Days Like These is a strange beast: a British remake of an American sitcom.	ITV has a problem. It hasn't had a long-running sitcom hit for ages, and its companies seem incapable of finding one. Now ITV's network director, David Liddiment, has taken the unusual step of seeking out a hit comedy himself. Liddiment's first meeting when he took charge at Network Centre in 1997 was with Carsey-Werner - America's top comedy producers, makers of Roseanne and The Cosby Show. He asked them to put ITV back on the sitcom map. The result: Days Like These, a 13-episode series starting on Friday, February 12. Days Like These is a strange beast: a British remake of an American sitcom. The US original is called That '70s Show and has itself only been running since last September. Set in 1976, it taps nostalgically into adolescent relationships in the era when platform shoes were hip, Abba topped the charts and youngsters wanted to be in Gary Glitter's gang. The characters are mostly young and frisky. They'd look at home hanging out with the Fonz in Happy Days. It's fast, sassy and funny. And according to Carsey-Werner's founder, Tom Werner: "Every episode has a combination of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll." Werner "strongly believes" the British version - made at Teddington Studios, Middlesex, with a British cast and crew - will be a success. "I flew over for a run-through, and people were laughing at references I didn't understand. The British oughtn't to think of it as an adaptation, but should view it as totally home-grown." For all Werner's optimism, Days Like These is a £2.5m gamble for Liddiment. ITV has not successfully adapted an American comedy since Central TV turned the Columbia-Tristar show Who's the Boss? into The Upper Hand (with Joe McGann and Diana Weston) in 1990.
	Traditionally, the transatlantic flow has headed the other way	Traditionally, the transatlantic flow has headed the other way, although Roseanne's plans to make a US AbFab never bore fruit, and an Americanised Men Behaving Badly flopped with audiences in the States. More successfully, Till Death Us Do Part was remade in America as All in the Family, with arch-bigot Alf Garnett transmogrifying into the less verbose Archie Bunker. And Dear John, Birds of a Feather and One Foot in the Grave were all turned into US hits, the latter by Carsey-Werner with entirely new scripts and Bill Cosby playing the lead. "We basically just used the [Meldrew] character, and then even that we abandoned," Werner says. Adapting an American show for British TV is fraught with difficulties. Five years ago, Carlton attempted a remake of The Golden Girls, renaming it Brighton Belles and recasting it with Sheila Hancock, Wendy Craig, Jean Boht and Sheila Gish. A publicity drive saw it off to a cracking start in the ratings, but the discerning British public picked up what Carlton had failed to recognise: in adaptation, the lines had acquired a mid-Atlantic feel that didn't ring true. Viewers voted with their remote controls, and the ratings plummeted. Halfway through its run, ITV's then network director, Marcus Plantin, hit the panic button and took the show off air. Liddiment - the man who tenderly revitalised Coronation Street for Granada TV in the early 1990s - is using all his hands-on producer skills to make Days Like These succeed where Brighton Belles failed. The key decision was to commission Carsey-Werner to remake That '70s Show themselves, yet to film in England using a British cast and production team. It was an unusual arrangement. When the deal was done, the original had not even been screened in America, but has since become a hit in an 8.30pm Sunday-night slot on Fox-TV. To a degree, therefore, Liddiment's judgment has already been vindicated. How did he know it was a hit in the making? He says he watched Carsey-Werner writers at work in Los Angeles and was impressed by their obsession with veracity: "They don't say, 'How can we make a line funnier?' They say, 'How can we make it truer?' "
	When the deal was done, the original had not even been screened in America	But how can a sitcom as American as impeachment be passed off as an all-British production? Carsey-Werner and ITV appear to be counting on Five Steps to Comedy Heaven. Step One: assemble a British cast and crew and tell them to do it their way. The 10 actors are unknowns, except for the former model Sara Stockbridge, and Ann Bryson, of Philadelphia cheese adverts fame. They play Mrs Palmer and Mrs Forman, the matriarchal figures around whom the action revolves. Crucially, a strong production team has been hired, spearheaded by the director Bob Spiers, who has worked on AbFab and Fawlty Towers, and producer John Bartlett, who helped give the BBC a hit with Goodnight Sweetheart. Step Two: ensure that the characters are believable in a British setting. The format was dreamed up by Bonnie and Terry Turner, creators of Wayne's World and Third Rock From the Sun. So it has been treated with respect. Suburban America has become Luton, and name changes have included the father figure Red becoming Ron, Kelso changing to McGuire and Hyde to Dylan. The Venezuelan language student Fez (whose unofficial fan club in America rejoices in the name Fez's Whores) has been transformed into Swedish country boy Tor. (Tor's Whores has an even better ring.) Step Three: anglicise the original scripts, written by a 12-strong team of highly paid American writers. Much of the makeover - by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who cut their teeth writing gags for presenters on The Big Breakfast - is in cultural references. Mentions of Gilligan's Island, Petticoat Junction and Nick Nolte's first TV appearance have been replaced by the likes of Man About the House, Upstairs, Downstairs and Benny in Crossroads. And a story line in which President Ford came to town evolved into a visit by the young Prince Charles. Bartlett, the producer, says: "We were going to have the prime minister of the time, Jim Callaghan, visiting, but I thought, 'Who'd give a damn?' "
	make sure that the original American show is never screened in Britain.	Step Four: make sure that the original American show is never screened in Britain. ITV's contract with Carsey-Werner forbids That '70s Show being sold to British television. The production team acknowledges that viewers' familiarity with The Golden Girls was the killer blow to Brighton Belles. Step Five: don't let the British cast see tapes of the American series. The actors were allowed one 30-minute screening of the debut episode to give them a peek at their characters. All further viewing was banned. Werner told the British team: "Don't look at the show! It's very important that when the script hits the table, you think, 'Here we are with an original piece of material, let's make it work!' " Werner expects Days Like These to evolve quickly away from its American progenitor, with a British team eventually turning out up to 22 scripts a year. But he wants it to retain its edge. The series is heavy with lustful fantasy scenes, as teenagers Eric Forman, Bob Palmer and his scantily clad sister, Donna, and their mates McGuire, Dylan, Tor and Jackie dream of sex and drugs. Will the British public be hooked? Can ITV Comedy lose its status as an oxymoron? We won't have to wait long to find out, Bartlett admits. "If the 13 episodes are not a success, I can't imagine it will be recommissioned. ITV has to justify everything in terms of ratings to advertisers," he says. But, whatever happens, we should applaud Liddiment for his efforts to bring a high-grade sitcom to ITV. As Werner says: "If it takes off, it will run for a very long time."

Days Like These shifted from its Friday slot to Sundays after five weeks; two weeks later, it was shelved. The remaining five episodes played out on the digital channel ITV2 to audiences of nearly two.

May 22 99