THE RETURN of News At Ten isn't the only worry for ITV network executives at the moment. Next Tuesday they meet to pick a new nightly soap to replace Aussie series Home And Away which has been poached by Channel 5.

It's a task that's as welcome as a press photographer at baby Leo's christening because finding a potential hit is fraught with difficulties. Just ask the BBC where bosses believed that the sun, sea, sand and sangria format for Eldorado was just what the doctor ordered for a new thrice-weekly soap. They learnt to their cost that you can't fool all of the viewers any of the time. Just because it came from EastEnders creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland didn't mean audiences would automatically watch it. They didn't, causing the £10m soap to be axed after just a year on screen. The purpose-built village in the hills overlooking Malaga was left to rot and the cast head back home to the labour exchange.

So it's timely to reflect on past soap failures to remind ITV bosses of where they might go wrong. They must remember that for every EastEnders there's an Eldorado, for every Coronation Street there's an ALBION MARKET. This came from Street makers Granada in the mid-1980s with the aim of boosting weekend schedules.

The setting was a Manchester market where the lives of traders and their families provided the stories. This provided for an ethnic mix of characters but viewers failed to warm to them as they did the European cast of Eldorado.

Squabbling between the ITV companies didn't help. When ratings weren't as good as expected, some regions demoted Albion Market to poorer time slots causing the ratings to fall even lower.

Even introducing familiar faces, singer Helen Shapiro as a hairdresser and Anthony Booth from Till Death Us Do Part as the licensee of the local pub failed to raise its profile.

Albion Market shut up its stall after 100 episodes - a year after the titles rolled for the first time.

Undeterred by the failure of Eldorado, BBC1 tried again with CASTLES -and found itself with another flop on its hands. They kept well away from Europe, setting the story in London, but the antics of a middle class family proved a big turn-off for viewers. The 24 episodes were watched by between three and four million people.

THE CREZZ was billed as drama but the one-hour stories about middle class residents of a London crescent were soap by any other name. Joss Akland, Isla Blair and Peter Bowles (who went on to appear in To The Manor Born) were the stars. Clive Exton devised the series whose writers included such names as John Wells and Willis Hall but it folded after 12 episodes in 1976.

A decade before that WEAVERS GREEN was a sort of The Archers with pictures. This twice-weekly soap was set in an English village with a couple of pre-All Creatures Great And Small country vets as the main characters. The series ended after just 49 episodes without even achieving the notoriety of a miss like TRIANGLE. This seaborne soap stayed afloat longer than the Titanic, running for three seasons on BBC1 before the drama about passengers and crew of a North Sea ferry sank with all hands.

They should have manned the lifeboats earlier after realising that a ferry serving Felixstowe, Gottenburg and Rottendam was hardly likely to be as glamorous as The Love Boat. They tried by casting Kate O'Mara and getting her to take off her top - to sunbathe - in the first episode but after that it was as much fun as a wet weekend in Blackpool. British programme-makers aren't the only ones to underestimate their audience. After the international success of Dynasty, producer Aaron Spelling thought THE COLBYS would be a surefire hit. It had the same glossy look, even some of the same cast as Jeff and Fallon from Dynasty paid visits to the Colbys of California.

The names (movie stars Charlton Heston and Barbara Stanwyck) and the budgets were bigger but the plots were more ludicrous. As Hollywood legend Stanwyck wriggled out of her contract she said what many critics had been thinking - that The Colbys was "the biggest pile of garbage I ever did".

Which brings us back to Crossroads, the favourite to be chosen as ITV's new early evening soap. The motel-set series was axed in 1988 having lasted 24 years on air despite protests and respectable viewing figures.

To revive it would be a mistake. Far better to try something new - how about a soap set in a newspaper office where all human (and some inhuman) life is on view?