Nordstern TV announced on Wednesday that it will screen all three cuts of The Orchard Gate’s finale on 7 October, exactly 40 years after the original broadcast. The discovery of a previously unseen ending has revived a dispute over a phone-in poll that viewers believed would decide the fate of the fictional village at the centre of the series.
The 90-minute special will stream in Austria and carry subtitles in six languages. Dener Cortês, the broadcaster’s drama director, said the new version matched the result announced on air in 1986, not the ending that viewers actually saw. “For four decades, people have asked whether the programme heard them. Now they can see what the crew made,” he said.
The vote that split viewers
The weekly serial ran from 1978 to 1986 and followed residents trying to keep their valley’s orchard cooperative alive. For the finale, viewers were invited to phone in and choose between a sale to a developer and a plan to keep the cooperative running. Nordstern reported that 61.8% of 43,206 callers backed keeping it; the broadcast instead ended with the sale.
The station said at the time that the transmitted ending had been chosen before the vote, and that the call-in was a separate audience poll. That explanation failed to quiet viewers who had expected the result to shape the story. Some wrote to the broadcaster for years, while former cast members said the finale had left the series’ ending feeling imposed rather than earned.
The alternate cut surfaced in January during a digitisation of the station’s film archive. It runs for 11 minutes and shows the cooperative surviving; a slate at its start labels it the “poll ending”. A control-room audio tape from the night records a producer directing staff to play the sale version. Nordstern says no original telephone records survive, so it cannot establish how the result was calculated.
Three cuts, one old argument
The special will present the broadcast ending first, followed by the restored cut and a shorter version filmed before the vote. Damini Oommen-Bir, who played one of the cooperative’s organisers, said the discovery had brought back a painful professional memory. “We were told the audience had chosen, then had to defend an ending they never chose,” she said.
Nordstern has not said whether it will alter the series’ listing or describe the poll as having determined the ending. Media historian Francisco Carrera-Campos of the University of Innsbruck said the surviving tape could clarify the production decision but could not settle what callers wanted. “It answers one question and leaves the loudest one open,” he said.
The broadcaster expects the anniversary stream to draw its biggest audience for an archive programme this year, though it has not released a forecast. It plans to publish the three cuts together after the special, free to viewers in Austria for seven days, then add them to its paid archive service.
Cortês said the station had considered marking the anniversary with a routine retrospective before the archive team found the reels. Instead, the broadcaster will invite viewers to submit memories and publish a selection alongside the stream. For fans who spent years arguing over a fictional valley’s future, the new ending may offer fresh evidence — but not a final answer.
