The show’s final story has gone down in history as one of the all-time bonkers meta TV endings. In the episode, titled ‘Deus Ex Machina’, the teenage Grovers learn that they’re characters in a TV show, manipulated for the entertainment of an omnipotent writer, who is bringing their story to a close. Now self-aware, the crew are given the ability to write their own endings by their creator, who can’t bear to kill them off himself. Much madness ensues, as the kids let their imaginations loose: the Grove is attacked by aliens, zombies and a T-rex, while one girl wears an “End is Nigh” sandwich board and begs for mercy from the “benevolent scribe” in the sky. At the end of the episode a pair of pre-teen anarchists, determined to keep the Grove out of the hands of evil property tycoons, push the plunger on a make-shift bomb and the screen is flooded with white light, after which a montage of characters from across the years plays over The Beatles’ ‘In My Life’. For a show that had previously concerned itself with teen sex, homelessness, soft drugs and that time Dec blinded Ant with a paintball gun, it was quite a big existential swing.
“You don’t want to end the story,” explains Bryan Johnson, the show’s final script-editor, who wrote the episode, “I love those characters and I got a bit obsessed with ‘what happens to my characters once nobody is writing them?’ So I thought I’d give them the chance to end their own story. The whiteout was the point where I’d handed it over to the viewer to create their own ending; if you want it to blow up, it’s blown up. If you don’t, someone’s pulled the wire out. There was no going back, but [for me] life would go on in their world.”
“It wasn’t until we came to sit down to storyline the last four episodes that I was told that they really were the very last four episodes,” says Johnson. “The BBC had decided not to wait until we’d finished,” says Bloom. “They’d made a financial decision to cancel the show.” The team now had to find a way to close out not only Series 18, but the preceding thirteen years of storytelling, with no space to build up to a finale. “That’s the most insane thing, looking back now,” he says. “You went from Ken Loach, Mike Lee, Andrea Arnold, Shane Meadows-style socially realistic drama and then… BANG. None of you are real. You’ve got to fight for your existence.”
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Back when he was a jobbing writer working on soaps and dramas like Revelations, Springhill, Families and The Grand, Davies’ finales, by necessity, had to work as both a full-stop and an ellipsis. “With a lot of those cheap soaps, we’d quite carefully engineer a finale that could be either a cliff-hanger for the next series or could be a real ending” he says, “Families [the ITV daytime soap Davies inherited in the early 90s]ended brilliantly with the mother-in-law murdering her daughter-in-law, who had slept with the father-in-law. At the same time we had a character, Jackie, inherit ten million Australian dollars, so we were all ready for Jackie the millionaire in the next series. That could have run and run. Revelations [a late-night soap Davies developed for Granada in 1994] ran for two years, and both years ended with a murder that the murderer gets away with, which gave us something for the next series. We made sure they came to a climax, but you’d build in enough to come back.”
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“There were always good intentions,” says Johnson. “It’s always about serving the characters and the story. There was so much to pack in and tie up, and tying everything neatly seems too convenient unless you do something like this. If we’d been given more notice maybe we could have built up to it. But I’m glad that we had the chance to try something like this. I’m glad we dared to be different. We went out kicking and screaming.”
