Examples of upcoming cases
Among the regular barristers to appear at Fulchester Crown Court was Bernard Gallagher who played the tough but very fair Jonathan Fry QC. Dorothy Vernon helped to give the show a little lunchtime sex appeal as the lawyer Helen Tate. Writers included the playwright John Godber and Jeremy Sandford, who wrote Cathy Come Home.
Crown Court was devised as part of ITV's plan to add a further 20 hours of television to the weekly schedule. Instead of gearing the programmes towards an assumed audience, the schedule brought a standard mix of genres to daytime TV. But it was Crown Court, the forerunner of modern legal dramas such as Kavanagh QC and Judge John Deed, which proved a serious subject matter given a dramatic twist could entertain millions of people every day.
A typical dramatic device employed by the programme's writers was to play on the audience's prejudices. In one three-parter called "Sugar and Spice", the backgrounds of a spiky-haired punk rocker and a well-spoken public schoolgirl were brought before the jury in the case of a very nasty mugging.
Viewers automatically assumed that the punk was the initiator of the attack and had coerced her apparently meek friend into the crime. It turned out that the public schoolgirl was responsible for the crime after a wily lawyer successfully antagonised her to the point where she showed her real character in the witness box.
Simon Haveland, the head of production at Legal TV, said: "I remember watching the original shows while 'sick' from school. The storylines were so addictive that I often tried to extend my illness for the rest of the week to see the outcome.
"My nan used to love the show too, which wasn't very cool from my perspective, but looking back it was incredibly clever that they managed to appeal to such a wide audience. We know that attraction is still there."
The prosecution will open for the first case at 9am on Monday 2 October on Legal TV and will continue six days a week with an omnibus edition on a Sunday.