Like Crossroads and Triangle, Eldorado became a byword in the 90s for bad TV programmes. In a way particularly early on this is probably true. The first episodes of the show were not good. A lot of the cast were inexperienced actors (or indeed non actors before this show) and there were issues with sound and video quality as they were shooting in real physical buildings and not indoor sets built inside a studio. This meant everything echoed a lot and quite often the lighting was a bit dark. As a British soap, albeit set and shot in Spain they also had the strange idea of the foreign characters speaking in their native language. Realistic - yes, but difficult for a show going out in an English speaking country, particularly as these bits of dialogue were also not subtitled!
Some of the early storylines were fairly awful to watch. That in particular of middle aged Bunny Charleson coming back to Spain with his 17 year old wife Fizz - it was just uncomfortable! Poor Kathy Pitkin who played Fizz bore the brunt of a lot of the criticism from the British press. True, she wasn't the best actress, but looking at it now she's no worse than a lot of current young British soap stars and given more of a chance I think she would have grown into the role and improved. Its very telling Eldorado is her one and only acting credit to this day.
As ratings went down and vitriol from the press continued the producer left and the replacement immediately set about removing many of the poorer actors, stopping the foreign language sections, rounding out characters better, adding better storylines and improving production techniques. These actions vastly improved the show and ratings began to go up.
The favourite and probably best characters and storylines came from those of playboy Marcus Tandy (with his enormous mobile phone and Renault Alpine) and his girlfriend, runaway stable hand Pilar. Washed up club singer Trish (Polly Perkins) and her good friend bar owner Joy had great chemistry and also got some quite dramatic and dark storylines for a 7pm soap opera.
For completeness of soap character archetypes you had the seemingly "cosy" Lockhead family, nosy neighbour Olive King, the very sophisticated Leduc family where the parents had their open marriage, as well as an actual Spanish family who had a few secrets of their own, including a very well done gay relationship storyline which was handled quite sensitively and was unusual for UK TV at the time.
Unfortunately all the improvements couldn't save the show as new BBC One director Alan Yentob made axing the show his first task in his then new role. The final episode sailed out into the sunset quite literally almost a year to the day the first episode was shown.
Looking back, yes the show had its problems early on but they were well on the way to being fixed, and towards the end Eldorado was getting what these days would be considered extremely healthy ratings - up to 10 million. I wonder if almost 30 years on if things had been different and the show had continued what would it be like now? I guess we will never know. I was a teenager when it was first on, and am now in my 40s. I enjoyed it then, and having re-watched it more recently I still enjoy it.
