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.