Heartbeat

[Old Bones]

My local PBS station ran all 18 seasons of Heartbeat . I didn't pick it up until 5 or 6 seasons in. It just finished , so they have restarted it from the beginning. I found it odd that all the later years were fairly PG orientated while season 1 episode 1 had bare female breasts ..... crazy Brits

[OceanBlue]

If I recall (from reading about it on TV.com), there were uncut and censored versions of some or all of the episodes from the first series of Heartbeat, when they were released on VHS.

Don't know if the series has been released on DVD in the States and Canada, but all eighteen series/seasons of Heartbeat were released on DVD in the UK by the label Network. I'm not 100% sure, but those series/season 1 episodes are uncut with the ad bumpers and original closing logos included (although there could be music substitutions. Any Beatles songs on the UK DVDs are substituted, along with one or two other songs. That's all I know about any music substitutions).

Have you had the spin-off The Royal over there? They introduced some of the characters on the show in an episode of Heartbeat towards the end of the Jason Durr era.

[Fnord Prefect]

Originally Posted by Old Bones

My local PBS station ran all 18 seasons of Heartbeat . I didn't pick it up until 5 or 6 seasons in. It just finished , so they have restarted it from the beginning. I found it odd that all the later years were fairly PG orientated while season 1 episode 1 had bare female breasts ..... crazy Brits

Plenty of PG rated films and the odd TV show with bare breasts and buttocks here in the UK, even the odd brief full frontal (Amadeus and Orlando come to mind, but there are more) as the BBFC don't view non-sexual nudity as an important factor when choosing a certificate. I'm sure in the case of Heartbeat it was the occasional violence and slightly more adult tone that gained the early series DVDs a 12 certificate rather than the boobs.

And as OceanBlue points out other than a a handful brief music substitutions the UK DVDs are 100% uncut, ad bumpers and all.

[OceanBlue]

Discussion in another thread of gameshows being cut so more adverts could be fitted into the half-hour timeslot, reminded me of back when Heartbeat originally aired on ITV. Towards the end of the early noughties, I remember when an extra ad break was put into hour-long programmes, including Heartbeat (before that, I can only remember two ad breaks in an hour-long timeslot), meaning the total runtime of an episode was slightly shorter.

[PatrynXX]

site took me from Danielle Steel's version to this and the dvd is not impossible to find but it's for sure on Ebay

[OceanBlue]

It might have been on the IMDb where I read it earlier this year, a user review about the reasons why Heartbeat was axed. I read it and thought "nowhere in any of it were ITV mentioned".

I remember very well reading about the first UK TV programmes to be filmed/shot in widescreen (they included Dalziel & Pascoe, Heartbeat and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?). Heartbeat's first series in widescreen was Series Nine (the 1999-2000 series/season). And a third ad break was introduced to hour-long programmes on ITV towards the end of the early-noughties I think.

Then during the Jonathan Kerrigan era of Heartbeat, a repeat run of the show up that point started on ITV3. Repeats of the show while new episodes were still being made. If I remember correctly, the highest-rated episode of the show was the one where PC Nick Rowan and Greengrass were stuck in a ditch with an unexploded WWII bomb. The ratings were still good during the Jason Durr era (my favourite era of the show), but went down a bit after he left. I think they stabilised when Jonathan Kerrigan joined the show. But I don't think the repeats on a loop on ITV3 helped matters (still being repeated on a loop today). Yes, there were other reasons why the show eventually got cancelled, but ITV weren't without blame (and they were rather quick to apparently destroy the sets when the show's cancellation was announced (ditto with spin-off The Royal).

The makers of Heartbeat should have had a resolution made to the cliffhanger with

[Show spoiler]Oscar Blaketon

in the series finale "Sweet Sorrow", just in case it did get cancelled (ditto with the

[Show spoiler]Dr. Ormerod

cliffhanger on The Royal). Watching that last episode again earlier this autumn, it felt very eerie knowing what was to come.

Sadly, a lot of the older castmembers have passed away now, but it would be nice to see a documentary about the show get made. Hoping as well that next year Via Vision release a complete series DVD boxset of The Royal (including the ad bumpers and original versions of the end credits, like Network did with Heartbeat).