Sun, sea and subtitles – how Eldorado became TV's biggest flop – The Guardian

It was made in a rush in the stifling Spanish heat, the cast included a passing teenage beach bum – and it costa packet. Eldorado was meant to be the new EastEnders – but 25 years since it was axed, it’s still a byword for disaster
Kai Maurer didn’t know that bleaching his hair would change his life. It was 1992 and the 18-year-old German was bumming around in southern Spain, searching for sun and all the other Ss. He dyed his long brown hair blond for a bet.
Next thing he knew, a British TV production was looking to cast a young, blond German for some filming they were doing in the area. Kai went along. He hadn’t really done any acting before, but he’d played the trumpet as a kid, he’d been on a stage. And the audition went well, he got the part. In Eldorado.
“I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” Maurer tells me today, over a quarter of a century on. “They were all going, ‘This is for the BBC, it’s going to be big like EastEnders, do you have any inkling how big?’ And I said, ‘No idea. I don’t even know what the BBC is.’”
Eldorado’s final episode was broadcast 25 years ago this week. Today the soap opera, said to have cost the BBC £10m, is synonymous with extravagant fiasco. As in, be careful, it could all go Eldorado; or we might have an Eldorado on our hands. The BBC hasn’t commissioned an open-ended soap since.
It started so hopefully. The early 90s saw peak ratings cold war between the superpowers. ITV had Coronation Street and Emmerdale, the BBC just EastEnders. With the government breathing down its neck, the Beeb needed to add a cruise missile to its arsenal, in order to increase its market share, justify the licence fee, and perhaps its very existence.
There was a competition, and a winner: EastEnders creator Tony Holland’s idea about expat Brits living in Spain. It had the key ingredients of a good soap: a sense of real community, of claustrophobia and isolation. There would be Germans and Scandinavians around the place, but it would centre on the Brits who brought their country with them. Little England was the original name.
Tony Jordan, then a rookie writer on EastEnders, was brought in by Holland: he wrote Eldorado’s very first episode. Jordan remembers the hype growing until “at some point the commercial people started thinking, ‘Hang on, we’re part of Europe now, this could be the first Eurosoap, that could play not just in the UK but all over Europe.’ It became bastardised, those other nationalities were not on the periphery, they were in the centre. You had all these people tying themselves in knots in this kind of Europudding.”
Jordan also talks about the terrible rush. Transmission was dragged forward to throw a curveball at ITV. The entire village they were building in Spain at a cost of £2m was hardly ready; casting was rushed. As well as established actors, unknowns were hired – people like Kai Maurer. It couldn’t be called Little England any more, so it became Eldorado. The first episode aired on 6 July 1992 – and it was awful.
The critics hated it. The Guardian’s Nancy Banks-Smith said it had “the look of a situation comedy whose laughter track has been lost” and wished for a tidal wave to wash the whole thing away. The punters hated it, too. The first episode had an audience appreciation index of 37, among the worst in memory. They’d hoped for 10 million viewers, but by the end of the first month the Friday episode (Eldorado originally went out three times a week) got just 2.8 million – fewer than Panorama. A year later the show that was supposed to save the Beeb’s ass was axed.
Patricia Brake, who played Gwen Lockhead and was involved for the duration, agrees that “greed probably ruined it. In the old days you had just one producer who took control. Now everything is done by committee. [The decision] to make it sort of European, I think that happened round a table somewhere.”
Brake thinks the show was too ambitious, that it should have started more gently. But soon it was going out five times a week. “We were told we would have siestas in the afternoon, because we were terribly hot, and I remember one cameraman falling over because they were working so hard in the great heat.”
She wasn’t convinced by the policy of hiring unknowns. “Some of the casting was unbelievably bad, considering how much talent we have in this country,” she says. Brake, who had worked with the RSC alongside Judi Dench and Ian Richardson, was now starring with Kai the German beach bum. Hey, he had been on stage, too, remember, even if it was only to blow his trumpet. Actually, if you look back at Eldorado now Kai is by no means the worst.
Kai’s lines were in English. Some of the other actors spoke their own languages – Spanish, Swedish, Danish – which might have been authentic but also meant that most viewers didn’t know what the hell they were saying. Subtitles were added later, though a primetime popular audience wasn’t ready for them in the early 90s. “I think it may well have been ahead of its time,” says Kai. “Multiculturalism, there you have it, God knows how many different European nationalities under one roof.”
Even the English bits weren’t always easy to understand – the sound quality was terrible. It turned out that a very expensive, purpose-built Spanish village had very echoey acoustics. The set still stands on the Costa Del Sol; it’s used for paintballing.
In spite of the stick it was getting, everyone I speak to who worked on it has fond memories of Eldorado. It might have been hard work, and not very good, but it was a lot of fun. Derek Martin, who played a gangster with a yacht, says the drive to work from his villa in the village of Mijas to the set, was the best he’s ever done. “We were all sad that it packed in,” he says. “The reason was because Mr Alan Yentob went to BBC One. If it had failed, it would’ve been his baby. But at the time it was shut down, it was getting eight million viewers. That should’ve been a licence to go again.”
Eight million in 1993, when most viewers had a choice of four channels, wasn’t as many as eight million is today, but it’s a lot more than 2.8 million. A new producer had been brought in, new actors hired, some of the worst non-actors fired; Eldorado had, to some extent, been turned around. Now it wasn’t really really bad, just not very good. And not very good wasn’t good enough for the new head of BBC One.
So what does Yentob, who inherited Eldorado from his predecessor Jonathan Powell, have to say for himself? “There had been chaos up there, problems on the set, a change of producer, lots of things weren’t working. We saw costs not coming down, and I had other things in mind that would have been difficult to achieve given the investment in Eldorado.”
Plus it was awful? “It was, and there you are. But when people are losing their jobs, it’s difficult to be that negative. I gave it a bit of a chance for a few weeks, looked at whether it was potentially going to get better. But, despite the fact it had a good producer, she couldn’t rehabilitate it, so, yes, I cancelled it.” Nancy’s tidal wave had finally arrived, in the form of Alan Yentob.
Protests ensued from angry fans. “The stick has not stopped,” Yentob says. “People have been campaigning for it to be revived for such a long time. I’m sure people are sticking pins into pictures of me day and night. Which they are anyway.”Martin, who went on to play Charlie Slater in EastEnders, has heard rumours of an Eldorado reprise. Now 85, would he go back? “Right now, this minute.”
For Brake, just 76, it might not have been the long-term, mortgage-busting job she’d hoped it was going to be. “I think it was the end of my career really. Everything I’m proud of I did before.” But she’s not bitter; it worked out well for her personally. If she’d stayed in Spain, she wouldn’t have met her husband.
As for Maurer, it was something of a beginning. “I did it the wrong way round didn’t I?” he laughs. “I then went to the UK and I studied acting. I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to see what this is all about, see if I can improve anything.’ What has improved is I don’t sound German any more.”
Not as German anyway. The acting lasted a while, but he found the only parts he was getting were comedy Germans or Nazis. He got tired of trying to impress casting directors: it was never as easy as it was that first time in Spain. He stayed in Britain, but changed career. Twenty-five years after the sun went down on Eldorado, Kai’s a flying instructor at Rochester airport, overlooking the River Medway in Kent.
Oh and Jordan, who went on to become one of the biggest names in television writing, thinks it would be a good idea to bring it back. “Drama is a very crowded space,” he says. “We’re constantly looking for things that will make a noise, bring in an audience. If there was a broadcaster brave enough and smart enough to do a version of Eldorado, they’d get an immediate audience, though to keep them they’d have to give them a good show.” Over to you, broadcasters.

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