[Brekkie]

STV seem to be the only ones who make watching the credits so tough, other streaming services it's a single button press to stop the countdown, if not an option in the menu to disable autoplay entirely. If they only made it easy to keep watching the credits and streamed the video in 50fps, it would be perfect.

I know as a free streaming service, it's in their interests to keep people watching and promote other content, but they don't have to make the end credits all but impossible to watch to do that.

C4 themselves also don't have an option to get out of the credit squeeze, which is annoying on shows like Hollyoaks and Shameless that have post-credit scenes, especially as the squeeze often incorrectly overlays the credits rather than reduced the picture size.

[Scrotnig]

Actually, on watching the end of Episode Two again, the extra bit isn’t as long as it is on some later episodes - sometimes they played a couple of bars from the next “verse”, as heard on the 7” record.

Yes and episode 2 is different from episode 1.

Feels like they were still playing around with what works and what doesn’t. Though you might think they’d have worked out fairly straightforward details like that before the first episode went out.

[James2001]

While All4 might have an unavoidable squeeze, do they at least keep the credits running rather than have an unskippable countdown? That would at least be a step up from STV.

[chrisdafur]

While All4 might have an unavoidable squeeze, do they at least keep the credits running rather than have an unskippable countdown? That would at least be a step up from STV.

Works fine for me on a Chromecast, even plays adverts once the credits have finished.

[WillPS]

No, Brookside genuinely didn't use commercial music until 1999, it was all stuff done in house at Mersey.

Not entirely true. They licensed a single Cher song for Lindsay Corkhill to sing.... many times. They really got their money's worth!

The Mersey owned musak kept making appearances right to the final years too, although that difficult final year when they tried using their graveyard slots to make more cinematic style character focussed episodes features a lots of commercial music. I never want to hear Starsailor again.

[James2001]

They filmed their own stuff for showing on the TV too, I've already mentioned the infamous magic rabbits, bit there were a couple of other bits too. Meadowcroft Park being the most notable.

Though admittedly, even in other soaps, what you see on people's TVs is usually other programmes made by the same company, whereas I don't think Mersey made anything other than Brookside, so I guess they needed to make their own stuff, otherwise they'd have to pay to licence footage.

On The Bill, it always seemed to be Cosgrove Hall cartoons, especially Duckula and Dangermouse, on Emmerdale in the 90s it was quite frequently The Raggy Dolls, and Corrie in the late 90s and 00s seemed to use the same few CITV clips (complete with DOG, the pre-98 DOG popped up sometimes into the 00s)- Engie Benjie and Don't Eat The Neighbours cropped up for years, even though the latter had a very short run in real life. A real bias towards kids shows for some reason, even when it wasn't kids watching TV.

[James2001]

One thing I've been thinking of, Brookside went 3 times a week in 1990- quite early, Corrie was the only other soap 3 times a week at that point. I wonder if they'd gone 4 times a week in the late 90s, it might have helped the shows fortunes? Part of the problem by the time we got into the 00s was all the extra episodes of The Bill, Emmerdale, EastEnders and Corrie making it hard for Brookside to get a place in the schedules, maybe if they'd been able to introduce an extra episode before most of those shows expanded, maybe they'd have got a foot in the door and the other soaps would have had to work around Brookside, rather than the other way round.

[WillPS]

There was a handful of stories which were stripped and stranded over a week, every weeknight. I think the helicopter crash relaunch was the last such attempt, and before that there was a 'whodunnit' tied with Suzanne's departure.

I can only guess these were attempts to see if a daily soap was viable.

[James2001]

Just been able to try the STV Player app on a Samsung Smart TV, and interestingly, a "watch credits" option does appear on there. Whether it's a new addition or not, I don't know (the app has had a new update today according to the Samsung appstore), but I'm here till Friday, so will be welcome for the next batch of episodes on Wednesday.

Still not there on the Virgin Media app though, hopefully it appears soon.

[Brekkie]

One thing I've been thinking of, Brookside went 3 times a week in 1990- quite early, Corrie was the only other soap 3 times a week at that point. I wonder if they'd gone 4 times a week in the late 90s, it might have helped the shows fortunes? Part of the problem by the time we got into the 00s was all the extra episodes of The Bill, Emmerdale, EastEnders and Corrie making it hard for Brookside to get a place in the schedules, maybe if they'd been able to introduce an extra episode before most of those shows expanded, maybe they'd have got a foot in the door and the other soaps would have had to work around Brookside, rather than the other way round.

I don't think so really - the BBC didn't think twice about putting EastEnders in Brooksides slot on the Monday, forcing it to move to Tuesday according to the varous wikis (though I thought it had a stint on Mondays at 8.30).     Can't find any ratings history at the moment but I thought Brookie was still rating pretty strong in the mid-90s - not at the level of EastEnders and Corrie of course, but significantly enough that you'd have thought it would be a factor in scheduling against it. 

It probably made more sense for C4 and indeed Mersey TV to split the risk and commission Hollyoaks in 1995 than to add further episodes of Brookside.   If Hollyoaks had failed they might have added a fourth episode of Brookside, but of course that's not how things panned out and although Brookside ultimately came to an end the production company (through Lime Pictures now) is still providing C4 with it's flagship soap 20 years after their original came to an end.