90s hit teen drama Byker Grove returns to screens after 20 years
Fans can now stream the full series for the first time in the UK on STV Player and on ITVX later this year – as part of a co-exclusivity deal with Mitre Studios.
Originally launched on BBC One in 1989, Byker Grove became a much-loved after school programme for millions of teenagers growing up in the 90s and noughties.
Set in the Byker area of Newcastle, the series followed the lives and relationships of a group of young people who spent their down time at local youth club, the Grove.
The show tackled challenging social issues of the time, including drug addiction, child abuse, homophobia and abortion.
In 1994, the series broadcast the first gay kiss on UK children's TV, when character Noddy Fishwick kissed close friend Gary Hendrix at the cinema.
Byker Grove also helped launch the acting careers of many young people, including Ant and Dec, Jill Halfpenny and Donna Air.
The show was also credited with training many behind-the-scenes talent.
Former writer, Catherine Johnson, went on to pen hit musical Mamma Mia! and Tom Hooper, who directed episodes in 1997, later won the Academy Award for Best Director for his work on The King's Speech.
Richard Williams, who is STV's Managing Director for Audience: Video and Technology, said it was exciting to be bringing back 'one of the seminal TV shows of the decade'.
'Byker Grove was an integral part of so many British childhoods and we're delighted that those original viewers – now of a slightly more mature vintage – can relive all the nostalgic action," he said.
"And if any Gen Z viewers want to find out who really started the baggy trousers trend, look no further than Byker Grove!'
Byker Grove is available to stream for free on STV Player and will become available on ITVX later this year.
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Enjoyed the holiday? Now buy the swanky vintage poster
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When he first hit cinema screens, an unknown actor nominated for an Oscar in his debut role, Terence Stamp was acclaimed as the most beautiful man in the world. His perfectly symmetrical features and dazzling blue eyes, topped with a boyish mop of tousled blond hair, were angelic. But when he grinned, his face radiated a sparkle of raffish mischief. The girls he took back to meet his adored mother, at the East End home where he grew up, numbered actresses such as Julie Christie and Brigitte Bardot, and supermodels Celia Hammond and Jean Shrimpton. Later confidantes included Princess Diana, who met him at a movie premiere in 1987 and was soon invited back to his decadently elegant rooms at the Albany in Piccadilly. She shared his obsession with health foods, and he wooed her by cooking a risotto of mushrooms and brown rice – with the letters HRH picked out cheekily in truffle paste. 'We'd just meet up for a cup of tea, or sometimes we'd have a long chat for an hour. 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For the rest of his life, he regretted it: 'When the movie came out and I saw Richard Harris do it, I thought, 'Well, I could have sung it as well as that!'' And he originally rejected another role, as the timid obsessive who kidnaps a beautiful young woman, in The Collector. 'I didn't want to be a spotty invisible bank clerk with a snotty nose,' he said. He eventually relented and the movie, released in 1965 with Samantha Eggar as his victim, is regarded as a cult classic. Other successes followed, including the spy caper Modesty Blaise, and Far From The Madding Crowd, opposite Christie. Their love affair was immortalised by The Kinks in a line from their hit Waterloo Sunset: 'Terry meets Julie, Waterloo station, every Friday night.' Despite this, he spent most of the late 1960s in an on-off relationship with a girl known as 'the Shrimp'. Jean Shrimpton was bewitched when she first met him. But though he professed to adore her, he often treated her with offhand cruelty. 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Four years later, fed up with waiting for a marriage proposal that never came, she dumped him. 'I'm a realistic sort of person,' she later said. 'I put up with quite a lot, but then I just walk away. I don't think he was in love with me at all, and if he was, he had a funny way of showing it. 'He was incredibly beautiful, and I was in love with his looks. I was infatuated and in awe of him, but I wasn't in love with him.' Stamp was devastated by her rejection. It came as his career was on the skids, his hopes of replacing Sean Connery as James Bond dashed when the role of 007 went to George Lazenby – with cosmic irony, a former model turned actor. He refused to move to Hollywood: 'There would have been Doris Day films for a lot of money, but then I'd have been trapped.' Instead, he drifted into the drugs scene, dabbling with cocaine and LSD. He and his younger brother Christopher were arrested in California in 1968 for smoking marijuana while driving in the Malibu mountains with a girlfriend. A few months later, Stamp was fined £15 for driving his Rolls-Royce down Pall Mall at 65mph. Reeling after Shrimpton ended their relationship, he left the country. 'I bought a round-the-world ticket, which was kind of epic, and I just thought, if I like anywhere I'll stay there.' On the morning he was due to leave London, he came out of his apartment at the Albany, Piccadilly, and heard music echoing from a nearby rooftop. The Beatles were on top of the Apple building, giving an impromptu concert. He talked his way up and spoke to John Lennon, teasing him that his long hair looked camp. Lennon insisted long hair symbolised strength, 'like Samson,' and for the next six years Stamp refused to cut his own hair, until it reached halfway down his back. Exploring India and the Middle East, he became fascinated with different types of spirituality. 'Tai chi, I was a whirling dervish, there wasn't anything I wouldn't try, except incest or Morris dancing,' he said. He settled in Pune, 100 miles west of Mumbai, at a hotel called the Blue Diamond, with other English expats. Dressing in a dhoti or white robe, he sat literally at the feet of his guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, every day. Some of the lessons involved tantric sex techniques. 'There was a rumour around the ashram that he was preparing me to teach the tantric group,' he said. 'There was a lot of action going on.' Terence Stamp during the filming of 'The Mind of Mr Soames' at Shepperton Studios in 1969 After a year, a telegram from his agent arrived. Stamp always swore it was addressed to, 'Clarence Stamp, the Rough Diamond, Pune – it was like a miracle it was in my hand'. The cable brought two job offers. One was a film about the mystic and spiritual teacher GI Gurdjieff. The other was Superman with Marlon Brando and Christopher Reeve. He took both roles. In Superman, he played the villainous General Zod. For the rest of his life, if he was in a benign mood, he would greet fans with a cry of, 'Kneel before Zod, you bastards.' Thrilled to have him back, his agent announced, 'He knows who he is at last. It's taken him a long time, but he's grown up. He's learned about himself.' Part of that change meant abstaining from drugs and alcohol, and becoming a vegetarian. For the rest of his life he was an advocate of whole foods, and wrote recipe books on healthy eating. But it also meant coming to terms with a difficult childhood, and decades dogged by a conviction that he was a disappointment to his father, Tom, a tug boat pilot. 'When I was a boy,' he said, 'we were a bit hard up. 'After we got a television set, I'd watch plays, and I was always saying, 'I'm sure I could do better.' My father said: 'I don't want you to talk about it any more. People like us don't do things like that.' 'He never said very much and I knew how deeply he must be feeling inside to have spoken like that. We never talked about it again, but inside my head, it was just a pressure cooker building up steam. I loved the East End, but I felt it was my destiny to get out.' He signed up to acting classes in secret, left home and spent two years at theatre school – and did not dare tell his parents until Billy Budd was about to be released. Tom Stamp, a heavy drinker, died from cirrhosis, but not before Stamp was able to buy his parents a home in Kent, close to the fields where they had met as hop-pickers. For the latter decades of his career, Stamp took work when he needed it, unconcerned by the quality. Sometimes it was good, such as his role in drag for Priscilla Queen Of the Desert. 'I thought I'd resemble Candice Bergen,' he joked, 'but I look more like an old boot.' But he never lost an air of regret that the promise of the 1960s, both for him and for the world, was not fulfilled.
