$30,000 Grant Saves Show : Orange County’s KOCE to Air ‘EastEnders’ Again

The saga of the British TV series “EastEnders,” dropped earlier this month by Orange County Public Broadcasting System station KOCE Channel 50, has a happy ending: The show will return to the air June 16.

The turn of fortunes may be completely at odds with the gritty, working-class realism that has made the show a hit at home and, increasingly, in the States, but “EastEnders” fans aren’t likely to complain. They pelted KOCE with more than 200 letters and 500 phone calls protesting the show’s cancellation earlier this month for lack of funds.

KOCE, which held exclusive Southern California rights to the BBC program, announced Thursday that the Queen Mary & Spruce Goose Entertainment Center in Long Beach will provide the $30,000 needed to purchase the next batch of 195 episodes, which will carry the show through April, 1991. When “EastEnders” returns, two half-hour episodes will air back-to-back each Friday at 10 p.m.

In rescuing the show, Queen Mary-Spruce Goose officials cited the British connection.

“Our second biggest international tourist market is from Great Britain--the first is Japan--so it makes good business sense for us to do this,” said Rich Kerlin, public relations manager for the Queen Mary-Spruce Goose. “Also, we realized after talking to . . . various KOCE reps that there was a big and rather enthusiastic following for the program. So it will also show good will to the community.”

Although the series had been one of KOCE’s most popular programs, station officials said that a PBS-wide effort to promote the system’s own programs was behind the decision to cancel “EastEnders.” The belief was that none of the station’s $350,000 programming budget for 1989 should be used to keep “EastEnders” on the air locally, when that money could go toward such PBS productions as “Nova.” At about $50,000 per year, the science series is the most expensive show in KOCE’s lineup.

KOCE officials now say they did not discover the extent of the “EastEnders” following until it announced that it would not renew the show. KOCE subscribes to a ratings service but does not receive audience estimates for individual programs.

Some viewers complained about the station’s handling of the cancellation, angry that the show was promoted extensively during pledge drives in March with no indication that it would be dropped when the initial batch of 130 episodes ran out on April 12.

One such letter writer, Priscilla Mayfield of Orange, said she sent letters expressing her anger to every station official whose name was listed in her KOCE programming guide.

“What else can you do with public television? You can’t boycott a product. The public is supposed to have some input.” Told that the show would return to the KOCE schedule, she said, “I’m glad that they responded. That’s great.”

“EastEnders,” set in the fictional borough of Walford in London’s working-class East End, is the BBC’s own most popular program. It focuses on some two dozen regular characters of varied racial, ethnic and economic stripe. Many are unemployed. Mary Smith is an unwed, punkish teen-age mother on the dole. Angie and Den Watts, who run the local pub, constantly are battling marital problems. The series also deals with such issues as rape, suicide, drug abuse and aging.

“EastEnders” began production in England in 1985 but has only been shown in the United States since 1988, when the BBC launched a push to export the show.