Galaxy TV & British Satellite Broadcasting (1990)

The story of how some of the biggest names in British TV and technology botched the opportunity of a lifetime.

What do you think of when I say the word ‘Galaxy’? Brian Cox? Chocolate? The meme with four brains?

For a brief moment in 1990, you might have thought of Galaxy TV, the hero channel for British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) which at launch was bold, innovative and well-funded. Within just eight months, it was dead and almost immediately forgotten. However, Galaxy TV would go on to have significant, if somewhat invisible long-term cultural impact despite its brief lifespan, and it also shares some stark parallels to today, with both GB News and TalkTV, currently struggling to establish themselves despite significant investment. Back in 1990 there were only 4 UK TV channels in existence and satellite television was such a new idea that no-one really had a clue what they were doing. Although should you decide to tune into a little bit of GB News or TalkTV later today, the phrase ‘plus ça change’ may come to mind.

British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB)

BSB was created as a consortium, backed by established TV and technology companies, including Granada, Anglia, Amstrad and Virgin. 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. 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.

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.

Money doesn’t solve everything though and BSB’s pathway to launch was littered with missteps and flat-out disasters. 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 SKY¹. 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.

Elsewhere, 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. 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. 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.

Galaxy TV

Throwing away first mover advantage was doltish, but it wasn’t terminal. SKY launched first and in a typical show of Murdochian aggression, beat BSB to getting agreements with most Hollywood Studios and American TV Networks. 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 competitor². 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. Despite SKY’s 12 month head start, subscriptions numbers were lacklustre, whilst and quarterly operating losses were getting bigger and bigger.

In early 1990 then, it was still game on. 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. 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. But BSB had to differnatiate itself through it’s TV content.

Galaxy TV therefore became BSB’s new great white hope and a team of experienced TV producers and commisioners got to work. In 1990, the UK was absolutely mad for soap operas. Brookside, Eastenders and Neighbours all launched in the 1980s, and all three had legitimately become part of Britain’s cultural zeitgeist³. 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. The name? Uh, Jupiter Moon.

Galaxy commissioned 150 episodes up-front, costing a whopping £6million, including £200,000 for just the opening title sequence.  In the cast, there was Lucy Benjamin (later, Lisa in Eastenders, and the answer to the pub quiz question ‘Who Shot Phil Mitchell?’) Anna Chancellor (Duckface in Four Weddings and a Funeral), and a character called Phillipe Gervais, who, yes, amazingly, was named after Ricky Gervais⁴.

Jupiter Moon did soap stuff (there were plot lines on love triangles, student sit-ins, and being in debt) and it did sci-fi stuff (space exploration, mining asteroids and rogue computer programs). But it was still somewhat grounded and featured absolutely no silly space monsters or aliens. It was real humans, in real space and it was entirely unique and different. It’s hard to judge quality over thirty years on, but I’m willing to believe it was better than a lot of stuff on TV at the time, and it definitely gets full marks for creating brand differentiation.

Up Yer News was BSB’s nightly sketch show and it was often broadcast live from Marcopolo house, giving it a real raw, edgy quality. This soon attracted raw, edgy talent, and the list of comedians who appeared on it includes Steve Coogan, Stewart Lee, Punt & Dennis, Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, Jerry Sadowitz, Mark Thomas, Jo Brand, John Thomson and Sean Hughes. If you’re thinking that is basically a near exhaustive list of 1990s comedy legends, then you’d be right. And in the first year of that decade, they all showed up on Galaxy TV.

The Happening is a utterly abysmal M.Night Shyamalan film starring Mark Wahlberg that is without a doubt one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in an actual cinema. But on Galaxy TV, The Happening was another exciting live show featuring music performances and other studio antics, all kept together by host Jools Holland. His eponymous, extremely popular BBC show Later With… would debut in 1992, built from the exact same DNA. It broadcast it’s 59th series in late 2021.

I know what you’re thinking. 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. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what it is. 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. The entire thing is ostensibly a spoof of genteel 1950s American sitcoms, but on very fascist steroids.

I must immediately point out that I find the premise of the show deeply offensive for many reasons, the biggest perhaps being that it unashamedly trivialises the suffering and deaths of millions of people and was filmed less than a year after the Berlin Wall came down. It is not set in some parallel universe where Hitler never became Chancellor either; it’s set in Nazi Germany in 1938 and in the first episode, Neville Chamberlain comes to visit. I am not making this up.

