General Hospital

I'd thought David Hasselhoff started life as Knight Rider, but of course, I should have known better. Nobody starts at the ‘top’ not even if you class Knight Rider as the top. Go back further in time and you find he was in the soap opera, The Young and the Restless – for several years - before Knight Rider came along. I’d thought it was General Hospital, but nope.
It was, to my surprise, Richard Dean Anderson, later known best for MacGyver, who appeared in General Hospital, from 1976 to 1981. Strange the things you find out when you go looking for something else. It’s hard to imagine Anderson in a soap, but everyone’s got to start somewhere. Sometimes I think Anderson feels he’s back in a soap, when you see him in Stargate, a series he’s looked infinitely bored with since the beginning. Bring back MacGyer, I say, even if he’s aged twenty years. He must still have a few tricks up his sleeve.
Curiously, when you look up Richard Dean Anderson on the General Hospital site, there’s nothing showing up about him. Maybe he was in it too long ago – and of course, so many things happen in soaps, and so many people come and go. Soaps never stand still, not for a moment. I remember Adrian Plass writing a wonderful piece about the sorts of things that happen to characters in soaps, how they can change from being heterosexual to homosexual overnight (it’s happened more than once on Shortland St, for starters), and how even the dead return to life – that’s happened on Shortland St as well! It’s a world where anything goes. If you want to find out the extent of how much anything goes, everything you ever wanted to know – practically – is on the General Hospital page, part of the soaps.com group of pages.

One last thing: I found this quote from General Hospital while I was checking out some of the above:
Skye Quartermaine Jacks: Since I have known you, I have been trapped in a burning building, stalked, kidnapped, and left to die in Wyndemere. I woke up next to a dead man, been convicted of murder, and spent time in a state penitentiary! But I will not have cockroaches crawling on me! That is where I draw the line!

Luke Spencer: They won't, no more. I promise you. Trust me. I'll just fumigate the cardboard condo and you can get back to your beauty sleep.

Say no more!

Washed by Soaps!

Soaps. You love ‘em or loathe ‘em – and a few of us sit somewhere in the middle, slightly uncomfortable on the fence, avoiding them one day, glancing at them another, and then getting totally involved in an episode – usually against our better judgement because we should be doing ‘something more important.’
It’s pretty scary to think, for instance, that Coronation Street has been running as long as I’ve been working: 46 years. Even scarier to think that William Roache, who plays Ken Barlow, has been working in that show, in that one part, for that same amount of time.
Even Shortland Street has been running 14 years. 14 years!
An article on Wikipedia talks about the regurgitating of stereotypes on these shows: as one character is killed off, another character turns up (not always straight away) to replace the now-missing stereotype. It’s perhaps more obvious in Coronation Street, but Shortland Street has its own stereotypes as well.
All these Soap Operas have their own sites, of course, but for the last five months or so a new US site has been up and running called, not surprisingly, soaps.com. It focuses on American soaps, particularly the daytime ones, and gives you just about all the info you’d ever need, from daily updates to news about characters, from comings and goings to spoilers, from weekly polls to a ratings race. There are nearly 100 links on the main page alone.
Don’t check it out when you should be doing ‘something more important.’
The home page is a little oddly laid out: one long column down the left, joining up eventually with another long column down the right. And a lot of it is pink. Hmmm….pink? Does this suggest that only women watch soaps?

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