for in-house programmes. Jonathan Powell's attempt to repeat the success of EastEnders in 1992, when he had become Controller of BBC One, led to one of the BBC's most notorious and costly failures. Eldorado was set in the British expatriate community in Spain, created by the same team of Julia Smith and Tony Holland who had come up with EastEnders. The costly soap opera, hugely maligned by critics and the victim of a viewer backlash against the massive advertising campaign the BBC had undertaken to promote it, was scrapped by Powell's successor Alan Yentob after less than a year's run, under pressure from the Director-General of the BBC John Birt. The 1990s saw a rise in the popularity of costume drama adaptations of literary classics, mostly adapted by the acclaimed screenwriter Andrew Davies. One of the most successful of these was a 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Contemporary social drama, a BBC signature style since the 1960s, remained in the form of landmark productions such as Our Friends in the North (1996), but it was notable that this was transmitted on the more niche BBC Two channel rather than the mainstream BBC One as might well have been the case in previous decades. There was criticism of the department's commissioning process in some quarters, which was seen as being overly intricate and bureaucratic. As The Independent described: "Lengthy agonising over whether the BBC1 saga Seaforth would be given a second series (eventually, it wasn't) further encouraged the view that the BBC's management floor is full of desks where the buck does not so much stop as hang around for a few months." Further problems emerged for the drama department after the departure of Charles Denton as its Head in May 1996. He was briefly replaced on a temporary basis by Ruth Caleb, the Head of Drama at BBC Wales. However, Caleb had no interest in taking the job on a permanent basis, and after a six-month attachment left the post at the end of the year. With no suitable candidate to take the job on a full-time basis having been found, Director of Television Alan Yentob was forced to oversee the department, again on a temporary basis. There was much criticism in the press over the inability of the BBC to find a full-time Head of Drama, with even the BBC