Richmond Hill (TV series): Difference between revisions

This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Richmond Hill" TV series – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Richmond Hill is an Australian television soap opera made in 1988 by the Reg Grundy Organisation for the Ten Network. It was devised by Reg Watson who also created Neighbours. It debuted on 27 January 1988 in a two-hour episode on Network 10 at 7.30pm. The series was only moderately successful and was cancelled on 22 June 1988. A total of 91 episodes were produced.

Whereas Neighbours was set in Melbourne, this series was set in a small fictional Australian country town near Sydney and most of the scenes revolved around the local police station, a real estate agency, and the pub. The serial drew comparisons to the hugely popular Seven Network soap operas, A Country Practice and Cop Shop. The programme was produced in Sydney, some location shooting took place in Mona Vale, New South Wales. Connie Ryan's house in the series was in Berryman Street, North Ryde NSW.

The cast was intentionally made up of experienced soap actors in a bid to secure immediate success. Well-known names included Maggie Kirkpatrick, Amanda Muggleton, Paula Duncan and Tim Elston from Prisoner. Popular veteran actress, Gwen Plumb, famous for her long-running role as Ada Simmonds in The Young Doctors, starred as Mum Foote. There were also several actors from Sons and Daughters, including Tom Richards, Rona Coleman, Angela Kennedy and Michael Long, as well as an assortment of young beginners, Ashley Paske, Emily Symons (pre Home and Away), Marc Gray, and Melissa Tkautz, all made their TV debuts in the series. Former comedy star Ross Higgins of Kingswood Country played the central role of the local police officer and family man Dan Costello.

Richmond Hill was broadcast on Network Ten in an evening timeslot 19:30–20:30 as two one-hour episodes each week on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

The series, although quite popular, was considered a lukewarm success in the Australian ratings, and was cancelled after six months in June 1988, and ended abruptly at episode 92 later that year. The decision came as a shock to producers, not least due to the fact that key actors contracts had just been extended for another year. As a result, the actors continued to be paid even though the series was no longer in production. There was not a definitive conclusion to the series because production was expected to continue. A final blow was the series had just been sold to the ITV network in the UK the very week it was axed in Australia, but ITV still aired all the episodes.

The UK's ITV bought Richmond Hill in June 1988, encouraged by the huge success of its sister-series Neighbours on the BBC. ITV decided to show Richmond Hill in a daytime Wednesday and Thursday 14:00 slot and it began 5 October 1988. In a first for ITV, an Australian soap opera was to be shown on the same day, at the same time, across all but one of the 14 ITV regional companies. It is not known whether Richmond Hill was ever intended to be a networked primetime series on ITV, but Network Ten's cancellation of Richmond Hill seemingly resulted in ITV losing interest in the series and its mid-afternoon timeslot meant that it didn't achieve anywhere near the audience figures that Neighbours, was achieving in its tea-time slot over on BBC One.

As a consequence of the serial being cancelled in Australia, Granada Television never followed the rest of the ITV network, and started to screen the series weekly from 20 October 1988, choosing to screen A Country Practice in the Thursday slot instead. In 1990 the series was moved to a Sunday and didn't finish until spring 1991.

Central Television also broke away from the network screenings in January 1989, eventually falling behind the rest of the network by dropping to one episode a week towards the end of its run. The majority of ITV regions resumed A Country Practice as its replacement, with regional UK viewers now considerably behind Australia and at varying parts of the storyline.

Richmond Hill was last screened in the UK in the mid-1990s on cable & satellite channel Wire TV (hosted by Femi Oke and co hosted Chris Stacey with guest presenters Darren Edwards, and Darren Gray), it was screened back to back with USA soap The Bold and the Beautiful, before Wire TV was finally axed in 1994.

Grundy also sold the soap to German television channel Pro 7, and Richmond Hill was dubbed into German. It was aired twice a week from 1991 to 1992.

As of March 2021, there has been no DVD Release of Richmond Hill.

• Aussie Soap Archive: Richmond Hill
• Richmond Hill at the National Film and Sound Archive