When a new TV channel launches this week, on the first night viewers will watch series such as Return of the Saint and Department S, followed by comedies Drop the Dead Donkey and Clive Anderson’s Whose Line Is It Anyway? will watch.
No, you didn’t fall into a wormhole and go back in time.
Instead, the creators of Rewind TV aim to ride the nostalgia wave and bring back beloved, rarely re-released hits. The channel, which will specialize in entertainment programs from the 1970s and 1980s, will launch 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 programs they plan to air include Hancock (predecessor to Hancock’s Half Hour, better known since its ITV debut in 1963), The Beiderbecke Affair and Hammer House of Horror.
Beuselinck and Moore, both 55, despair at the state of modern television. We’re talking the day after the TV Bafta awards, where many of the winners and nominees were dark crime dramas such as Happy Valley and The Sixth Commandment. “I personally find these gritty dramas excruciatingly demoralizing,” says Beuselinck. “I’m not sure why you’re watching them. ‘Oh, there’s another terrible murder.’ ”
Moore thinks the streaming giants are trying to “deploy the algorithm” and use data to predict which venue, location, director and actors will guarantee a hit. Crime, especially true crime, performs particularly well by these measures.
“This is very formulaic. Humanity has lost,” he says, pointing to the shows they aired, such as Enn Rietel’s 1980s sitcom The Optimist and the 1960s cult classic The Prisoner, as a way of showing how times have changed. “What’s nice about these? [old] What is shown is that they are old school in terms of technology, but also fundamentally human creativity. People write a good script and it’s well acted without the benefit of a bunch of CGI and special effects. This is filmmaking and real photography and scenery rather than any gimmicks. There’s something a little more human about it.”
Beuselinck thinks that if shows like Fawlty Towers were made today, they might never be released due to the focus on data. “A lot of modern productions have a lot of lowest common denominator stuff going on, which means things that are a little weirder might not get done,” he says.
One of the biggest potential pitfalls when curating a nostalgic TV channel is navigating what can be politely described as changing attitudes towards women, ethnic minorities and gays. The added complication for Rewind TV is that Beuselinck and Moore plan to air the shows in their original timeslots, and what was once acceptable before the watershed may not air until 9pm today.
Shows like On the Buses can be challenging in an Ofcom-regulated world. “It’s surprising that attitudes have changed so much that even shows that you think are completely harmless sometimes have attitudes towards women and racial stereotypes that are frankly unacceptable these days,” says Moore. “But in those days, they were managed in an ordinary way for pre-watershed television broadcast.”
The pair are determined not to censor the past, but Beuselinck says they “know the really difficult content and we probably won’t touch it anyway.” Those who like Love Thy Neighbor should “go quietly,” he says.
Many of the shows they plan to release are already available online or on streaming services, but viewers will have to dig deeper to find them. So why go to the effort and expense of launching a linear TV channel? The duo think there’s a big market, especially among older people who experience “choice paralysis” when faced with the blessings offered by broadcasters and long for a more exclusive offer.
“We want to have a channel where you can almost guarantee it will be something you want to watch,” Moore says. “This is our job: we are the human algorithm.”
Rewind TV is part of the booming nostalgia industry for those tired of what terrestrial programming has to offer, and it also doesn’t side with expensive streaming services. Established channels include That’s TV and Talking Pictures TV, which receives six million viewers each week.
“Talking Pictures is a huge success and shows you that it can be done,” says Beuselinck. “We got a lot of encouragement from them.”
He adds that he doesn’t want Rewind to be a “cult channel” and plans to program mainstream hits in a schedule that’s familiar to first-time viewers. First of all, they are looking for ways to recreate the common experience that flow has destroyed.
Beuselinck and Moore, whose careers have been built on selling videos and DVDs, understand that some of the great TV shows will be lost as the streaming world continues to grow. “As physical media enters its decline years, this content is disappearing, and we are conscious of this,” says Beuselinck. “We’re not the saviors of classic television by any means, but it’s good and we want to give it new life.”
Beuselinck’s father is Just Good Friends actor Paul Nicholas, who is currently starring in the West End adaptation of Fawlty Towers. “He’s very excited about the whole channel,” says Beuselinck. “Every time I talk to him, he comes up with a show we need to release.” One of the shows to air shortly after Rewind TV’s launch is ITV comedy drama Bust, in which Nicholas, now 79, plays a bankrupt peddler.
The duo was planning to open the channel before the coronavirus outbreak started, but was delaying things due to technical problems. Probably so, because, according to Beuselinck, the advertising collapse caused by Covid meant they would “lose our shirts”.
It took hundreds of thousands of pounds, including cash from family and friends, to get into this position. Most of the spending has been on securing the rights to the shows – most of them relatively cheap but figuring out who owns what decades after broadcast can be time-consuming for the couple – and their technical infrastructure.
By comparison, Disney’s annual content budget is $25bn (£20bn), while Netflix’s is $15bn. Even the BBC spends just shy of £2bn every year. “We’re not a big company with a lot of turnover, so the step we’re taking is pretty scary,” says Moore.
Rewind TV starts on Thursday 23 May on Sky channel 190