I binge-watched 240 hours of Crossroads. Here’s what I learnt

When television was young, it was ethereal. It danced through the air and was intercepted on its way into space by the nation’s sets and aerials. These days, the medium is more contained. It is streamed and collected in box sets. But some of those old programmes still retain a hold on the cultural memory. We remember Quatermass for terrifying a generation. We remember Cathy Come Home for changing the law on housing. And we remember Crossroads for being rubbish.

I’m a child of the three-channel era, when events in a fictional motel somewhere near Birmingham were both a national joke and a national pleasure – but some explanation may be required for those unhaunted by images of swooping yellow opening credits, nodding extras waving chalet keys, and actors frowning at folders of blank paper as they wait for the scene to start. Co-created by Peter Ling and Hazel Adair, ATV’s ­Crossroads was a daily soap that ran on ITV between 1964 and 1988, 4,510 episodes in total. (The short-lived Noughties revival doesn’t count, because the whole thing turned out to be a hallucination experienced by a checkout assistant played by Jane Asher.)

In its heyday, up to 15 million people tuned in to see Noele Gordon as its ­matriarch, Meg Mortimer, dealing with the everyday problems of the modern motelier – unpaid invoices, unexploded bombs, suicides, ­chalet maids contracting malaria in ­Mombasa – and to watch Ronald Allen, as her deputy, David Hunter, firing innocuous lines into the middle distance with arresting intensity (“I quite like… scones”). Victoria Wood’s 1980s parody, Acorn Antiques, chose its targets well.

That ITVX has given Russell T Davies three hours and Helena Bonham Carter to make Nolly, a fond backstage drama about Noele Gordon, suggests something about the nature of modern British television. As the man who revived Doctor Who and created Queer as Folk and It’s a Sin, Davies is one of the most powerful people in the business. It’s hard to imagine Nolly – an account of Gordon’s expulsion from Crossroads in 1981 – being pitched successfully by anyone else.

Davies delivers it with his unmistakable mixture of tenderness and audacity; Bonham Carter’s study of the dry, grinding cadences of Gordon’s voice is forensic, and the production has recreated the original motel set, right down to the padded panels on the reception desk. But even Davies would not suggest we should all sit down and watch the soap that inspired it.

“Crossroads was supposed to be a story about two feuding sisters,” he tells me. “Meg was the rich one and the poor one was called Kitty. But the actress playing Kitty died early on, and the character was written out, and somehow the series survived for years without a proper dramatic foundation.” Which may be why he seems faintly horrified when I inform him of my plan to watch 700 of the surviving episodes – partly in preparation for discussing Crossroads with him on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking next week, partly as a fundraiser for St Basil’s, a charity for homeless young people in Birmingham, and partly, as Edmund Hillary might have said, because they were there.

Crossroads, made for a soap-bubble existence, has now been preserved and packaged in a way that’s customary for more finite and prestigious dramas. Network, a company unequalled in its devotion to archive TV, is releasing a 94-disc, 240-hour box set containing all of Gordon’s extant episodes. (Many are lost, including, frustratingly, one in which a Baader-Meinhof-type gang kidnaps Meg’s husband.)

So, what happens when you actually watch it? Here’s how it was for me. At first, I mainly noticed the infelicities. Actors declaring that “the early worm catches the bird” or “you can’t make eggs without breaking an omelette”. George the farmhand throwing down a glass in anger to see it bounce on the chalet floor. An extra in the motel hair salon staring straight into the ­camera. Pure Acorn Antiques stuff.

Soon, though, I began to register something else – the soap’s social engagement, particularly with the lives of the people who might have been watching in its original daytime slot. A storyline about a disabled child included a detailed demonstration of the use of a bathroom hoist. Benny, the woolly-hatted handyman whose name became a 1970s playground insult, was shown learning to read. Plots about abortion and agoraphobia came and went and were rarely played for sensation. Black regular cast members appeared, long before any arrived in Coronation Street – the first, Meg’s adopted daughter, Melanie (Cleo Sylvestre), was the producer’s response to Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, given in Birmingham in 1968.

And here’s where it gets a bit transcendental. Unlike Coronation Street, rooted in the kitchen-sink ­particularities of the British New Wave, Crossroads occupies a strangely indeterminate environment. It is a wipe-clean, transatlantic zone patronised by American psychiatrists, Swedish airline bosses, Italian film stars, and members of the armed radical Left. It is a motel, but you never see the motorway. (And only hear it twice, to my knowledge.) It has a swimming pool open to non-residents – but not, it would seem, to the cameras of ATV. Crossroads motel is a kind of nowhere.

Somewhere around episode 3,010, I began to see Crossroads in more abstract terms. There were people in brown rooms, talking, pausing, talking, pouring coffee from stainless-steel pots. Shots of featureless pine doors. A view through a window, where the street outside was a black-and-white ­photograph. Frequently, there would be a long and inconsequential phone conversation – often used, as Nolly reveals, to pad out an episode that was falling shy of its run-time. “Hello, Crossroads motel, how may I help you? Yes… no extra charge for pets… We’ll expect you on the 15th… Goodbye.”

From this almost avant-garde banality, the secret subject of Crossroads eventually revealed itself to me. Aided, I should add, by a joint injury that made me a temporary insomniac, I watched Crossroads late into the night, hoping that its repetitions and inconsequences would lull me into unconsciousness. They had the opposite effect. Just as I felt myself slipping over the border, I would be snapped back by existential dread and the endless inescapable loop of Tony Hatch’s theme tune.

In Nolly, Bonham Carter’s heroine comes to see that Crossroads is an insatiable “machine” that she serves. She is right. The real drama of Crossroads was its own voracious demand for plot, scenes, lines. It is a show about actors trapped in brightly lit sets as surely as the ­protagonists of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit are trapped in their chalet-sized private hell.

In 1968, Peter Ling, co-creator of Crossroads, wrote the storyline for an episode of Doctor Who – the oddest in the show’s history. The Mind Robber occurs in the Land of Fiction, an environment sustained by the labours of a hack writer whose brain is plugged into a giant computer. If he stops producing stories, reality will collapse upon him. He wants the Doctor to take his place. It is a duty that the Doctor recognises as a form of enslavement. I think Ling knew what he was talking about.

So, this is my warning. If you watch Nolly and it turns you Crossroads-curious, proceed slowly and with care. A box set of a soap is a marvel and a wonder, but it is also against nature.

Soaps are not to be binged. They give us companionable fictional people with whom to share our lives. That’s why the marriages of Deirdre Rachid or the trials of Meg Mortimer are not like the problems of Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, but have the same bumpy one-damn-thing-after-another quality of our own existences.

In those 4,510 episodes, an army of staff picked up the phone and asked: “Hello, Crossroads motel, how may I help you?” You never heard the reply. They were actors, speaking into a dead prop. But you already knew that the answer was something like: “Just be there, thanks. And keep talking.”

Nolly is on ITVX from Thursday. Crossroads: The Noele Gordon Collection is available on Network DVD from Monday