Your earliest soap memory?

[Jason73]

My earliest soap memory ever was watching Alma Rudder and Cecile de Pouligniac gaslight Blaine Ewing on Another World. I don't remember all the details but I remember Alma dressing up in a Raggedy Anne doll costume and terrorizing poor Blaine. In my childhood memories some of that stuff was pretty dark and scary. That was back in 1982.

Seems like a lot of us have dark soap moments that made impressions on us when we were younger.


My earliest UK soap memory is from not too long ago:

The first time I ever watched a UK soap was when I watched the Corrie 50th anniversary tram crash.

 

[Rove]

I'd say my earliest introduction to Soap would have been The Young and the Restless. Since this and Days of Our Lives were screened during school hours in Australia I'd have to watch these soaps if I was home sick from school. My mother was a fan of The Young and the Restless so I can vividly recall characters from this soap more than others.

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These two in particular stand out for me. I still recall the moment mother referred to Jill as a tart. My eyes popped. But the biggest one for me was Dallas. The moment I was introduced to the Ewing family it felt like I was home.

 

[Karin Schill]

Mine is of the Dallas opening credits. I must have first watched those around the time when my parents read me books with drawings of animals and what they sounded like since I came to associate the music with the cows in the opening credits!

I also remember there was a scene where someone was at the hospital. I don't remember which season it was but it must have been quite early on. I wanted to watch the show but my parents told me it was not a children's show and that I should go to bed. So since they refused to read me the subtitles or explain what was going on I gave up and went to bed. I bet if they had dubbed Dallas to Swedish I would have watched it earlier than I did as I began watching a Swedish soap opera called "Varuhuset" when I was 7 years old but wasn't allowed to watch Dallas until I was 11.

 

[TJames03]

Ryan's Hope and the nighttime soaps. Actually, I clearly remember the first night DYNASTY aired it's three-hour pilot.

 

[Barbara Fan]

I dont really remember my 1st soap memory but it has to be either Corrie or Crossroads as both my grans watched them and my mum watched Corrie.

And I always remember as a little girl, my mum telling me that the old lady called Ena Sharples from Corrie was the same Violet Carson who played piano on Stars on Sunday on ITV
All smartened up and no hairnet!!

I am pleased to remember the first episode of Dallas tho in 1978 and happy to have been there from day 1

 

[Carrie Fairchild]

I was looking and hoping to find that scene with Colin & Benny, but no luck.

I did find this

There's two clips of it in the first five minutes of this doc I recently rewatched. There's the scene of the fight and then the second scene where Benny finds her body with Colin looming over him.

My earliest memory is this scene from EastEnders. It's strange that I remember it as I must've only been three years old when it aired. I'm wondering did I maybe see a later broadcast on Irish TV but I'm pretty sure my mother watched it at BBC pace.

Other random early soap memories are a mobile home exploding in Neighbours as Scott & Charlene ran for cover, someone's wedding dress being ruined by a burst water tank on Emmerdale, the bush fire in Sons & Daughters where Margaret contemplates leaving Pat behind and the harrowing scenes in Brookside where a woman (Sue?) and her son are pushed off some scaffolding to their deaths. In regard to the American soaps, I remember one of Gary and Abby's sauna scenes and thinking it was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen on TV during one of Knots afternoon screenings on RTE or BBC. I only remember the opening credits of Dallas and Dynasty (I only really got to know those shows in reruns). And I didn't even know that Falcon Crest existed until I heard it being referenced in an episode of Cybill (by guest star Joan Van Ark no less).

 

[Walford Boy]

Being from the Midlands it has to be both The Archers and Crossroads. Nothing specific, I can remember having to be quiet Sunday Morning while the Archers omnibus was on while my mum was preparing the Sunday roast.

And at 6:35 pm weekdays it was Crossroads after ATV today.

 

[Lockardian]

My earliest Coronation Street memories are similar to others. A woman (called Sally?) visiting Deidre and giving Tracy a doll, then Tracy going missing and eventually being found with the woman. Must have been 1979. I remember the aftermath of Renee’s car crash - people on the street wondering why the corner shop was closed and a policeman telling them Renee was dead. That was 1980. Another memory (October 1980) was Tracy getting locked in the loo!

