Dion

And here's me thinking none of the US soaps ever did that, cheers for that anecdote Good point Yeah, I guess this might be the main reason for an extended day when the plot actually doesn't necessarily call for one.

Yeah the only issue I have with that period was how coy the show was about certain topics from about 1996 onward (post the Billy and Melissa controversy). That's not to say that the show was completely sexless - it wasn't, but it was weird when Janae had an HIV scare and the words HIV and AIDS were specifically avoided even though there was no problem 11 years earlier with Michael and Cody.

Yeah that is a very British way of doing things

A couple of posts about pacing in the Beyond the Gates thread got me thinking about day and night cycles in the soaps, with one of the most famous examples being the several weeks long day/nights that used to happen on Passions. So what are your thoughts? Do you like long days? Or should a day/night cycle be kept short i.e to one or two episodes? I myself tend to think they should be kept short unless the plot requires it - i.e for an event. Should a new day always begin in a new episode? Or are you fine with a new day starting in the middle of the episode like the Australian soaps? I think having a new day starting in the middle of an episode tends to work better when the show is mostly consistent in keeping the length of it's days to one or two episodes. Should the "days" always feel continuous? Or should there be skips where a new day is perhaps a few days later rather than "the next day?" I think having some skips helps avoid the sometimes funny situation of having holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas only a couple of days apart in "show time". What are some examples of really long days? Or really short ones? I've heard for example that the 1981 masquerade ball on OLTL with Olympia went on for a month for example, or the 24 style sweeps months that GH was doing in the late 2000s. Discuss.

Yeah I been thinking along those lines too

I'm probably currently on the longest streak of not watching a single episode of the show in it's entire 32 year history (I think I haven't watched since about July) whereas with Neighbours I've watched every single episode since the revival

25th anniversary special, features a long montage in the middle

18 years ago we had the summer of sleaze, so is this the Autumn/Fall of sleaze lol

Correct, Billy Miller's Drew and Sam split not long after Jason came back. Sam had initially decided to stay with Drew and divorced Jason to legally marry Drew, but after two months and an earthquake had changed her mind and then divorced Drew to be with Jason. Drew then was in story with Tamara Braun's Kim Nero and their son Oscar for the next year or so before BM's exit with Drew being presumed dead in the plane crash, while Sam and Jason had the Dawn of Day stuff with Shiloh and Sam's imprisonment and parole for killing Shiloh before splitting up with Jason after the explosion that left Lulu comatose (It was a hit on Jason and he and Danny had just left when it happened, Sam didn't want her children exposed to the danger). Sam then helped Dante with PTSD and eventually started a relationship with him, while Jason had a romance with Britt and was briefly married to Carly etc etc until his own presumed death. When Drew came back played by CM, there was like a moment of two of tension with Sam but they went and put him with Carly.

The "writer" is, I believe, a certain someone who once was HW of OLTL and recently finished a stint as HW on Days...

Mike and April were once, I believe, being groomed to be the next main supercouple to kind of takeover from Steve and Kayla (just as they had taken over from Shane and Kim who in turn took over from Bo and Hope) on the supercouple factory line that was Days in the mid-late 80s, Nick of course was to be their Jack/Victor/Larry. But I think even before MTW left someone had realised they'd struck gold with Jack and Jennifer instead

Too bad the old nephew is (possibly only presumed) dead though (Spencer)

Thanks @depboy uff...the early years GH baby and child curse strikes again! Poor Joanne and poor Jane! Now I don't know if it had already been decided to write Jane out by this point but if the decision had already been made it does seem unnecessarily cruel to kill off Joanne. I recall Jane had a miscarriage as part of her first story and then another one two years later.

That's very true and it's still legal for them to marry or co-habitate in the state of New York. And they could even have kids, just get some genetic testing if they were really concerned. The risk of defects from first cousins marrying isn't actually that much higher compared to non-relatives, it's when successive generations of cousins marry that you really start to get problems and even then only if there is a genetic disorder in the family.

Danny Fargo is probably the other one from AW's early years. He was only on for nine months and while he probably wasn't mentioned very much, if at all after Bill died and Missy left for the last time, he was responsible for bringing in Sam Lucas (his accomplice in a gas station robbery) who in turn ended up bringing his sister Ada and niece Rachel onto the show... And Walter Curtin was the prosecuting A.D.A in the murder trial that followed after his death.

Almost in time to see Sasha discover her newfound Australian heritage lol I wonder how long it will last though, I don't think Australia ever embraced GH the way it did Days, B&B or even Y&R. Even during the peak Scorpio years the show was about 5 years behind and then dropped in 1989 (to be picked up again the following year having skipped most of the late 80s and leaving some viewers wondering what happened to characters like Holly and Jake!)

I don't know the exact details but it definitely aired in Australia during at least part of the period that Carmen Duncan was on it...I don't know if they also aired the episodes with Julian McMahon (who was known in Australia for being the son of a former prime minister and for being on Home and Away). Then in 1995, it ended up on Foxtel (Pay TV) and they played the remainder of the show. In New Zealand the show aired around 1991/92 but I don't know how far we were behind

Yeah I loved that scene where they went to Robin and she was flipping through her old journals and was like "oh no can't be my dad, he was here in Port Charles fighting against Mr Big" or something like that

They had some scenes last year when Felicia and Holly went off to rescue nu-Ethan at some sort of auction and Tracy was already there trying to bid on him too to save him as well. And if you like veteran characters interacting there's this gem from 2009 with Luke, Holly, Tracy, Monica, Edward and Alice the maid

At least Ethan fit somewhat neatly into the timeline...I always appreciated that even if it did mean Luke cheated on Laura (wasn't as fussed about Holly cheating on Robert as I think it was already established back in the 80s that Holly had been with another man before she was presumed dead)

Tbf though Holly was presumed dead for a good chunk of that (Victor Cassadine faked her death, shot and killed Paloma and then burned Paloma's body to fool Robert into thinking it was Holly), she came back about a month after Brando died. Though that just raises even more questions about what Sasha knew, why Holly didn't go visit her after she came back etc.

Well honestly I don't know the show that well, particularly this period, but I managed to dig this episode up from YT. I have to say, I know the actress is really American but her Australian accent is fairly decent to my New Zealand ears, she almost sounds like she's doing a stint on Sons and Daughters (an Australian soap that would start the following year)

I found this interesting while perusing the 1975 synopses at AWHP. There were indeed plans for several new cities in Australia under the prime minister of the time, Gough Whitlam (if you know Australia, you'll know that most of the population is crammed into the 5 largest capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide and this was an ultimately failed attempt to change that). For context, this was a week before Mary died and two months before Steve died was presumed dead. Oh and on another Another World note, Gough Whitlam was the prime minister after Julian McMahon's dad (William McMahon), Whitlam having beaten McMahon in the 1972 election.

I think you're thinking of Nurse Deanna, whose name I always remembered because it was like Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Then I recently found out Nurse Deanna's last name is supposed to be Sirtis - as in Marina Sirtis who played Troi - so guess I'm not the only one who made the TNG connection lol. So maybe that'll help you remember Actually come to think of it, I wonder what Genie Francis makes of this lol