The Pilot Episode
The 76 minute pilot episode was produced by Bill Harmon and Perter Bernados who had earlier produced the highly successful soap opera Number 96.
Arcade also employed Number 96's creator David Sale and its veteran scriptwriter Johnny Whyte as scriptwriters. Like Number 96, there was some room for light comedy as well as drama.
Rupert Murdoch had acquired the 0-10 Network in 1979 and had Channel ATV 0 in Melbourne change its call sign from 0 to 10 in January 1980 to make the network complete. So the launch of the pilot (or "movie-length opening episode") of Arcade was seen as the "flagship" program of the brand-new Network Ten.
On the night it aired (Sunday 20 January 1980), the 0–10 Network officially became known as Network Ten to reflect ATV-0's transition to ATV-10 – although the Brisbane station continued to broadcast as TVQ-0 until 10 September 1988. On 27 December 1987, Adelaide's SAS-10 gave ADS-7 the affiliation rights of Network Ten, and became known as ADS-10. (Perth's NEW-10 did not go to air until 1988.)
Read more about this topic: Arcade (TV Series)
Famous quotes containing the words pilot and/or episode:
“With two sons born eighteen months apart, I operated mainly on automatic pilot through the ceaseless activity of their early childhood. I remember opening the refrigerator late one night and finding a roll of aluminum foil next to a pair of small red tennies. Certain that I was responsible for the refrigerated shoes, I quickly closed the door and ran upstairs to make sure I had put the babies in their cribs instead of the linen closet.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)