British Soap TV Shows

The residents of Coronation Street are ordinary, working-class people, and the show follows them through regular social and family interactions at home, in the workplace, and in their local pub, the Rovers Return Inn. Britain's longest-running soap.

The lives of several families in the Yorkshire Dales revolve around a farm and the nearby village. With murders, affairs, lies, deceit, laughter and tears, it's all there in the village.

The everyday lives of working-class residents of Albert Square, a traditional Victorian square of terrace houses surrounding a park in the East End of London's Walford borough.

Focuses on the lives of residents in the fictional London suburb of Charnham.

Drama series about life on the wards of Holby City Hospital, following the highs and lows of the staff and patients.

Drama series about the staff and patients at Holby City Hospital's emergency department, charting the ups and downs in their personal and professional lives.

The ground-breaking soap set in a housing estate on the outskirts of Liverpool.

The daily soap that follows the loves, lives and misdemeanours of a group of people living in the Chester village of Hollyoaks where anything could, and frequently does, happen...

Set in the fictional Midlands town of Letherbridge, defined as being close to the city of Birmingham, this soap opera follows the staff and families of a doctor's surgery.

Compact was a British television soap opera shown by the BBC between 1962 and 1965. The series was created by Hazel Adair and Peter Ling, who together went on to devise Crossroads. In contrast to the kitchen sink realism of Coronation Street, Compact was a distinctly middle-class serial, set in the more "sophisticated" arena of magazine publishing. An early "avarice" soap, it took the viewer into the business workplace, and aligned the professional lives of the characters with more personal storylines. The show was scheduled for broadcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, thus avoiding a clash with ITV's Coronation Street on Mondays and Wednesdays. When Compact began, the editor was a woman, Joanne Minster, yet it was not long before she was replaced by Ian Harmon, the son of the magazine's owner. Despite being largely criticised by reviewers, Compact was popular with the general public, and in 1964 a regular omnibus edition was introduced, broadcast on Sundays. Morris Barry, a some-time actor and BBC director – he directed several Doctor Who stories in the 1960s – took over as producer and was given a brief to spice the series up in view of the criticism it had received from the national press. But the BBC, never comfortable with the concept of soap opera, quietly dropped the series in 1965.

On and off pitch battles of of the fictional Harchester United Football Club.

The BBC's answer to Dynasty, Howards' Way was launched in 1985 with an enormous 1 million pound budget. The main characters in the show were 'best boat designer in the world' Tom Howard, his boutique running wife Jan Howard, 'I'll have a drink' Jack Rolfe and a nasty man called Ken Masters. It starred Maurice Colbourne.

Footballers' Wives is a British television drama surrounding the fictional Premier League Association football club Earls Park F.C., its players, and their wives. It was broadcast on the ITV network from 8 January 2002 to 14 April 2006. The show began with a multi-lateral focus on a variety of different types of relationships explored; however, from the third series onward, the primary focus was on a complex love triangle between Tanya Turner, Amber Gates and Conrad Gates.

Emergency: Ward 10 is a British television soap shown on ITV between 1957 and 1967. Like The Grove Family, a series shown by the BBC between 1954 and 1957, Emergency: Ward 10 is considered to be one of British television's first major soap operas. Set in Oxbridge General Hospital, this soap opera focused equally on the lives and loves of its medical staff and the pressure of their work.

Night and Day is a British soap opera which was produced by Granada Television for LWT and ran on ITV from 2001 to 2003. Its theme-song, "Always & Forever", was sung by Kylie Minogue.

Albion Market is a short-lived British soap opera, intended as a companion to Coronation Street on ITV.

Set in Sydney beach suburb of Manly, New South Wales, Out of the Blue is a drama about a group of thirty-year-old friends returning home for a high school reunion, which is brought to an end when someone is murdered. An investigation follows as the group attempts to discover which one of them was the killer.

Take the High Road was a British soap opera produced by Scottish Television, set in the fictional village of Glendarroch, which started in February 1980 as an ITV daytime soap opera, and was dropped by the network in 1993, although various members of the ITV Network continued to screen the programme, while others had no interest in doing so. The programme has developed a cult following.

Eldorado was a British soap opera that ran for only one year, from 6 July 1992 to 9 July 1993. Set in the fictional town of Los Barcos on the Costa del Sol in Spain and based around the lives of British and European expats, the BBC hoped it would be as successful as EastEnders and replicate some of the sunshine and glamour of imported Australian soaps such as Home and Away and Neighbours. A co-production between the BBC and independent production company Cinema Verity, Eldorado aired three times a week in a high-profile evening slot on the mainstream channel BBC1, filling the slot vacated by Terry Wogan's chat show Wogan, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 7.00pm. In spite of a high-profile advertising campaign on television, radio and in the press preceding the launch, the programme was not initially a popular hit with viewers and critics. Ratings improved with a radical overhaul, but it was eventually cancelled by the new controller of BBC1, Alan Yentob.

Hollyoaks Later is a spin-off from the Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks. Broadcast on E4 with a late night slot, the series began in 2008, and was an annual event for the soap until 2013, when there was a break, until it returned with a special episode in 2020. Each of the original series was shown over five consecutive nights. The late night airing allowed for more sexual content, "edgier" storylines, and stronger language. Each series is a stand-alone story, although each ties in with events on the main show at the time, with the producers often taking advantage of the later broadcast time to tie up loose ends on the more violent and controversial storylines.

Rooms is a 1974–77 British afternoon soap created by John Finch and produced by Thames Television for ITV. Each story is two parts, concerning the various drifters who rent rooms in a lodging-house at 35 Mafeking Terrace.

Comedy soap opera re-imagining the lives of the British Royal Family as you have never seen them before.

