Compact is a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
televisionTelevision is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
soap operaA soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
shown by the
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
between 1962 and 1965. The series was created by Hazel Adair and
Peter LingPeter Ling was a British writer in many media, but best known for his work in television, where he was the co-creator of the soap opera Crossroads....
, who together went on to devise
Crossroads.
In comparison to the
kitchen sink realismKitchen sink realism is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement which developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose 'heroes' usually could be described as angry young men...
of
Coronation StreetCoronation Street is a British soap opera set in Weatherfield, a fictional town in Greater Manchester based on Salford. Created by Tony Warren, Coronation Street was first broadcast on 9 December 1960...
,
Compact was a distinctly middle-class serial, set in the more "sophisticated" arena of magazine publishing. An early "avarice" soap, it took the viewer into the business workplace, and aligned the professional lives of the characters with more personal storylines.
The show was scheduled for broadcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, thus avoiding a clash with ITV's
Coronation Street on Mondays and Wednesdays.
When
Compact began, the editor was a woman, yet it wasn't long before she was replaced by Ian Harmon (
Ronald AllenRonald John Allen was an English character actor who achieved the status of a soap opera star.Allen was born in Reading, Berkshire...
), the son of the magazine's editor.
Morris BarryMorris Barry was born in Northampton and was a noticeable figure on the production side of the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s....
, a some-time actor and BBC director - he directed several
Doctor WhoDoctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...
stories in the 1960s - took over as producer and was given a brief to spice the series up in view of the criticisms it had received from the national press. Although there were protestations about a suicide using a gas fire, and scenes of children smoking drugs, both critics and the public remained indifferent to the show, and the BBC, never comfortable with the concept of soap opera (at the time they considered it to be the realm of independent television), quietly dropped the series.
Ronald AllenRonald John Allen was an English character actor who achieved the status of a soap opera star.Allen was born in Reading, Berkshire...
went on to star in ATV soap opera
Crossroads from 1969 to 1985.
Marcia AshtonMarcia Ashton is an actress best known for her soap opera roles as Lily in Compact and as Jean Crosby in Brookside....
, who played Lily, appeared in
BrooksideBrookside is a defunct British soap opera set in Liverpool, England. The series began on the launch night of Channel 4 on 2 November 1982, and ran for 21 years until 4 November 2003...
many years later.
Carmen SilveraCarmen Blanche Silvera was a Canadian-born British comic actress of Spanish-Jewish descent who moved to Coventry with her family when she was a child...
played the role of Madame Edith Artois in the
British sitcomA British sitcom tends, as it does in most other countries, to be based on a family, workplace or other institution, where the same group of contrasting characters is brought together in each episode. Unlike American sitcoms, where twenty or more episodes in a season is the norm, British sitcoms...
'Allo 'Allo from 1982 to 1992. The director David Giles went on to have a highly distinguished television career.
Only a handful of episodes exist in the BBC archive: there are in fact as few as four surviving episodes out of the original run of 373. (See
WipingWiping or junking is a colloquial term for action taken by radio and television production and broadcasting companies, in which old audiotapes, videotapes, and telerecordings , are erased, reused, or destroyed after several uses...
)
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