As my title says, it started off quite well, but constant character changes and a general lack of material to work with effectively killed the show.
Personally the show started going awkward for me when Paul Smith was replaced as 'Simon' - Christopher Mayer was ok but he never quite made it for me. And this was right in the early seasons.
Anyway, aside from that, the show was pretty good until in the space of 1 season or so Debbie, Simon and Nudge (practically half the main cast) just disappeared and were replaced. The biggest problem here was not that they were replaced but rather their replacements were almost IDENTICAL to the earlier characters. Ben was Simon with a bit of Nudge thrown in. Arthur was also a bit of Nudge. Samantha was Debbie.
Needless to say that after this the show started going downhill quite rapidly. Even the replacement of Martin Kelly was for naught because Greg Russell was (surprise surprise) yet another identical replacement. If you're going to replace characters, please make them DIFFERENT. Making them practically identical to the originals only serves to remind us of how good the original cast was compared to the current one.
The only character that stayed with the show throughout was Betty (Jenny doesn't count because she was played by 2 different actresses, who both played her differently), which was pretty sad. Betty may have been funny at first but in the end all she did was mess up everything again and again and again. Was funny at first, but after a couple of years you want something else for a change.
In all, the series was enjoyable, but it's best years were 1986-1991 when the original cast (well at least most of it) was in.
