Soap Opera Repeats Channel

Then the last few episodes were basically Phil Redmond having a big sulk at Channel 4 for axing it, and turning their controller into a drug dealer who got lynched.

According to off the telly, Phil Redmond blamed c4s cricket coverage for the decline of brookside. It was seemingly in decline long before that. A friend stopped watching it in the mid 90s as there was an annual siege, according to her.

When it was in its last days, brookside episodes would not feature some characters for weeks on end, so it was disjointed.

Phil Redmond always used to say Brookie was struggling because C4 kept moving it around the schedules, failing to realise that you don't get booted around the schedules if you're still pulling in audiences. Hasn't hurt Corrie either, has it?

I hunted these episodes out on Youtube (only around three). Its quite amusing in hindsight - people suddenly keeling over, others getting mild symptoms of rampant diarrhoea, the residents manning their own barricade to keep people in/out, Ron Dixon saying its the gays fault and its like AIDS.

Ah, I couldn't find them.

I think Brookside ultimately suffered from the increase in the soaps on the other channels taking the primetime slots away one by one. C4 really should have retooled it as a 9pm soap airing for an hour once or twice a week, but ultimately I doubt the channel would have been able to justify having two soaps long term so once airing 4 or 5 times a week became the norm one of them had to give.

Corrie isn't shunted in the same manner though - it has 6 regular timeslots. Brookie had none, it wasn't being moved once in a while but pretty much continuously.

When Hollyoaks started, it was being touted as a soap aimed at teens. I haven't watched Hollyoaks for many years, but would it be fair to say, Hollyoaks is now, what Brookside was?

Certainly fair to say they've shifted focus and grown with their audience and they've consciously bought back older characters over recent years. There is still a teen element which gets a focus they wouldn't on other shows, and indeed they're at their centre of the County Lines storyline which was supposed to dominate this year. The student element is pretty much gone though which is a bit of a shame.

Granada Plus repeated Albion Market, but has it been shown on ITV2/3/4?

Oh, and I recently put the Albion Market theme tune to good use, on my model railway layout channel!

I think Sky Soap showed Albion Market too.

They also showed most of the run of Emmerdale Farm, and there was a period of around a year where they were running it in parallell with Granada Plus who started with the change to Emmerdale in November 1989. Going by the screenshots on the Emmerdale Wiki, it seems they got up to August 1988. I wonder what would have happened if the channel had run 6 months or so longer and they got to November 1989 and the change to Emmerdale, would they have gone back to the beginning, or continued showing episodes that Granada Plus had shown around a year earlier?

Incidentally, mentioning the use of the Albion Market theme tune in video 47 from my model railway layout, one of the comments came from someone, who used to work on Albion Market! My layout series is only at 47 videos (48 will come end of June), but has lasted longer in terms of years (now into its third year wheras Albion Market lasted one), and will probably last a lot longer in terms of episodes as well.

Absolutely not. Brookside had a much more social focus. And wasn't obsessed with dreadful actors who would be better served as models playing vacuous characters