A very sad tale this. Albion Market, like EastEnders, was inspired by the revolutionary 1982 Channel 4 soap Brookside, which shook up the UK soap world with a gritty, in-your-face approach, real houses and controversial issues. Albion Market was created by Andy Lynch (Brookside scriptwriter) and Peter Whalley (Coronation Street scriptwriter) and began as a curious melding of Coronation Street-style characters and Left Wing Brookside style story-lines, with a little Corrie-style humour mixed in. It bombed. And it was dreadful. Another problem was the screening nights - people liked the pub on a Friday night in those days, and Sunday was not a night viewers yearned for soap. Only around 25% of UK households had a VCR in those mid-1980s days, and so that was not a lot of help. Viewers' attentions had also been grabbed by EastEnders, which began in early 1985 (Albion Market launched in the August) and the Market characters were nowhere near as abrasive and dynamic as some of the original Albert Square residents.
The BBC stuck with EastEnders through ratings teething problems (it was initially beaten by Emmerdale Farm!), but the ITV Network was a different kettle of fish and dropped Albion Market into even more disadvantageous time slots when it failed to take off initially. The show was shaken up and became far more intriguing with the introduction of a corrupt new market boss, but ITV had already decided to scrap it before the changes could properly take effect. Granada TV provided closure to the show's story-lines by dispatching the new villainous boss-man and bringing back the original, so viewers were able to leave Albion Market without too many threads left dangling.
The BBC stuck with EastEnders through ratings teething problems (it was initially beaten by Emmerdale Farm!), but the ITV Network was a different kettle of fish and dropped Albion Market into even more disadvantageous time slots when it failed to take off initially. The show was shaken up and became far more intriguing with the introduction of a corrupt new market boss, but ITV had already decided to scrap it before the changes could properly take effect. Granada TV provided closure to the show's story-lines by dispatching the new villainous boss-man and bringing back the original, so viewers were able to leave Albion Market without too many threads left dangling.