off.) With such a punishing itinerary, the scripts – production line affairs under the guidance of a supervising story editor – were of necessity thriftily furnished with off-the-peg dialogue. ‘The sheer volume,’ admitted producer Phillip Bowman, ‘precludes excellence.’137 The odd Coronation Street-style gag still managed to appear amid the expository tundra. (‘What’s that? “Goulash Budapest”? Looks like “Shepherd’s Pie Walsall East” to me.’)

Then there were the plywood sets and the under-rehearsed acting. Props were mislaid, eyelines unmet, extras (literally, on the first transmission) prodded into life with sticks. In Nancy Banks-Smith’s opinion, ‘The Acocks Green Wavy Line Drama Group could probably put on a preferable performance.’138 There was also Tony Hatch’s strange theme tune, in which an electric guitar impersonates a doorbell, accompanied by a perfectly mismatched quartet of piano, harp, oboe and drums. And there was the odd inexplicable directorial flourish, such as the decision to open episodes with a prolonged close-up of a telephone, a half-eaten cucumber sandwich, or, on one Burns Night, a huge pile of sheep offal. This jumble of eccentricity gave the constant sense of a production obliviously strutting around with its flies undone.

The torrent of critical vitriol had no effect on Crossroads’ march from regional curio to national mainstay. In 1972, the recalcitrant northern ITV regions finally took the soap. By 1974, it matched and occasionally outflanked Coronation Street in ratings terms, peaking at roughly fifteen million viewers, with the Queen Mother and Harold Wilson’s wife Mary among its noted fans. It became a truly national programme on 1 April 1975, when the assorted regional stations synchronised their transmissions. ATV made special ‘catch-up’ programmes for the likes of Granada and Thames, who’d snootily let their screenings of the soap lag by the best part of a year.

With the entire country occupying the same time-zone, Meg Richardson and Hugh Mortimer had their marriage blessed in Birmingham Cathedral. This wasn’t the normal soap wedding, with forgotten rings, catering panics and a ghost from the past interrupting the ‘speak now’s. This was a full mock ceremony, shot as an outside broadcast, not a million miles from Princess Anne’s nuptial coverage a couple of years earlier. Soap royalty ruled for a day. A TV Times commemorative wedding brochure sold half a million copies.

Merchandise multiplied. In 1976, Crossroads became the first British TV show to have its own regular magazine: Crossroads Monthly was published by Felix Dennis of OZ infamy, with star profiles, a cookery column and a gatefold pin-up of Gordon. A roaring trade was also established around reproductions of a still life that hung on the wall of Meg’s bedroom.

One spin-off had dire repercussions. Paul McCartney, another star fan, recorded a keening stadium rock version of the Tony Hatch theme. Jack Barton, then series producer, decided it was good enough to replace the original in the programme proper. Huge mistake. ‘The Crossroads theme was bright and happy,’ fumed Martyn Finch of Croydon to TV Times. ‘Now it has plunged into insignificance. The rhythm has gone and the roll of the credits no longer fits the music.’ This was perceptive; the famous crossover credit rollers did indeed come and go in reasonably good time with the old doorbell theme, and McCartney’s theme upset the balance. After a few weeks of mass grievance, Hatch’s original made a triumphant return, with Macca reserved, as Barton explained, ‘for downbeat and dramatic, cliffhanging endings. I am hoping that Paul McCartney will write us another, more up-tempo, version of the Crossroads theme,’ he added hopefully.

In 1981, the glory faded with the termination of Noele Gordon’s contract: programme controller Charles Denton found the resulting correspondence ‘ranged from abuse to lumps of foreign matter’.139 On 11 November, after narrowly escaping death (‘Oh, my God! The motel! It’s on fire!’), Meg Richardson took her final bow in the QEII’s Queen Mary suite. Fans were beside themselves: ‘The girls on the switchboard have been trying to sympathise,’ reassured an ATV representative, ‘and have been telling them not to give up hope.’140

Crossroads soldiered on for another six and a half years, but successive revamps and tinkerings with the theme tune couldn’t stop its ultimate slide to an audience of a then paltry twelve million. It inspired few words but generated huge numbers. In a time before the posh papers found they could cheaply fill space by grabbing any piece of low culture that toddled along and hugging it to death in a giant set of inverted commas, Crossroads had a tremendous reach that was all but invisible to the media at large – the media still being dedicated, in Tom Stoppard’s words, to ‘preserving the distinction between serious work and carpentry.’141 But as Stoppard would have admitted, there’ll always be a market for stools.