With episode 1219 it beat previous title-holder Number 96 to become the show with the most episodes filmed in Aussie TV history. It kept this record for over a decade, until it was overtaken by A Country Practice. Ironically it was around the time of this achievement that things started to go wrong. First, the brains behind the show, Alan Coleman, left to start his own production company. The soap also suffered from some high profile cast departures. Some of the best loved characters left the soap in a short space of time, including Dr Fielding, Maggie Gordon, and then Sister Jeffries, Kate Rhodes and Dennis Jamison. But it was the show's ever changing time slot that was to be the final nail in the coffin. Thanks to Australia's love affair with sport, and with the advent of one day cricket, the Nine Network stations frequently moved the time of the show to accommodate the cricket coverage. Worse, in Sydney, the local station moved the show to the five o'clock slot, which was seen as a total lack of faith in its future. Just a few months after the party to celebrate the record breaking episode, it was announced that production on The Young Doctors was to stop. Luckily there were already about six months of episodes in the can, so the show continued airing until 1983. |
