Night and Day (TV series)

The series begins on the sixteenth birthday of best friends Jane Harper and Della Wells, who live in the same street in Greenwich.[2][1] However, before the day is over, Jane has disappeared. Over the next year, the lives of six families in the street become further intertwined as a tangled web of secrets and lies threaten to boil to the surface, and Jane's disappearance continues to have a devastating effect. The series combined typical soap opera plots, including babies switched at birth and clandestine affairs, with more unusual stories including murders at the catacombs, and an episode in which a mysterious stranger came to the street and stopped time to uncover the truth about the residents, only to eventually erase their memories of events of that alternative reality and turn everything back to normal.

Despite the series being axed, the decision was made long before the final episode was set to air allowing the producers to script an ending to the series. As the series comes to a close, Sam – wandering away from home – finds Jane working as a geisha, with no memory of who she was. He returned her to her family, and her return – coming on the heels of the year anniversary of her disappearance – only served to increase tensions and bring secrets into the open. The final episode, the eightieth when counting only the hour-long episodes, focused on revealing some of the secrets behind the characters and Jane being arrested for murder. The episode then flashed forward to four years later and looked at one day in the very different lives of the residents of Greenwich, as Jane was seemingly released from prison and came to discover what had happened since. However, Natalie later learns that Jane was not released, and had in fact died in her cell that morning, and that the presence was in fact her ghost. The final episode closed with a montage of moments from the series to Björk's All is Full of Love.

The series premiered with an unusual format: three thirty-minute episodes would air each week in a teatime slot, before being merged into one, single hour-long late-night "omnibus" episode, which aired on Thursdays, often containing additional explicit scenes (such as discussion or events that could not be aired in an earlier timeslot). The first thirty-minute episode attracted 2.2 million viewers, airing at 17:05 on 6 November 2001. Across the next few months, the series averaged 1.4 million viewers in this timeslot. However, on 27 March 2002, ITV announced it was removing the series from the teatime slot the following week.[3] This was in response to the series' viewing figures rapidly declining, attracting only a 9% audience share and being beaten in the ratings by BBC Two's The Weakest Link and Channel 4's Richard & Judy.

The series' removal was so sudden that TV listings for the next week still advertised it. Speaking of the decision to axe the teatime episodes, Tony Woods, then head of continuing drama at ITV, stated that "The series has already established itself as cult viewing for young adults, and re-positioning it with a debut broadcast in the evening will build on its appeal". The series continued to air the hour long episodes in a later time slot, with some episodes airing as late as 2AM. Most episodes also aired later than billed, some almost ten minutes behind the advertised schedule. The vacant teatime slot was filled by repeats of game shows such as Catchphrase, You've Been Framed and Family Fortunes. Eventually, in January 2003, a relaunched version of Crossroads aired in the slot, before it too was also cancelled after only a few months on air. The final hour long 'omnibus' episode aired on 5 June 2003 and attracted 500,000 viewers, despite airing at 00:30.

In Australia, the series screened on ABC TV. It originally aired at 6pm on weeknights, as a lead into the evening news, but the later episodes were predominantly screened very late at night, in a similar fashion to the UK broadcast; although these retained the thirty-minute format.

The series was first unveiled by ITV executives on 27 April 2001, before the leading cast were announced on 9 May.[4] The series was commissioned in the wake of ITV losing Home and Away to Channel 5. The series eventually premiered in November 2001 after production delays halted filming and meant that the original premiere date was pushed back.[5]

'Thornton Street' was in reality King George Street SE10, one of the most historic areas of Greenwich. Other locations in Greenwich included the Cutty Sark pub, the Old Greenwich Hospital and Greenwich Park. 'St Vincents Halfway House' was actually in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Interior shots were filmed at the Three Mills Studios in Bow.

Night and Day was nominated for ten awards at the British Soap Awards 2002, beating established rivals such as Hollyoaks and Emmerdale. It won one award, 'Hero of the year' (chosen by a panel of judges) for the character of Sam giving up football to look after his orphaned siblings. Filming had finished the day before the British Soap Awards.

Some five weeks before the final episode aired in 2003 many TV guides flagged up the weeks episode as the 'last in series'. Indeed, the Radio Times even printed a double page feature about the shows demise after 17 months on air. Quite why this error could have happened is unknown. This led to some fans thinking the series had ended on a knife-edge cliffhanger when in fact the next five weeks tied up all the loose ends to all plots.

In 2006, the Radio Times ran a small article about the fifth anniversary of Night and Day's premiere. The programme was described as being stylish but with little substance.

The series was never released on DVD or video. The sheer number of songs used on the soundtrack throughout the series would make a DVD release financially impractical as each artist would need to be paid a royalty fee. At the time of the shows final transmission rumours circulated on fan message boards of a clause in the production contract that prevents a rerun of the series until five years after its initial transmission. This has not been confirmed by ITV or LWT. As of 3 February 2021, more than fifteen years since the final episode, the series has yet to being repeated.

• Night and Day opening titles on YouTube
• Night and Day at IMDb