Soap Opera Repeats Channel

As an addendum to this post that still doesn't explain why they're willing to release drama programmes that go on for hundreds of episodes and require the same narrative path of requiring knowledge of whats gone before but not soaps.

That looks far higher quality than when ever actually broadcast on Sky's analogue service.

Because soaps go on for thousands of episodes.

The longest running soap was America's Guiding Light which racked up over 15,000 TV episodes (GL started on the radio before transferring to TV in the 1950s) before it was dropped in 2009. For comparison, Coronation Street has not long reached 10k episodes.

Can you imagine the size of the DVD rack you'd need at home to hold 15k episodes of something?

Holding them as files on hard drives would be a lot smaller

Funnily enough in Australia, Prisoner and The Bill have both been released in their entirety on DVD. The Bill has nearly 2,500 episodes, so that's a hell of a lot of discs. Prisoner's a lot shorter, but it's still nearly 700 episodes.

Network actually started doing something similar with all the surviving episodes of Crossroads, but got as far as 1979 before giving up (which admittedly was still a lot of episodes, even with the majority of pre-1978 episodes missing). They also released several volumes of The Bill and Emmerdale Farm, but they only got as far as 1990 and 1974 respectively.

I do still think there's a place for some streaming service to try it. UKTV Play's doing it will The Bill right now (though the fact it's stuck at 25p is frustrating), takes away the need to build an extension to hold the discs.

But the point remains: To want to invest in a complete series of something soapy like what survives of Crossroads requires a massive financial investment and copious disks, time and effort on everybody's part. Not to mention in a lot of soaps many episodes boil down to not very much happening. How many times can you realistically watch the episode of EastEnders where somebody spent the entire episode talking to a tape recorder? What are you going to get out of that on the third or fourth viewing?

Compare to something epic like Game of Thrones for example which aside from being a case of quality over quantity which is the opposite of what a lot of soap basically is, and you can watch GoT over and over and get more out of it each time.

Here’s what someone once said that puts into perspective how many episodes were made:

There is the issue of clearance rights. Credit to whomever was able to get all the episodes released on DVD (obviously Prisoner being an Australian programme would have made it easier to release on DVD) but when it comes to older dramas such as Corrie and Emmerdale many of the actors have passed away and it's possible that the families of those actors may not for whatever reasons wish to give rights or the actors themselves may not give permission (Wikipedia explains how Martin Shaw didn't give permission for episodes of The Professionals to be repeated for years because he felt that the character of Doyle was one-dimensional. He only changed his mind when he found out that Gordon Jackson's widow was having financial difficulties):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Professionals_(TV_series)#Controversy




Perhaps an edited version of the soaps with all the uninteresting bits removed and replaced with a caption would be more suitable eg a character at home getting drunk before going to confront or attack another character could be replaced with something like:

Quote: Expand

Phil has been drinking heavily in the Arches getting angrier and had decided to deal with Billy

Maybe wishful thinking, but I could do with a Soap Operas Channel (without the Repeats element) clearing the way for other content in the then cleared EPG slots.

I've got all 20 volumes of the Prisoner DVDs. I've also got The Sullivans which runs to 23 volumes and 1,114 half-hour episodes. Other soaps I have on DVD are some of the US primetime ones like Dallas and Dynasty/The Colbys. I quite enjoy watching old soaps - I find them to be more enjoyable than their modern counterparts. That said, my interest is in the soaps that ran for shorter periods (well, shorter in terms of soap operas) and are a bit more exciting. I wouldn't entertain watching old episodes of soaps like Corrie, EastEnders or Neighbours for instance. There are just far too many episodes. It's taken me years to get probably a third of the way through Prisoner alone. The soaps that are viable have already been released; those that aren't viable haven't been.

I wouldn't really class the US primetime "soaps" as soaps in the traditional sense really, in terms of scheduling they were just regular drama series, once a week, 26-odd episodes a year, divided into seasons. The only primetime soap in the US that really fits the terms as we understand it was Peyton Place, 2, then 3, half-hour episodes a week, all year round.

More than 19k eps of The Archers of course. Though it- and it’s listeners- think they’re above it being classed as a ‘soap’.