Soap Opera Repeats Channel

Yes, it basically became a mini-movie each week which worked quite well for the last few months as long as the episode focused on characters you were interested in.

There are a few classic episodes to watch officially on All4 so it turning up on BritBox or somewhere isn't out of the question. I think a linear channel is unlikely as the earlier episodes would probably need quite a bit of editing for pre-watershed and it is unlikely to be scheduled post-watershed other than overnight.

I agree the demise of Brookside was badly handled. The bottom line was Channel 4 didn't want it anymore and for its final few years it was moved around the schedules and then finally moved to a Saturday omnibus only screening before finally ending up very late on a Tuesday night.

Ironically Hollyoaks has now overtaken Brookside both in terms of number of years on air and number of episodes produced.

They are storylines that had sex in them. Difference.

Mod edit: paragraph removed

From what I know of Brookside it had far more substance than that.

You don’t know much. Or do, and are deliberately trolling.

The Pandemic brought some old episodes of The Archers back, but it was pointed out that most of the first 30 odd years didnt exist anymore- even the stuff on YouTube is clearly taken from personal tape recordings.

STV has restarted Take the High Road uploading 5 episodes every Sunday in February which should take until 2026 to show the lot on the STV player. From some of the cast members and fans its welcome, although it's a totally different show in place from even when I started watching back in around 1987.

Yes you need a Scottish postcode to watch and log in initially (but they do give an example which works )

STV Player on my Roku box here works with an English postcode, you just only get the STV content, you need to use a Scottish postcode to get the ITV content.

I'm not trolling. I've come here to discuss TV, it's a TV forum after all. Just giving you my takeaways from seeing bits and pieces of both and a regular run of HO episodes a few years back.

As I've said I used to watch HO regularly and got bored of the constant slighty pervy sexual gratification scenes with cast members. I've also went and watched a few old episodes of Brookside and their fundamentally more about action or character even with bizarre plots.

If you disagree with that fine, but that's my takeaway from seeing bits and pieces of both. I accept I've never watched either religiously like I do with Coronation Street, so if regular watchers of both programmes see a different parallel and see more in either show then fair play to them.... each to their own. That doesn't mean the points I raise don't exist as faults with the show.

That doesn't mean HO doesn't have bizarre plots or Brookie never went to parading characters round in their underwear for no reason; but if you asked soap fans to assign one of those values to each of those two shows - they'd go the way I've painted them.

https://www.britbox.co.uk/soaps

Is it me or is Britbox having a dedicated landing page for Soaps a new thing? Headed as SoapBox....?

Also seem to be pumping out new episodes at a steady rate for Emmerdale and Coronation Street. Not much for EE yet - primarily Christmas episodes, but looks like some sort of long term dedicated section intent is there?

One of the sections on that page is 'Soap Legends: Dev Alahan'. I'm not really a soap watcher but is Dev really that much of a soap legend?

Brookside was the best in the 90s when you had Trevor hiding behind the postbox 😂 use to give me nightmares as a kid 😂.

Nope. Not at all, but I guess he's been in the show donkeys years which is what those sections actually appear to mean.