Yes, the Jewish couple next door are ‘the normal ones’⁵, but that doesn’t mean it’s not thoroughly anti-Semitic none-the-less. It is possible to make Hitler funny and it’s been done well decade after decade; from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, to The Producers, to the recent Jojo Rabbit. It is however undeniable that Heil Honey, I’m Home was creatively a huge, offensive misstep, but it does starkly reveal the bold, experimental attitude Galaxy TV was willing to embrace.

In the end, Heil Honey, I’m Home broadcast only one episode before being pulled and the remaining eight filmed episodes were fortunately never aired. Someone at BSB had to decide on the best day of the week and time slot to beam anti-Semitic content into thousands of homes from outer space and for some reason they chose 9.30pm on a Sunday night. Without a hint of irony, the show went out immediately after a repeat of Dad’s Army. The mind boggles. The ensuing media outrage and cancellation did create some serious talkability and much needed publicity for BSB; although understandably, many people may have immediately signed up to SKY after reading about it.

The Failure

Galaxy TV was the great white hope of BSB, and arguably, it actually delivered against an extremely challenging brief, successfully creating fresh, high quality TV programming that would drive subscriptions. But the truth is that Galaxy TV was playing a rigged game; it was never going to save BSB however good its content was, because the technology behind BSB simply wasn’t in the right place.

Let’s think about Netflix for a moment. Netflix would never have made it big if the distribution method for watching whatever you wanted, was via a USB stick with hundreds of shows on it. It wasn’t until high-speed broadband became the norm in large parts of the world that it was able to pivot out of renting DVDs of other people’s content, into becoming a content creator and the first streaming giant. If Netflix had gone for this pivot too early, it would have failed; a dodgy Web 1.0 user experience, endless buffering, pixelated content, and slow subscription growth would have combined to consign it to, at best, holding on for dear life until the world caught up.

Holding on for dear life until the world caught up was seemingly the original business plan for BSB. Without getting too technical, BSB was using a format called MAC, meaning their picture quality was extremely good (or at least relatively so, given the now very basic 1080p HD TV had yet to be invented, let alone the 4K OLED). But MAC came with two big drawbacks. The first, was that due to partly tech limitations and partly politics, it could only offer space for five channels. The second, was that the cost of buying a satellite dish that could receive the BSB channels, was £400, plus another £100 for installation. In 2022 money, that’s an up-front cost of £1,000, before you’ve even paid a penny towards the actual monthly subscription costs.

SKY meanwhile, used PAL, a more established technology. The picture was not as good, but it could handle significantly more channels (48 in total). A SKY dish (which could NOT receive BSB signals) cost ‘just’ £200, and were often subsidised as part of a long-term subscription. This created a huge financial gap that even top quality programming and content, was never going to be able to bridge.

Despite these seemingly insurmountable odds, BSB attempted to tackle the issue full on, via what in the marketing world is called ‘justifying a price premium’⁶. They decided to do this, by inventing, the Squarial; a satellite dish that wasn’t round, but square. A square aerial. A Squarial.

Unfortunately, simply changing how something looks doesn’t justify a price premium. The Squarial was nothing more than a shallow stunt, that when first introduced to the press was actually nothing more than a non-functional prototype. The final product was much bigger than shown, because it turns out that satellite dishes are usually round because that’s the best shape for them to be. Making them square does just one meaningful thing; make them less effective. Perhaps most cripplingly, the Squarial was completely non-strategic, and more of a mindless grope in the dark for a silver bullet. Even so, BSB went all in on the Squarial, with it being the key feature in a massive £20million media campaign at launch, which told the people of Great Britain ‘It’s cool to be Square’.

The total lack of consumer insight behind the thinking and creative meant that reality inevitably bit back. British consumers simply didn’t care about the shape of a piece of metal that sat on the wall of their house, and they never really looked at. Or if they did, certainly not enough to pay hundreds of pounds more for it.

By late 1990 Sky had sold a million SKY dishes. BSB had sold only around 100,000. The irony however, was the SKY was losing £2million a week, with their only saving grace being that BSB was losing about £8million. The truth was that both SKY and BSB had entered the space a few years earlier than was sensible, each spurred on by the other. One monopoly provider in those early years could have crept forward slowly, learning from their inevitable mistakes in a brand new market, but crafting a path forward towards long-term growth and eventual profitability. A full-scale war between two rival and incompatible eco-systems from day one was frankly nothing short of madness.

