Soap Opera – 1960’s

‘Swinging Britain’
 Swinging Britain –
The 1960’s

Coronation Street

Bet Gilroy (née Lynch)

from a 1994 episode

Ken Barlow in first Deirdre Rachid being

episode;1960 jailed in 1998
Crossroads

TELLY’S famous Crossroads motel is now the

setting for X-rated scenes ? starring
Scandinavian hookers.
The Thistle Hotel in Cheltenham, Gloucs, was used
as the outside of the fictional Crossroads and
featured in the show’s opening credits.
The soap, starring dozy Benny and Miss Diane, ran
from 1964-88, then was axed in 2003 after a brief
revival. (The Sun March 2007)
 Events of 1960
• U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA) announces his candidacy for the Democratic nomination

for President.
• France tests its first atomic bomb in the Sahara

• A Soviet missile shoots down an American Lockheed U2 spy plane; the pilot Francis Gary
Powers is captured.

• Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 5 , with the dogs Belka and Strelka
(Russian for "Squirrel" and "Little Arrow"), 40 mice, 2 rats and a variety of plants. The spacecraft
returns to earth the next day and all animals are recovered safely.

• December 9 - French President Charles de Gaulle’s visit to Algeria is marked by bloody riots by
European and Muslim mobs in Algeria's largest cities, killing 127 people.

• December 9 - First Episode of long-running drama Coronation Street airs. It was originally
planned to be a 16 part drama but became such a success that it is still running 5 times or more
per week.
 Crossroads
• Crossroads was a UK soap series which
originally ran during the 1960s and 70s
based on a motel in the middle of
England, somewhere around Birmingham
in a fictional village called Kings Oak. The
series was produced in the ATV television
studios, based in Birmingham and was on
in the early evening 5 nights a week.
 Crossroads
• The motel was run by Meg Richardson (Noele Gordon), daughter Jill (Jane Rossington) and son
Sandy (Roger Tonge). The guests either said nothing at all (cheap, like the mute barmaid who
did nothing but grin between 1978 and 1986), or stayed three months, the standard length of a
contract for the series (indeed, even the regulars were only on three month contracts, which
explains a lot of mysterious disappearences for lengths of time divisible by three months).
• Other staff included various chefs (Carlos, Shughie McFee) and waitresses (Miss Diane) and
there was a cleaning lady - the gossip centre of the motel, Amy Turtle . The manageress of the
local post office, Miss Tatum who always wore tweed skirts, hair in a bun. Who could forget
Benny (Paul Henry - for a photo see The Sweeney - Famous People in Series 1) who apparently
owned a dog called Moses, a goat called Starry and a donkey named Miss Diane. (Thanks goes
to Angie Welford for these last two items of information) In later years there was a garage, run by
Jill's first husband, Stan Harvey who left for Germany after Jill had an affair with her own step-
brother, Anthony Mortimer. .
• In the 70's Meg appointed a General Manager - Adam Chance. After Noele Gordon was sacked
from the show (causing a public outcry in the UK), a husband and wife team David and Barbera
Hunter (played by Ronald Allen and Sue Lloyd) took over the role of managers. The show then
seemed to go into a decline or at least some major cast changes - finally the last managers were
Nicola Freeman, played by Gabrielle Drake (sister of Nick Drake) and the very last one was
Tommy "Bomber" Lancaster, played by Terence Rigby.
• Theme music was by Tony Hatch and Paul McCartney & Wings did a memorable version on an
LP - Venus And Mars which was often used as an episode closer, particularly if that episode had
a particularly poignant ending.
 Crossroads
• During its original run the show was usually only 20 minutes long excluding commercials. To save time,
there was no opening sequence, simply a title caption over the start of the first scene, accompanied by
brief theme music.
• The closing titles originally consisted of two superimposed roller captions, one vertical and one horizontal.
As one credit would roll off screen vertically the next would roll on horizontally, and vice-versa,
symbolising the show's title.
• Until the mid- 1980s the show would always end with a brief post-credits scene in which a character would
speak a single line of dramatic dialogue, before the final bar of theme tune played over the closing
ATV/Central logo. This has since been emulated by other soaps, notably Hollyoaks, which it continues to
do so, and for a brief period during the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Emmerdale used post-credits scenes.
• In the 70s, Wings recorded an alternative arrangement of the show's theme music which was meant to be
played over the closing credits whenever the show ended on a particularly dramatic cliffhanger. This
version appeared as the last track on the album Venus and Mars.
• Roger Tonge (Sandy Richardson) was a cousin of Dale Griffin, drummer of heavy rock band Mott the
Hoople.
• The show was parodied in "Acorn Antiques", a spoof soap opera which was a regular sketch on Victoria
Wood As Seen On TV, screened in the mid-1980s. It is now a hit musical touring Britain. Victoria Wood is
a member of the Crossroads Appreciation Society, and sometimes uses this fact in her jokes.
• Jane Rossington and Tony Adams also played their characters in sequences for BBC2 theme night during
the early 1990s, set in a recreation of the Motel lobby.
• The majority of surviving episodes are stored at Yorkshire Television in Leeds, others are kept at the
British Film Institute in Bradford.
• The earliest surviving episode of Crossroads is episode 126, from 1965. It was found in an old tin in May
2008 by an ATV employee.
• http://www.notwen.net/cr/croads.htm