When a new TV channel launches this week, viewers will see dramas such as Return of the Saint and Department S on the first night, followed by comedies Drop the Dead Donkey and Clive Anderson’s Whose Line Is it Anyway?
No, you didn’t fall through a wormhole and go back in time.
Instead, the makers of Rewind TV are trying to ride the nostalgia wave and bring back beloved, if rarely re-aired, hits. The channel, which will specialize in entertainment programs from the 1970s and 1980s, lands on Sky satellite services this week and its founders plan to expand to Freeview and Freesat in the near future.
It is the brainchild of Oscar Beuselinck and Jonathan Moore, two friends who work in video and DVD publishing. Other shows they plan to broadcast include Hancock (a precursor to the better known Hancock’s Half Hour, which hasn’t appeared since its ITV debut in 1963), The Zwedenbecke Affair and Hammer House of Horror.
Beuselinck and Moore, both 55, despair about the state of modern television. We’re speaking the day after the TV Bafta Awards, when some of the winners and nominees were dark crime dramas such as Happy Valley and The Sixth Commandment. “Personally, I find those gritty dramas insufferably painfully depressing,” says Beuselinck. “I’m not sure why you would look at them. “Oh, there’s another terrible murder.” ”
Moore thinks the streaming giants have started “algorithm-based commissioning,” using data to try to predict which premise, location, director and actors will guarantee a hit. Crime, especially true crime, does particularly well by these standards.
“That’s so formal. Humanity has lost,” he says, pointing to programs they air, such as Enn Rietel’s 1980s sitcom The Optimist and 1960s cult classic The Prisoner, as a way of showing how times have changed . “What’s so great about this one [old] shows that they are old-fashioned in terms of technology, but that it is also essentially human creativity. They’re people who write a good script, and it’s a decent actor without the benefit of a lot of CGI and special effects. It’s about the filmmaking and the actual photography and the scenery, and not about trickery. There’s something more human about that.”
Beuselinck thinks that if programs like Fawlty Towers were pitched today, they might never have made it to air because of the shift to data. “With a lot of modern productions, there’s a lot of lowest common denominator stuff going on, which means the slightly quirkier stuff might not get made,” he says.
One of the biggest potential pitfalls in putting together a nostalgic TV channel is navigating what can politely be described as changing attitudes towards women, ethnic minorities and gays. The added complication for Rewind TV is that Beuselinck and Moore plan to air shows in their original time slots, and what was once acceptable before the watershed may not be able to air before 9 p.m. today.
Shows like On the Buses can prove challenging in an Ofcom-regulated world. “It’s amazing that attitudes have changed so much that even what you consider completely innocent programs sometimes have attitudes toward women and racial stereotypes creeping in that are frankly not acceptable today,” Moore says. “But at the time, they were just the standard for pre-basin television broadcasting.”
The pair are determined not to censor the past, but Beuselinck says they “know the content that is really difficult and we probably wouldn’t want to touch it anyway.” People like Love Thy Neighbor say: “must go away quietly”.
Many of the shows they want to air are already on the Internet or on streaming services, although viewers will have to dig deep to find them. So why go to the trouble and expense of launching a linear TV channel? The pair believe there is a large market, especially among older people, who experience “choice paralysis” when confronted with the streamers’ rewards and desire a more curated offering.
“We want to have a channel where you’re pretty sure there’s something you want to see,” Moore says. “That’s our job: we are the human algorithm.”
Rewind TV is clearly part of the booming nostalgia industry for those sick of what terrestrial scheduling has to offer and who also don’t want to get on board with expensive streaming services. Established channels include That’s TV and Talking Pictures TV, which attract six million viewers every week.
“Talking Pictures is a great success and shows that it is possible,” says Beuselinck. “We were very encouraged by them.”
He adds that he doesn’t want Rewind to become a “cult channel” and plans to program mainstream hits on a schedule that will feel familiar to those watching for the first time. Above all, they want to recreate the shared experience that streaming all but destroyed.
As people whose careers have been built on selling videos and DVDs, Beuselinck and Moore are also aware that great TV will be lost as the streaming world continues to grow. “As physical media enters its final years, this content is disappearing and we are aware of that,” says Beuselinck. “We are by no means the saviors of classic television, but it is good and we just want to breathe new life into it.”
Beuselinck’s father is Paul Nicholas, the Just Good Friends actor currently treading the boards in the West End adaptation of Fawlty Towers. “He is very enthusiastic about the entire channel,” says Beuselinck. “Every time I speak to him, he comes up with a program that we should broadcast.” One of the programs Rewind TV will air soon after launch is Bust, the ITV comedy-drama in which Nicholas, now 79, plays a cycling dealer who goes bankrupt.
The pair had planned to launch the channel before the coronavirus pandemic hit, but had technical issues that slowed things down. Probably a good thing, because they “lost our shirt” due to the Covid-induced advertising crash, according to Beuselinck.
It has cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, including cash from family and friends, to reach this position. Much of the spending has gone into securing the rights to programs – many are relatively cheap, but it can be time-consuming for the pair to figure out who owns what decades after broadcast – and their technical infrastructure.
By contrast, Disney’s annual content budget is $25 billion (£20 billion), while Netflix’s is $15 billion. Even the BBC spends a whopping £2 billion every year. “We’re not a big company with deep pockets, so it’s quite a scary leap we’re making,” Moore says.
Rewind TV launches on Thursday 23 May on Sky channel 190