Encouraged by the success of EastEnders, this twice-weekly soap opera (with an omnibus edition on Saturday evening) launched in October 1987 as BBC Radio’s first new soap opera since Waggoners’ Walk and the first on Radio 4 since The Archers.
Episodes centred on the permanently bickering occupants of a ramshackle old house at 5 Limerick Road in the fictional South London borough of Ditcham Heath SW21, whose landlady Alex Parker (Kate Duchene) was an unmarried mother who worked at the local Bread Street Community Arts Centre.
Originally from Norwich, her wealthy East Anglian family owned the house.
Her lodgers, who had met her when they were all at college in Leicester, were Liverpudlian twins Julia and Michael Brennan (Beverly Hills and Russell Boulter) from an Irish Catholic family; Anita Sharma (Seeta Indrani), a doctor from a Hindu family in Birmingham; and Hugh Hamilton (James MacPherson), a yuppie merchant banker from Kilmarnock, who moved into one of the attic rooms.
The long-term sitting tenant, eccentric old Ernest Bond – who lived in the basement flat with his Siamese cat, Salome – was played by Brian Murphy from George and Mildred.
In later years, the series increasingly focused on the local bar, The Chariots of Fire – which allowed a rotating cast of boyfriends, colleagues, and South London locals to weave in and out of the stories – and a crime boss played by John Hollis.
Alexei Sayle made a guest appearance as himself in late 1989.
Critics, and most of the Radio 4 audience, found it grey, drab and miserable. Changes in the production team were to no avail, and the show was killed off in July 1991.
The writers abandoned realism for high-stakes drama to wrap up the series. The final months of the show featured a major kidnapping plotline that brought the housemates’ intersecting lives to a tense, theatrical climax.
Harvey Brough, former leader of the vocal jazz group Harvey and the Wallbangers, wrote the jangly signature tune.
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