Residents of a sheltered accommodation block run by a warden go about their business.

CRUSH is a gay series following the adventures of a bunch of boys whose destinies intertwine between love, friendship, passion and betrayal against a backdrop of rock music and lust.

River City is a television soap opera, first broadcast in Scotland on BBC Scotland on 24 September 2002. River City storylines examine the domestic and professional lives of the people who live and work in the fictional district of Shieldinch in Glasgow. The series primarily centres around the residents of Shieldinch, their houses, flats and apartments and its neighbouring streets, namely Montego Street and which encompasses a pub, bistro, community centre, café and various small businesses, in addition to a subway station and basketball court. The series was originally screened as two half-hour episodes per week. Today, one hour-long episode is broadcast each week - usually Tuesday evenings on BBC One Scotland, repeated Sunday afternoons on either BBC One Scotland or BBC Two Scotland. In Australia, River City is screened 11:00am weekdays on Seven's British-oriented multichannel 7TWO.

This series takes viewers on a journey in the 1930s, under the roof of the hotel, where the past and the present merge. The focus of the series is business of a prominent Banja Luka family, entangled in numerous intrigues.

Quayside was a soap opera, based around the lives of young people living on the Newcastle Quayside produced by Zenith North Television and aired in 1997 on Tyne Tees Television in the North East England and Yorkshire Television in Yorkshire. Tyne Tees Television produced this soap opera as a venture into it becoming a regional soap opera alongside the larger soaps such as Coronation Street and EastEnders despite Tyne Tees not actually having a licence commitment to regional drama. Directed and produced by Matthew Robinson it starred Joe Caffrey, Emma Louise Webb and other North East actors, many of whom had appeared or went on to appear in Byker Grove and other local programmes. Despite receiving 40% of the audience share when it started, ratings began to fall primarily due to its position in the schedules. It aired once-weekly at 7.30pm, a slot which is traditionally dedicated to local programming and resulted being alongside EastEnders on BBC One.

Scottish aristocrats' secrets and relationships are threatened by the return of a woman who left under suspicious circumstances 20 years earlier.

Sofia's Diary is a British drama web series distributed through the social networking platform Bebo. Based on the Portuguese series of the same name, which debuted in 2003, it follows the life of a teenage girl named Sofia, portrayed by Rachel Hyde-Harvey. In 2008, the series was acquired by Channel Five, becoming the second web series to be broadcast on British television. Its first two seasons aired on Fiver. After an eight-month hiatus, Sofia's Diary returned to Bebo on May 29, 2009, with a six-week third season. Unlike the previous seasons, new episodes were released twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. The series was initially sponsored by Sure Girl, while the third season was produced in partnership with Transport for London to support a road safety awareness campaign aimed at teenagers.

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Echo Beach is a British teen drama series that aired on ITV in 2008. Set in the fictional Cornish coastal town of Polnarren, it ran for twelve weekly episodes from 10 January to 21 March 2008. The show was created by Tony Jordan and produced by Kudos for ITV.

When Colonel Carey-Lewis dies, his irrepressible daughter, Loveday, inherits Nancherrow and fights to keep it alive so that her son Nat will eventually take over from her.

Families was a daytime soap opera produced by Granada Television and created by Kay Mellor. It followed two families; the Thompsons, based in Cheshire, England, and the Stevens, living in Sydney, Australia. It was produced and recorded at Studio 6 at Granada Studios in Manchester. The link in the storyline was businessman Mike Thompson, who walked out on his family on his birthday and flew to Australia to be with his true love Diana Stevens, whom he had left years earlier. Unbeknownst to Mike, Diana had given birth to his son Andrew and as complications ensued over the abrupt life changes for both families, Andrew travelled to England, where he met Mike’s daughter, Amanda, by his English wife Sue, and they fell in love, not realising that they were half-brother and sister. This plot line was somewhat similar to the opening storyline of the popular Australian soap opera Sons and Daughters which had successfully aired on ITV daytime since 1983. It was broadcast twice a week at 3.20pm with the first episode broadcast on 23 April 1990. Both episodes were also repeated on Thursday 10.40pm in the Granada TV region as part of Granada's "10.40-extra" strand. After two years, stories involving the Thompson and Stevens families—and the UK-Australian crossover angle—had run their course, with several characters either dead or left for pastures new. In their place came the wealthy Bannerman family, who were introduced during the summer of 1992, as they moved into the Thompsons' Cheshire mansion from a suburb of Manchester. In addition, some of the remaining Australian-based characters were re-located to England.

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199 Park Lane is a British television soap opera based around the residents of an exclusive block of apartments in London, and dealt with the intrigues of the Chelsea/Kensington set.

Daily soap featuring the fictional residents of the village of Cwmderi.

The Royal Today is a British medical soap opera, a spin-off of the similarly themed drama, The Royal. The concept is that whilst The Royal is set in the late 1960s, The Royal Today featured the same hospital in the present day, with a new set of characters working in the same location. Each episode followed the events of a single day, and the show was broadcast daily, so the series could be said to progress in real time. The first series of 50 half-hour episodes began on 7 January 2008 on the ITV network airing from 4pm-4.30pm. Although there were a number of running storylines, the series generally eschewed the use of cliffhangers. The series was axed in March 2008 after poor ratings, on an average of 1.175 million viewers.

Driving School is a docusoap that was broadcast on BBC One in the summer of 1997, which followed a group of learner drivers around Bristol and South Wales. Made on a reduced budget but shown in primetime, it created one of the first reality TV stars in Maureen Rees. It was narrated by Quentin Willson, who would later present the similar Britain's Worst Driver.

Garnock Way was a short-lived Scottish soap opera, produced by Scottish Television for the ITV network, running from 1976 to 1979.