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8 of the cheapest-looking TV shows ever made

Photo credit: BBC
Photo credit: BBC

From Digital Spy

Not every TV show has the bulging budgets of Game of Thrones or The Crown. Some don't even have the money of Doctors or Father Brown. In fact, some appear to have reached the screen with such a small amount of money behind them you suspect they were mugged on the way to the screen. Here are just eight of the most cash-strapped, bargain-counter TV shows ever, where the producers' ambitions far outstripped their wallets...

1. Captain Zep: Space Detective

Photo credit: BBC
Photo credit: BBC

With such a hokey name, maybe we shouldn't have expected too much gloss and sophistication from Captain Zep: Space Detective. A children's series that ran from 1983 to 1984, it was, in effect, a sci-fi game show, where, in front of an audience of bizarrely costumed kids, Captain Zep would introduce each week's mystery.

Which sounds fine and dandy, except there clearly weren't enough pennies to do justice to the stories' grand SF ambitions. Doctor Who and Blake's 7 would create their alien worlds on a variety of British quarry pits and their aliens from copious amounts of latex and rubber. Captain Zep, on the other hand, simply superimposed their actors against inanimate drawings, giving the show the sorry look of a cash-starved Mary Poppins.

2. The Tomorrow People

Not the recent American remake, nor the 1990s reboot with a fresh-faced Naomie Harris, but the 1970s original, which was launched as ITV's answer to Doctor Who on only a fraction of its rival's already meagre budget.

Spaceships regularly looked like what they were: fizzy drinks bottles spray-painted silver, wobbling their way in front of a pin-pricked black drape, while the aliens often looked like something knocked up by a team of under-fives on work experience. (One memorable extra-terrestrial was simply a green felt puppet with a tinfoil beard).

Sometimes it was so mockably cheap that it made Rainbow look like Avatar.

3. Teddy Edward

Photo credit: BBC
Photo credit: BBC

"Screw 'em, they're kids, they'll never notice the difference," was, we suspect, the general attitude behind this little-remembered children's series from 1973.

Where its BBC stablemates boasted innovative stop-motion (Bagpuss, The Flumps) or some kind of animation, however basic (Mary, Mungo & Midge, Mr Benn), Teddy Edward told its five-minute stories using a collection of still photographs of a teddy bear simply plonked in various locations (albeit narrated by the soothing tones of newsreader Richard Baker).

All told, it was about as captivating as watching a heavily sedated toddler give you a slide show of their favourite toy in different parts of the garden.

4. Benji, Zax, and the Alien Prince

Photo credit: CBS
Photo credit: CBS

The Benji movie franchise was never quite in the same box office-busting league as Lassie or Beethoven, but no movie in that series toxified the Benji brand as much as this small-screen spin-off that was so shoddy it looked as though it had been funded by the homeless.

Its washy, home-video-camera-recorded look was nothing though compared to the abomination that was Zax, the camp robot servant to a prickish alien kid named Yubi.

Meticulously shot so you never see the prop bloke's fingers holding it up, Zax looked rather like Wall-E, if he'd had been made for the price of an egg and cress sandwich.

5. Churchill's People

Photo credit: BBC
Photo credit: BBC

Back in the 1970s, the BBC liked to see itself as the wise old uncle of the nation, giving us nutritious television that we may not have wanted, but certainly needed.

So it was when they decided to adapt Winston Churchill's four-volume opus History of the English-Speaking Peoples for the small screen. It was a massive undertaking to tell the story of Britain and its former colonies throughout the world, from Caesar's invasion of Britain to the beginning of the First World War.

It needed a budget of universe-swallowing proportions to do justice to its ambitious narrative sweep, but its mission statement of recording everything in the studio, with no location work, meant they looked more like avant-garde theatre plays than grand historical epics. The new Controller of BBC1, after viewing the first episode, told his bosses he thought the series so bad, he didn't think it was transmittable.

"I had the feeling that if this was part of the inheritance, I rather wished I hadn't been included in the will," he said. The Sunday Telegraph memorably wrote of the show, "It not only sounds like a school's radio programme, but looks like it too." Unsurprisingly, it's never been repeated or released on DVD.

6. Jane

Photo credit: BBC
Photo credit: BBC

Likelihood is, if you were a boy coming of age during the Second World War, your sexual awakening would have been helped on its way by Jane Gay, a blonde-locked, clothes-shy sex bomb who first appeared in the Daily Mirror in 1932.

The newspaper's boldly racy comic strip ran for 25 years, but in 1982, the BBC revived it for the small screen in this curiously experimental series starring former Blake's 7 fave Glynis Barber.

Answering the perennial question of "How do you do a comic-strip series on TV?" with the most literal response imaginable, Jane had its lingerie-loving title character and the other characters crudely green-screened in front of black-and-white comic strip panels in an effort to replicate the cartoony nature of the Mirror stories. (Hey, it worked for Sin City 30 years later.) Artistically, it had some merit, but it was also a series that, while it was aimed at adults, looked like it was made for children.

7. Eldorado

Photo credit: BBC
Photo credit: BBC

The BBC's stratospherically-hyped '90s soap promised that it would be EastEnders with sun, Coronation Street with tans and Emmerdale with sangria.

Instead, Eldorado quickly became a national joke, ratings nose-dived, producer Julia Smith had a nervous breakdown and, one by one, the original production team either bolted or were sacked.

Aside from its patently "inexperienced" cast, the soap was also lambasted for its poor technical quality. Rushed into production, it appeared little consideration had been given to the acoustics of the purpose-built Spanish set, so the sound quality was ether echoey or indecipherable, and the rooms often seemed too cramped to hold both the actors and the camera crew.

Eldorado would limp on for a year before the BBC swung the axe. The show's Spanish set is now used for paintballing, for which it's much better suited.

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