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Heil Honey, I’m Home is essentially a fever dream you would expect one of the characters in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia to have after drinking a can of paint, and features Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun living next door to a Jewish couple called Arny and Rosa. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what it is.

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Heil Honey, I’m Home is a stupid name for a TV show, because it sounds like a sitcom where the main character is Adolf Hitler or something. Galaxy knew it needed a soap opera, so it decided to commission one set in the year 2050, on a space ship orbiting Callisto a moon of Jupiter. Brookside, Eastenders and Neighbours all launched in the 1980s, and all three had legitimately become part of Britain’s cultural zeitgeist 3. In 1990, the UK was absolutely mad for soap operas.

Galaxy TV therefore became BSB’s new great white hope and a team of experienced TV producers and commisioners got to work.

But BSB had to differnatiate itself through it’s TV content. Both BSB and SKY, had two potentially big revenue streams of household subscriptions and TV advertising available to them, which could scale alongside each other. If BSB could combine the exclusive imported content that SKY couldn’t afford, with their own high quality, must watch ‘British’ TV, they could have a compelling proposition that could be commercially viable. In early 1990 then, it was still game on. Despite SKY’s 12 month head start, subscriptions numbers were lacklustre, whilst and quarterly operating losses were getting bigger and bigger. BSB couldn’t possibly compete with such financial firepower, but after SKY also signed a hugely expensive deal with Warner Bros., BSB were able to pen an exclusive deal with Paramount. They paid an eye watering £100 million for an exclusive deal with Disney in 1988, showing they would happily pay over the odds just to block a competitor 2. SKY launched first and in a typical show of Murdochian aggression, beat BSB to getting agreements with most Hollywood Studios and American TV Networks. Throwing away first mover advantage was doltish, but it wasn’t terminal.

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Meanwhile, Sky News simply flat-out stole NOW’s original plan, becoming the UK’s first 24 hour rolling news channel when SKY TV went live in early 1989, a full year before BSB was able to belatedly launch.

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The result of these many hiccups and changes of direction meant that Rupert Murdoch’s SKY were first to market in the UK satellite TV space, buttressed by wall-to-wall free publicity in the Murdoch owned Sun and News of the World. Įlsewhere, NOW was originally planned to be the UK’s first 24 hour rolling news channel, but after failing to agree terms with ITN, NOW ended up being a strange smorgasbord of lifestyle shows, documentaries, news bulletins and arts programmes, like some sort of deeply unnatural offspring spawned from a tryst between BBC Four and ITVBe. Shortly afterwards Virgin also dropped out once it became clear SKY was going to be a competitive direct rival another example of how Richard Branson loves a monopoly. The many trials and tribulations of coming to market (many of which were technological in nature), resulted in Amstrad dropping out and instead of building satellite receivers for BSB as promised, they started making them for a new rival, Rupert Murdoch’s SKY 1. Money doesn’t solve everything though and BSB’s pathway to launch was littered with missteps and flat-out disasters.

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Money therefore quickly became no object and a brand-new, purpose-built facility ’ Marcopolo House ’ was constructed in Battersea at great expense and acted as the studio and broadcasting centre for the five channels NOW (news, current affairs), The Sports Channel, The Movie Channel, The Power Station (music) and finally Galaxy, very much the hero channel, focused on entertainment. However, the potential rewards were correctly anticipated to be equally eye-watering, especially as BSB fully expected to be the only player in the premium ‘pay TV’ space in the UK. This was necessary because of the eye-watering market entry costs in what was a brand-new, cutting-edge technology putting two satellites into space to deliver the signal direct to every UK home was just one of the extremely significant costs BSB had to bear before generating a single penny of income. BSB was created as a consortium, backed by established TV and technology companies, including Granada, Anglia, Amstrad and Virgin.

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