What they were devoted to, were shows aimed at their dayparts when the had control of the set. And everything else around that, was just accepted. Chit-chat over the fence in those days, was limited to whatever they and their neighbors had in common. There was very little attempt to bring tension (like sensitive subjects would) into their relationships when they had neighbors, community organizations and family. Aside from "the leisure class", I even wonder how much time they spent participating in book circles? Dinner prep can take a lot of time; helping the kids with school projects can take a lot of time; house chores as well, naturally. My mom sent a lot of free time on women's magazines, and had a monthly bridge group; other spare time was with neighbor's wives. She wasn't hooked on the soaps per se, but, they were always on. Nothing more dreary than intuiting, even at pre-school age, that you were going into a commercial break, when the organ music swelled on an unresolved minor chord... On the other hand, I can say I memorized my first advertising jingle at age 4: "Makes your hair do what you want it tooooooo" (Alberto).
When I was a kid in the 80s my mom watched all the CBS soaps: The Young and The Restless, As The World Turns, Capitol (an early 80s soap set in Washington, DC) and Guiding Light. I would walk home from school, get home around 2:20 and see the last 10 minutes of As The World Turns and then all of Capitol, which was only a half-hour show.
For a few brief years in the early to mid 80's I watched 'As The Word Turns' with my then newlywed wife. It's the very first place I saw Meg Ryan, Marisa Tomei and Julianne Moore.....and the second place I ever saw Lisa Loring. My main memory of the plot is James Stenbeck coming back from the dead multiple times and the never ending love triangle between Betsy, Steve & Craig.
Coronation Street celebrates its 60th birthday today, and still going strong 6 times a week with some big storylines coming to a climax this week. Amazing achievement really, and of course William Roache has been in it from episode 1 (December 9th 1960) as Ken Barlow, and on Monday night made his first reappearance since production started up again after the Covid break, no doubt he will feature plenty in the 60th anniversary episode tonight! It's a little mind blowing to think that this has been going non stop since before the likes of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Stones had released any records!
As a Brit, Brookside and Hollyoaks were my favourites. I quite liked Emmerdale but it didn’t maintain standards.
I loved Brookside. Barry Grant was a proper baddie, Jimmy Corkhill, Ron Dixon, Sinbad, and then Trevor Jordache buried under the patio! Fun times.
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I liked what I've been able to see of Brookside on DVD and on youtube. I sure wish someone would put out some full runs of Brookside episodes on DVD, and also that Network would do a volume six of Emmerdale Farm! I see there are a lot of Crossroads on video now, so there's still hopes for these two faves of mine.
Gosh! I never saw Emmerdale Farm but read the books. It had changed its name to Emmerdale when I 1st watched it.
I've never quite known where to start with the Emmerdale books, or maybe I don't want to get too hooked on buying a lot of them. I never saw Emmerdale Farm when it was called that either, I came in about when Kim Tate was leaving, after some big airplane crash, maybe around the mid '90s? I saw that the old shows from the first episode were released on DVD and gave the first set of it a try, and it got up to five sets and now I think they aren't going to release any more (though I know the Skilbeck twins die from a single episode on a video set titled 'Soap Box' with samples of various shows).
I got them as a series set & started with book 1 of series 1. I got the series sets cheap from a charity shop. :0) I remember watching it with parents as a girl. I never got the entire series on DVD.
I became obsessed with Guiding Light in college- I like to pick apart how the story arcs were constructed and how they played out- by the time I noticed the show endlessly repeating/recycling story lines I basically gave up, but would occasionally go back and watch it.
I watched The Doctors when David Canary played a creepy weirdo cult leader named Far Wind. The character left for a while then returned with a better haircut and normal clothes as Warner. He renounced the cult and apologized for being weird, then took over an entire wing of the hospital at gunpoint and held everyone hostage demanding $5 million. Good stuff.
I remember my grandmother watching him kill Missy(played by Dorian Lopinto) and it made her mad big time. Of course, Dorian went on to One Life to Live, as Samantha Vernon.
"One Life to Live" and "General Hospital." I have no idea why we suddenly started watching those two soaps when there were so many others, but they were only half an hour long to begin with. Tommy Lee Jones was on OLTL when I first watched it. OLTL was more socially relevant of the two shows. GH was always ridiculous. Although OLTL had a years-long multiple personality storyline with wealthy publisher Viki Lord Reilly Buchanan having a party girl alter called Niki Smith who got in all kinds of trouble when Viki got bored with her real life.
Probably the first soap I have any memory of is “Where the Heart Is” but I don’t recall the characters or plots. I remember watching Ryan’s Hope when it first aired. My mother was the one who got me hooked on soaps and I watched them off and on for many, many years until eventually I was just watching General Hospital on occasion then just completely lost interest altogether about 15 years ago.
like a lot of people, i followed the luke and laura saga (general hospital) pretty religiously. only soap i kept up with then, but followed bh 90210 with the same zeal later.
Soaps I've heard a lot about but barely ever seen are Crossroads, Market In Honey Lane, and Prisoner In Cell Block H. I did follow a Venezuelan soap for awhile while they had it on dubbed into English, titled Lady In Rose... Lady in Rose - Wikipedia Tenko might count as a soap? I did see that when it was fairly new.
Yeah. Because i would always be calling my mother in to the room where I was lying on the couch and telling her to please find a channel that didn't have one of those shows on "that's just a lot of grown-ups arguing." She'd change the channel so i could watch The Real Ghostbusters instead of those soaps.
I was looking through books written by Sean Egan awhile ago remembering how much I enjoyed his books on The Animals and The Creation and found a book about Coronation Street. It's been a great read so far (just into the '90s and of course the show has been running since late 1960!) He also does the reader the service of covering other British and also Aussie soaps a bit too, the competition... it seems like one of the first to threaten to topple The Street (or just Corrie if you prefer) from it's perch as top soap was made by ATV in London circa 1967 and was titled The Market In Honey Lane. It was scheduled complimentary to Corrie and having seen one it was quite high quality, so I've ordered the 4 DVD set that exists of it. I dislike the later BBC's EastEnders so it's a bit annoying to learn they built it where Honey Lane used to be made at Elstree Studios. What killed Honey Lane according to Egan seems to have been various ITV franchises moving it about in the schedule in it's second year (Coronation Street was uniformly Mondays and Wednesdays at 7:30pm everywhere). I've given Emmerdale a bit of a look in this month, it's fallen far from where it once was, and guess what... there's yet another lost Dingle family member introduced... augh! Not enough sheep dipping and shearing, what's the point of being in a village in Yorkshire if the stories are the same infidelities and accidental pregnancies? Coronation Street has been better the last few years... with the exception of every appearance of Mary. Cannot buy her in the least... not amusing, and worse than even Brian or Sean. It's like having shell-less turtle Reg Holdsworth around... I just keep cringing.