If you’re thinking that SKY was the clear victor and pulverised BSB into oblivion, then you’re just yet another victim of Murdochian propaganda. It is true that BSB collapsed in late 1990, after a frankly embarrassing run of just eight months, but in reality, it had simply collapsed first. As a result, BSB immediately merged with SKY to become the eponymous BSKYB. Murdoch was not picking over the carcass of a fallen foe, it was a 50-50 merger and a two-way bailout. SKY may have been further away from the precipice, but it was certainly seriously worried about going over the edge too.

In the three months leading up to the merger, SKY’s parent company News Corporation had seen its stock price plunge from $19 to $7, as company debts mounted. The BSB merger enabled BSKYB to go on and be a success, but in late 1990, they hadn’t scaled the mountain; they were simply being given a second opportunity to attempt the climb. The merger also gave SKY one significant new weapon. Despite it’s lower subscription numbers, BSB actually had much better advertising contracts, through leveraging the contacts and experience of part shareholders Grenada and Carlton. SKY was brand new to TV advertising and it’s sales were weak. The merger essentially gifted Murdoch the best black book in the business for selling TV advertising space. Titans of industry, much like cats, always seem to land on their feet…

And as for Galaxy? SKY shut it off immediately, primarily because it was too distinctive and different compared to its own hero channel, SKY One. Almost every show was immediately cancelled and over 40 episodes of already filmed and edited but still un-broadcast episodes of multi-million pound show Jupiter Moon were literally thrown in the bin⁷.

SKY One would go on to become one of the most influential TV channels of the 90s and early 00s, being home to cultural touchpoints as varied as The Simpsons, The X-Files, Lost and, uh, Dream Team. SKY One was so successful that it only very recently ceased to exist, in late 2021 after a sensational run spanning across five decades, having originally launched in 1982. But it was the demise of Galaxy TV and the merging of British Satellite Broadcasting with Sky to create ‘BSKYB’, that truly set it on its path towards becoming a roaring, era-defining success. 

Thank you for reading.

Further Reading

Want to truly dive down the rabbit hole on Galaxy TV and British Satellite Broadcasting? Then I recommend Dished! a contemporary book from 1992 about the collapse of BSB and rise of BSKYB.

If you want to find out how Murdoch made the most of his second opportunity to conquer satellite TV by securing the rights to the new Premier League in 1992, then tuck in to the four hour documentary Fever Pitch: The Rise of the Premier League on BBC iPlayer.

1. A fine example of Lord Alan Sugar having no qualms whatsoever about being absolutely ruthless if it means he ends up making more money. With BSB, he did the equivalent of someone on The Apprentice just walking out and joining the other team half-way through a challenge; something no-one has ever had the hutzpah to actually try on the show, but it would be a power move that I think could earn you the rare Lord Alan compliment of ‘you remind me of myself’.

2. The same playbook was deployed in 1992 when Sky Sports secured rights for the brand-new Premier League by writing a cheque for £300 million, blowing the BBC and ITV out of the water and making all live league football in the UK available on ‘pay TV’ only.

3. Dirty Den serving Angie with divorce papers on the Christmas Day 1986 episode of Eastenders remains the most watched show in the history of British TV, with over 30 million viewers. Three other episodes of Eastenders make the all-time top ten, plus an episode of Coronation Street, all of which aired between 1986 and 1992.

4. How!?, I hear you cry, given this show broadcast a whole decade before The Office? Well, the associate producer was Jane Fallon, and she named it after him. The couple are still together today, and their relationship is the foundational stone on which hit Neflix show After-Life is based.

5. This is similar to the classic 1990s BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, where the neighbours are utterly normal and Hyacinth Bouquet is clinically insane. However, whilst she may have very strict rules about people using her crockery, she is not an actual Nazi, so the show is suitable for public broadcast.

6. For example, a Smeg fridge doesn’t keep your milk fresher for longer, or cooler more efficiently, but it has an appealing design and brand appeal. That justifies it’s premium (at least to some people). If it didn’t, the brand would either have to drop it’s prices, or go out of business.

7. Eventually the remaining 40+ episodes were salvaged and aired on the Sci-Fi channel over five years later in 1996. This is still the longest ever break between two concurrent episodes of a soap opera in the history of television.