Davidson Park

Davidson Park is a Euro Republics-made children's television school drama series, made by TV3 Productions and portraying life in a typical comprehensive school.

The show began its run on 6 September 1993 on TV3, and is one of the longest-running programmes on Euro Republics television. It was created by Ian Byrne.

Overview
The drama was centred on the fictional comprehensive school of Davidson Park in the equally fictitious North London borough of Moordale. As well as dealing with school-related issues such as bullying, learning difficulties, teacher-pupil relationships and conflicts, Davidson Park "broke new ground over the years, with the kind of hard-hitting storylines not usually seen in children's dramas".

Series history
Davidson Park was originally conceived by Riverside writer Ian Byrne, who first approached ERTV with the idea in 1988, unsuccessfully, with the network stating it was a rip-off of UK series Grange Hill. In 1991, he managed to sell the idea to TV3, who thought that while the school drama premise was already done well by Grange Hill, there was room for a Euro Republican answer, and the show first went to air on 6 September 1993, as part of a major schedule revamp on TV3's children's strand, Club3.

From the start, the series caused controversy for its real-life, gritty portrayal of school life, which differed from the idealised portrayals of earlier school dramas. This led to Byrne being summoned to lunch by TV3 bosses and forced to agree that there would be no further series unless he toned things down. Despite this, when TV3's childrens director was replaced in mid-1994, these rules were toned down, and eventually dropped, allowing Davidson Park to properly push boundaries.

An omnibus edition of Davidson Park began to air on Saturday afternoons on the then new Channel 4 starting in November 1995, but was dropped in 2003 when the channel rebranded as ZTV. Beginning on 6th September, 2008, in celebration of the programme's 15th anniversary, the first fifteen series of Davidson Park were repeated during The Fix Saturday morning slots on TV4. Repeats began to be seen in 1996 on the Club3 channel's Mission Control strand, with an omnibus. In 1998, it began to be repeated on cable channel Spark, who repeated it from episode one.

By 2001, the series was attracting 9 million viewers each episode, with 3 million viewers tuning into the Saturday omnibus.