Crossroads wise - I remember Rosemary Hunter shooting David. No idea of the year. I distinctly remember seeing the episode on 13th December 1979 because a character mentioned “it’s December 13th” and I remember thinking “it’s the same day there as it is here”! Something about Sarah Jane “bleeding again” and her mother being worried too. Oh - and Pamela Vezey’s character telling her daughter not to paint the living room orange as “it would be like living inside a Belisha beacon”!!

Dynasty - Claudia on the roof with what everyone thought was a baby, but when she dropped it they realised it was a doll (January 1984 in the UK).

Dallas - a fire starting when two characters were fighting and knocked some candles over.

The Sullivans - Auntie Rose catches Terry and Peter drinking (Mid 1980 in my ITV region).

 

[B.J. Ewing]

I can’t remember any storylines or anything, but I do remember the fascinating characters of Bet (with her big white hair) and Hilda Ogden (with her curlers) from Coronation Street on our TV screen. Must’ve been somewhere in the 80s.

But an earlier one (I think) is a Dallas memory. And that’s Sue Ellen escaping from the sanatorium.

 

[J. R.'s Piece]

Since my latest age revision, I think it is from 2008. That time on Hollyoaks when multiple returnee multiple murderer Warren Fox’s affair with his wedding planner had reached the ears of his fiancée, whose ex-husband Warren had murdered. So she then planned to murder Warren by shooting him dead after they got married. Except when she tried to off him before the ceremony, she found that Warren had taken away the bullets. So he murdered her, went to the wedding ceremony and pretended that she had jilted him. Then later that day, Warren discovered that she had been pregnant with his child. It was a Christmas episode. It was the only one of Warren’s various murders that he has ever got convicted fo. After his death (I’ll explain later) and getting away with it for three years, he eventually served a lengthy four and a half years for it in prison, before returning as “Mike” in the shower of his latest fiancée, whose sister he had been trying to murder. Warren has just come back for the latest instalment in the long-running stolen twin babies storyline that began 20 months ago when he kidnapped his newborn baby daughter from the hospital. Then he came back six months later and kidnapped his baby son from the hospital, having been lured by the baby mother faking her own death. Last night (after the mother tried to kidnap them but was then convinced by others that they weren’t hers before the audience were later shown that they really were hers but she still doesn’t know), Warren vowed that the mother will never see them again and that she will never get the better of him. Although as he is due back as a permanent regular in the autumn, he might be wrong.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

I was watching the end scenes from one daytime soaps in the States for weeks before my DANIEL BOONE reruns aired at 4pm which fluctuated with the Olympics. I was never able to get into daytimes soaps, but I kept watching the final scenes of this one (EDGE OF NIGHT, perhaps?) in which a gunman perched in an upstairs window kept waiting to shoot someone. It went on forever... I missed one episode, the one where the shooting occurred, naturally, and I still couldn't tell what had happened, the story having already zoomed ahead.

And that typified daytime soap dynamics: it was all either too slow or too fast.

Before that was DARK SHADOWS but I don't remember my first glance at it. It just arrived in my world somehow.

My first (three) memories of DALLAS was the shot of the first Southfork's face front at the end of the closing credits, the one with "Neil T. Maffeo" over it (which only happened in the first three episodes) which I knew had to be that new DALLAS series because I'd seen it advertised previously. The first scene I recall watching was Bobby coming up the steps of Jenna#1's apartment a few months later. The next scene I remember quite a while later was Major Nelson driving down the street at night with a fecal-feasting grin and a Stetson, watching a detective in the rearview mirror tailing him and chuckling, all set to a jaunty John Parker tune, and I was like "Noooo --- no sir. I am not doing this!" and changed the channel quickly.

Heh. And here I am.

Same thing with DYNASTY -- I saw a TVGuide ad for the pilot which asserted the show would become part of the viewer's life, and I sneered (quite properly, by the way). Although I had some curiosity about Linda Evans because I'd found her to be a much more enigmatic actress in the '70s than she'd been in BIG VALLEY, I didn't really start watching until I'd heard them say in a very early ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT installment that Joan Collins had just signed to do 22 episodes of DYNASTY playing John Forsythe's ex-wife, and I thought: How interesting -- they're giving Forsythe a black ex-wife! ...You see, I'd always thought Joan Collins was a light-skinned, British black woman.... Imagine my surprise when a few episodes in and I realized she was caucasian.