‘EastEnders’ PBS Series Hits Dead End in Orange County

The day has long since passed when one could say that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” This week, Old Sol sank a little lower on the cultural horizon of Southland Anglophiles with word that after Wednesday, the popular BBC-TV series “EastEnders” will no longer be shown locally.

KOCE Channel 50, the Orange County public television station with exclusive Southern California rights to “EastEnders,” won’t pick up the next package of 165 episodes of the British soap because “we can’t afford it,” the station’s program director said this week.

KOCE’s Kirk Groenveld said the issue isn’t the popularity of the show, which has been lauded as a down-to-earth alternative to fantasy-oriented American soaps such as “Dallas” and “Dynasty.” Set in London’s working-class East End, the series follows the lives of a dozen or so regular characters,including a couple who own the popular “Queen Vic” pub, a punkish single mother on the dole, an unwed pregnant teen-ager, one yuppie couple and a Turkish immigrant who is a taxi driver, cafe owner and is married to a British woman.

“It is very popular,” Groenveld said. “I think in our last membership survey, it was the eighth most-popular series, and our ratings tend to back that up.”

Viewers have been calling and writing the station in what KOCE officials describe as an unprecedented response since a letter about the cancellation appeared last week in TV Times. That was the first public word that the series would be coming to an end on KOCE, which has been showing “EastEnders” twice a week since January, 1988. It is one of between 25 and 30 PBS stations nationwide that carry “EastEnders.” (Los Angeles PBS station KCET Channel 28 passed on the series last year because station officials felt it would require too great a block of programming time.)

“Viewers are asking, ‘How can you cancel it?’ But they only have half the story,” Groenveld said. “The other side of the story is that we can’t afford the next season.”

The next batch of shows would cost about $30,000, which the station’s management has decided to spend elsewhere, Groenveld said.

KOCE will spend about $350,000 buying programs this year; the most expensive single program is the PBS-produced “Nova,” which costs KOCE $48,000-$50,000 per year.

Groenveld also cited a concerted effort by PBS stations nationwide to carry as much of the system’s original programming as possible to raise PBS’ profile in the face of increasing competition from cable, videocassette recorders and other entertainment media.

The show was, however, promoted prominently during pledge drives in March with no mention that KOCE would stop carrying it after the initial batch of 130 episodes runs out on Wednesday. In addition, “EastEnders” actress Linda Davidson, who plays punkish single mother Mary Smith and was featured in KOCE pledge-break pitches last month, was in the Southland this week lining up interviews to promote the show, unaware that KOCE was dropping it.

Groenveld did offer one glimmer of hope for the show’s future: “If a corporate underwriter wanted to support ‘EastEnders,’ we would make every effort to bring the series back.”

That appears to be the only hope for Southern California “EastEnders” fans. A spokeswoman for the show’s U.S distributor, New York-based BBC Lionheart International, said Thursday: “At the present time, no one else is under license” to carry the show.