Will Home and Away: The Early Years return?
BTTB has received further information concerning the Home and Away: The Early Years repeats that have recently disappeared from the 7TWO schedules.
The hugely popular Early Years repeats began on 7TWO with the Pilot episode from 1988, on the day of the channel’s launch in 2009, and have run largely uninterrupted through the first eight seasons of the show—with the 1996 season debuting back in March.
When the repeats were removed from 7TWO’s schedule a month ago, after airing the week of Shane Parrish’s death, viewers were understandably concerned given that there was no obvious reason for the break.
Whilst Seven Network‘s switchboard initially told us that the airings would definitely resume after a couple of weeks, it soon became apparent that this wasn’t the case and we attempted to make further enquiries.
We approached another contact at Seven who kindly passed on an email to 7TWO’s Programming Department, but sadly this went unanswered.
As a result, we went further up the hierarchy and spoke to Seven’s Director of Network Programming, Angus Ross, who has confirmed to BTTB that, unfortunately, there will seemingly be no further airings for the foreseeable future:
“We have reached a batch of episodes where all the available “runs” under existing agreements have been used – so we can’t play them.”
When we asked whether there were any plans to overcome this obstacle, Angus continued:
“I am not aware of any negotiations. It would not make sense financially at present.”
Our queries has been forwarded on to the relevant people, where we will attempt to find out whether such negotiations could become a possibility—and continue to make known the popular demand for the episodes.
We will endeavour to provide any updates from further discussions with Seven as and when we can.
August 2018:
We again contacted Angus Ross, making known the continued interest in the Early Years airings, and enquired whether any steps were being taken to overcome the obstacles in airing them. Angus confirmed that there was no further update on the situation.
A further email to Seven’s Director of Content Rights & Distribution went unanswered.
July 2020:
We repeated our inquiry to Angus Ross, asking about the presence of a few episodes from this problematic batch in collated collections on 7Plus, and whether this meant that any issues may have been overcome.
We also asked whether the episodes could be added to 7Plus as an alternative to airing on 7TWO.
It was confirmed that there were unfortunately still no further updates at this time, citing financial issues.