Markup View

Author: AgPrv

Nov 25th 2011 at 6:46:51 AM

In the 1950's - 1970's, British media mogul Lord Lew Grade was notorious for this. Known as "Low" Grade for the questionable output of some of his work, he viewed popular enertainment as a matter of making money by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Indeed, he insisted his ABC and ITC production studios, which controlled large swathes of the ITV network, shoe-horn American leads into just about everything, so as to make it easier to sell the shows to the lucrative North American market. He was frequently reminded that he had a statutory duty to produce TV shows that were tailored to the needs and interests of the British viewer first and foremost, that he should produce British shows for British TV, and that any sales to the USA afterwards were a bonus (and would indeed sell if the quality were good enough). Grade dismissed this as a hopelessly naive point of view. Indeed, he was responsible for nurturing Gerry Anderson's expensive-to-produce sci-fi puppet shows with guaranteed screenings on British TV - provided the main characters had American accents. Thunderbirds was designed from the start  with US resale in mind - hence the Tracy family.  Grade's other big TV success was The Muppet Show - parodied by one British comedy as "always guest-starring some unfunny untalented American who you've never ever heard of".

This attitude ran in the family: his son Michael Grade rose to be a senior executive with the BBC, who made himself most unpopular by killing off a long-running sci-fi series that had outlasted its time and run out of ideas. It's name - "Dr Who".