YES...says actor Paul Henry, who played bumbling Benny in the long-running TV series.

I think if we read between the lines, the idea is to have a soap set in a hotel. In that sense, I think it is a good idea. It's a marvellous setting, there are so many people coming and going, so many possible storylines. The guests, the people who work there, the people just passing through.

Of course, things have changed so much since the days of the original Crossroads that it would have to be a completely different type of series. The original was right for its time, but people would think it was dated now. It would need to be a bit more earthy. I remember, years ago, there was a show on the Beeb called United, about a football team. If that was done now, there would be some fantastic stories, because now we know about what these players are getting up to in their time off the pitch. Then we didn't.

So Crossroads would need to be different. There would need to be plenty of characters for people to love or hate.

But I think it would work to have a soap and to call it Crossroads. You'd have the audience who used to love the show: but if the storylines were more modern, sexier, you'd also have a younger audience watching as well.

People knocked it, but it's got to be better than all the gardening and cookery programmes on TV. We can do without still another one of those. There are a lot of marvellous actors in this country, and there is not the work for them to do. We've got more TV stations, but at the end of the day there is less work. You can speak to a young person in drama school now and he'll say he wants to be a presenter. You end up with presenters interviewing presenters on TV. That's no good.

I don't know any more than anybody else about whether it will come back, just what I read in the papers. It's like everything else in life, we don't know until it actually happens.

But I would be very happy to see Crossroads back. I don't know whether you could re-instate all of the characters. Quite a few of the actors at the time have anyway departed and gone to that other motel in the sky. But Benny is one of the few characters you could re-instate. He was a fabulous character to play, a child in a man's body. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.

NO...says Evening Press TV critic Julian Cole who thinks we should look forward, not back

OLD television programmes should be allowed to stay in their coffins. The last thing we need is for the likes of Crossroads to come creaking back to life. There are many reasons why it should keep both feet in the grave, and not all of them are related to the show's cherished awfulness.

Crossroads ran on ITV in all from 1964 to 1988, notching up more than 4,500 episodes. Amazingly, this soap attracted up to 18 million viewers, displaying the perverse British taste for what is patently dire. When in 1981 matriarch Meg (Noele Gordon) was sacked, The Sun newspaper ran a popular campaign, predating by many years all the fuss it was to make over Deirdre's imprisonment in Coronation Street.

Central Television decided to switch off the life support machine in 1988, and there was an outcry from loyal fans. Now more than a decade later, a period in which wobbly sets and wobblier acting, ridiculous plots and bland Brummie blather are a pleasantly distant memory, Labour peer Lord Waheed Alli, Carlton's director of programmes, wants to bring it all back.

One very good reason why Crossroads should be left in peace is that its success was accidental. Viewers warmed to its amateurism, they knew it was dreadful and loved it because it was wonky. They loved its absurdities and wouldn't have wanted anyone to fix all that was wrong. It worked because it was wrong, and trying to recreate that amateurism would be well nigh impossible.

Besides, television should learn to grow up and not cling to its tatty old comforters. Programmes are frequently disinterred, from Dr Findlay and The Saint to the Generation Game and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and with varying results. I quite like Randall and his dead friend, in a lazy Saturday night kind of way.

But TV should look forwards and not back. We need new programmes, fresh ideas, interesting angles - not a re-hash of past successes.

Programmes have their time and then they are gone. Often the old programmes we remember are burnished by nostalgia. They weren't really that good, it's just that we like to remember them, to talk about them, to bandy trivial facts about what has long gone.

Even when TV does try something new, all too often the dead hand of familiarity lies over a fresh venture. Either that or the same actors are wheeled out in copy-cat vehicles. How many times do we want to watch John Thaw or David Jason? Yet the trend continues, and now Ross Kemp, having escaped EastEnders, has been signed up by ITV for a series of what are likely to be dreary, routine dramas (if Hero Of The Hour is any yardstick).

If TV is to remain a vital, relevant medium, then it has to be daring and take risks. The only way to do this is to look ahead. Flicking through ancient copies of the Radio Times is no way to seek inspiration.