Who invented soap operas

Today marks the eightieth anniversary of the birth of a cultural sensation that would outlast almost every other piece of broadcast media from its era: a soap opera called Guiding Light. The show lasted through two mediums and thousands of episodes. It was originally thought up by Irna Phillips, who was also behind As the World Turns and a whole lot of other popular soaps.

The show first premiered as a fifteen-minute radio spot, before becoming a half-hour television show in When it ended, the show was an hour-long CBS show. Ah yes! As with many colloquial things, exact origins are hard to track down. From Mozart to Verdi , many of the most popular operas revolve around people, the grand and the lowly, and family stories. A big part of opera has since been rooted in everyday dramas, albeit fairly ridiculous ones.

Just like your daytime stories. In The Marriage of Figaro , the Count, wanting to seduce Susanna — to whom Figaro is betrothed — tries to set Figaro up with Marcellina, a woman old enough to be his mother. Turns out, she actually is his mother. In the opera, she nearly faints but ultimately seems happy that she can still love Figaro, albeit in a slightly different way.

For a time it was '60 percent entertainment, 30 percent information and 10 percent education'. It also worked spectacularly as a programme and quickly became a hit with both urban and rural listeners, attracting an audience of over 9 million by Such was its power that famously, the death of Grace Archer in a fire on September 22 saw the BBC inundated with calls from grief-stricken listeners and the newspapers the next day full of nothing else, completely overshadowing the launch of commercial television.

Down the years the programme has changed with the nation, and storylines that would have been unthinkable in the less permissive s are now commonplace, but the realities of country living. BBC television's first foray into soap opera was a children's programme The Appleyards , which went out once every two weeks from to At first it was broadcast live. It featured Mum, Dad and their four children, living somewhere in the Home Counties.

Unlike later soaps, which continue in real time, as the younger Appleyard child actors grew, they were replaced, so in this little corner of suburban England time appeared to stand still. The Grove Family , which ran from to , was the first television soap for adults.

It was set in the north London suburb of Hendon and featured three generations of a successful builder's family who took their name from the BBC's Lime Grove studios. First and foremost entertainment, it nevertheless contained public service elements as well as reflecting the post-war growth in prosperity. The s saw commercial television establishing such a dominance in soaps with shows such as Coronation Street and Crossroads , , that until the launch of EastEnders in , many considered that the BBC was not committed to this type of popular drama.

This was not for the want of trying though. After the failure of the short-lived and largely forgotten attempt at a replacement for The Groves called Starr and Company , BBC television returned to the fray in with a more successful and memorable drama, Compact.

Seen as a rival to Coronation Street , but scheduled to avoid clashing with it, Compact had a decidedly more upmarket setting than its more established rival amid the glamorous world of fashion publishing. Predictably, it was panned by critics but liked by audiences and due to viewer demand an omnibus edition was introduced in The programme did not win a place in the heart of the Corporation, however, and was discontinued in Later the same year, the BBC tried again with The Newcomers , which ran until late and told the story of the Coopers, a London family who moved to the fictional town of Angleton against the real background of a shift in population from London to smaller satellite towns in the s and s.