Richmond Hill was broadcast on Network Ten in an evening timeslot 19:30–20:30 as two one-hour episodes each week on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The series, although quite popular, was considered a lukewarm success in the Australian ratings, and was cancelled after six months in June 1988, and ended abruptly at episode 92 later that year. The decision came as a shock to producers, not least due to the fact that key actors contracts had just been extended for another year. As a result, the actors continued to be paid even though the series was no longer in production. There was not a definitive conclusion to the series because production was expected to continue. A final blow was the series had just been sold to the ITV network in the UK the very week it was axed in Australia, but ITV still aired all the episodes. During early 1989, Channel Ten replayed Richmond Hill at 3.00pm weekday afternoons though after only 35 episodes that were replayed it was then abruptly removed from its programming schedule in replacement of US chat shows like
The Phil Donahue Show and
The Oprah Winfrey Show. The remaining episodes have still not been seen on Ten since their original 1988 broadcast. Foxtel's UKTV Gold channel in Australia replayed the entire Richmond Hill series during the late 1990s between 1996 and 1997 during weekday mornings at 9.00am. The series has not been seen in the last 20 years on Australian TV and is waiting to be seen again whether it be released through DVD consumption or by a streaming channel.
International The UK's
ITV bought
Richmond Hill in June 1988, and it was announced by the network in August that encouraged by the huge success of its sister-series
Neighbours on the BBC, they had paid £600,000 for the rights to screen the series.
Thames Television, the ITV region serving the London area, managed the series for the network, and regions opted in to a dedicated feed from Thames. ITV decided to show
Richmond Hill as hour long episodes on Wednesday and Thursdays, directly opposite
Neighbours as part of a revamp of the daytime schedule. It began airing on 5 October 1988. The intention was for all ITV regions to air the same episode, on the same day, at the same time, which would have been a first for an Australian soap opera on ITV, but had been tried once before with the American daytime soap opera
Santa Barbara in 1987. Many of the ITV regions temporarily dropped another Australian series,
A Country Practice, from their schedule to make way for the two weekly episodes of
Richmond Hill and it isn't known whether it was ever intended to be a networked
primetime series on ITV, although in April 1988, the ITV network cancelled
Crossroads, leaving 3 half-hour evening slots. This would have meant the re-formatting of episodes, but Network Ten's cancellation of
Richmond Hill seemingly resulted in ITV losing interest in the series completely, and its mid-afternoon timeslot meant that it didn't achieve anywhere near the audience figures that
Neighbours, was achieving in its tea-time slot over on BBC One. Due to local programming commitments,
Granada Television started the series two weeks later than the rest of the ITV network, and started to screen the series weekly from 20 October 1988, and chose to screen
A Country Practice in the Thursday slot instead. In 1990 the series was moved to a Sunday and didn't finish until spring 1991.
Central Television also broke away from the network screenings in 1989, eventually falling behind the rest of the network by dropping to one episode a week towards the end of its run (running
Quincy in the Thursday slot instead). The majority of ITV regions resumed
A Country Practice as its replacement, with regional UK viewers now considerably behind Australia and at varying parts of the storyline.
Richmond Hill was last screened in the UK in the mid-1990s on cable & satellite channel
Wire TV (hosted by
Femi Oke and co hosted Chris Stacey with guest presenters Darren Edwards, and Darren Gray), it was screened back to back with USA soap
The Bold and the Beautiful, before
Wire TV was finally axed in 1994. In New Zealand,
Richmond Hill was bought by
TVNZ and premiered on
Network Two at 8.20pm on Sunday 19 February 1989,
after the series had been cancelled in Australia. Following the feature-length pilot, the series was aired as one episode a week (as opposed to two episodes a week in Australia) and shown Wednesday nights at 8.00pm (from 22 February) before moving to 7.30pm (from 5 April until 2 August) and then to Tuesday nights at 7.30pm (from 8 August until 24 October). After a short break, the series was moved to Friday nights at 7.30pm (from 8 December 1989 until 7 December 1990). All episodes were played. Grundy also sold the soap to German television channel
Pro 7, and
Richmond Hill was dubbed into German. It was aired twice a week from 1991 to 1992. ==Major cast==