Eldorado: the sun-and-sangria soap that became a byword for TV failure Where did it all go wrong for Eldorado, the BBC’s soap about ex-pats in Spain that launched 25 years ago […]

Where did it all go wrong for Eldorado, the BBC’s soap about ex-pats in Spain that launched 25 years ago this week?

Sun, sea, sex and sangria on the Costa del Sol.

Just the televisual tonic for Britain in 1992, as it emerged from a two-year recession. Or so the BBC thought when it commissioned Eldorado.

Having filled the 7pm slot previously occupied by Terry Wogan’s chat show for a decade, the costly new soap opera lasted just 156 episodes, after viewers headed for Departures in their droves.

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The opening lyrics of the full vocal theme tune put it best: “It was over, before it had begun.”

Premiering on 6 July, 1992, Eldorado was pitched as an antidote to the Albert Square angst of EastEnders, with BBC producers believing that a thrice-weekly dose of escapism would be a ratings winner.

Doomed from the opening credits

The problem was, despite ploughing £10 million of licence fee payers’ money into the show, set in the fictional town of Los Barcos and originally titled “Little England”, Eldorado suffered from implausible plotting, dubious acting and technical sound problems (an issue the BBC seems to be plagued by to this day).

Incredibly for such a major launch, several cast members were untrained, or had very limited experience – apparently because producers were seeking an air of ‘realism’.

Kai Maurer, who played Dieter Schultz, had only appeared in small parts on stage and screen, and was singled out for criticism.

And looking back, the decision to include snippets of dialogue in Spanish, French and even Swedish without subtitles was unlikely to go down well back home.

As if all this wasn’t enough to guarantee disaster, on its launch night, after an expensive advertising campaign, Eldorado also suffered at the hands of ITV, which scheduled a special hour-long edition of the national institution that is Coronation Street, in a spiteful but successful attempt to gazump the ex-pat upstart.

Cancelled too soon?

Despite these considerable teething problems there were still many fans dismayed when the new BBC1 controller Alan Yentob decided to axe the soap in March 1993.

It sailed off into the sunset (literally, in the case of Marcus and Pilar) almost exactly a year after its debut.

The official reason given was poor ratings, and it was frequently well short of its target audience of ten million. But then again, soap operas can take years to build loyalty and become a fixed part of the schedule that viewers watch through force of habit.

Yentob later told the Guardian: “I didn’t take Eldorado off because it only had an audience of four to five million. I took it off because it wasn’t good enough and it was misconceived.”

But the ratings did improve after a desperate revamp, and the final episode of Eldorado was watched by more than ten million viewers.

The Eldorado lesson

Since its ill-fated experiment, the BBC has not launched a new soap opera in the past 25 years (unless you count its Australian commission Out of the Blue, which only ran for one series in 2008).

Yentob assumed that by killing off the show, the Beeb would swiftly emerge intact from its Spanish debacle. But even that wasn’t to be.

The £2 million purpose-built set in the hills near Malaga, and all of its high-tech equipment, was effectively written off, and eight of the cast took the corporation to court over alleged unpaid wages.

Today, the set remains a ghost town, a kind of Pompeii-style warning from history for TV commissioners everywhere. It briefly became a hotel but even that didn’t last.

As for Yentob’s decision to wield the axe, Polly Perkins, who played Trish Valentine, knew where to point the finger.

“The BBC have been very good to me lately,” she told the Eldorado Revisited blog in 2013. “But I feel that Alan Yentob was entirely the wrong person to be in charge. He’s an artsy-fartsy person, who prefers to be in front of the cameras by the look of it, doing intellectual programmes – which I do enjoy – but what has a man like that got to do with soap?”

While some lament its demise, Eldorado has become a byword for expensive failure.

And even after its demise the soap couldn’t escape the satirical cross-hairs of Chris Morris’ The Day Today, and its mock soap ‘The Bureau’.

In 2013, Julie Fernandez, who played Vanessa Lockhead, and would later appear in The Office, told the BBC that the time was ripe for an Eldorado revival.

“The thing that people loved about Eldorado was the sunshine, and the sense of escapism,” she said. “They should bring it back. I’d definitely think about doing it.”

And while the thought of a post-Brexit Eldorado sounds like it could have a fair degree of dramatic tension, it looks like the last word on the soap will always belong to Marcus Tandy.

As he sailed off with Pilar, his final line was a thinly-veiled dig at the BBC: “You can’t trust anyone these days, can you?”