vetsoapfan

According to legend, Mary Matthews' death episode is out there somewhere too, being horded by traders who want to keep their stash underwrap.

Rare episodes of AW from its golden period, 1964 to 1974. Bits and pieces of this material has been on the internet before, but (to my knowledge) not in such a complete form. This is my favorite decade of my favorite show, so woohoo!

I would kill to see more of the 1973-82 Brooks and Foster period, particularly 1973-78.

Nuanced, subtle storytelling is long gone from today's daytime dramas, alas. The scenes with Jingles the Clown were often quite terrifying, and the storyline went on for an extended period. As it turned out, Zoe Cannell, Carter's sister and Julian Cannell's wife, was the one under the disguise. She was afraid that her husband Julian was falling for Andrea, and with a husband as handsome as Joel Crother's Julian, could anyone blame her for being nervous, LOL? Actress Lois Smith (of EAST OF EDEN and TRUE BLOOD fame) was mesmerizing as the deranged Zoe. This was Writer Henry Slesar at his delicious best. We were so lucky to have him pen exciting, intricate, layered mysteries on TEON, but his work on SOMERSET was also very good. I only found OLTL weak under his pen, but he was not alone at the helm of that show. The Somerset Register website (an incredible treasure trove of information about the show) says that Andrea's aunt Rowena was Jingles the Clown, not Zoe. Zoe, however, had given Rowena the clown outfit along with instructions to give Andrea meds (laced with weed killer) every night. The Somerset register is indeed a treasure trove of information, and your post has jarred and clarified my memory. Yes, you are correct: afraid of getting caught, herself, Zoe Cannell manipulated batty Aunt Rowena into "helping" give Andrea Moore her medicine (which Zoe had poisoned) by donning the Jingles the Clown costume and visiting Andrea at night. I should have written, "As it turned out, Zoe Cannell, Carter's sister and Julian Cannell's wife, was the one BEHIND THE PLOT TO KILL ANDREA MOORE. She was afraid that her husband Julian was falling for Andrea...." All of this is in my SOMERSET scrapbook, which I maintained during the show's run, and I should have referred to that for verification instead of relying on my memory. Color me embarrassed. With senior moments like this, I appear as dotty as...Aunt Rowena! Sorry about that! When it comes to technology, I am the single most clueless person on the face of the planet. I have no clue whatsoever how folks upload anything to the internet. We can talk about this more in a PM. How cool that you kept a Somerset scrapbook! I have fuzzy memories of the show that stick in my head: Zoe killing Carter, Dorothy's attempts to kill Heather, Eve's mountain car accident, Avis talking about Julian's masculine hands, Jill and Jack's necklaces. Such a great show! Yes, I kept scrapbooks for several of my favorite shows, including SOMERSET, AW, Y&R, etc. Even the short-lived HOW TO SURVIVE A MARRIAGE. What I found interesting--and frustrating--about SOMERSET is that its quality soared and plummeted at various times, depending on who was writing it. Henry Slesar and Roy Winsor were by far its best writers. I thought Greg Mercer and Steve Slade were two of the sexiest guys on daytime at the time. Jerry Kane was hot, too. I loved Jessica Delany. She was so sweet and sympathetic. I believe that with consistently good writing, the show could have lasted much longer than it did. Even at its "weakest," I would still watch SOMERSET over today's versions of Y&R, DAYS, GH, or B&B!

Nuanced, subtle storytelling is long gone from today's daytime dramas, alas. The scenes with Jingles the Clown were often quite terrifying, and the storyline went on for an extended period. As it turned out, Zoe Cannell, Carter's sister and Julian Cannell's wife, was the one under the disguise. She was afraid that her husband Julian was falling for Andrea, and with a husband as handsome as Joel Crother's Julian, could anyone blame her for being nervous, LOL? Actress Lois Smith (of EAST OF EDEN and TRUE BLOOD fame) was mesmerizing as the deranged Zoe. This was Writer Henry Slesar at his delicious best. We were so lucky to have him pen exciting, intricate, layered mysteries on TEON, but his work on SOMERSET was also very good. I only found OLTL weak under his pen, but he was not alone at the helm of that show. The Somerset Register website (an incredible treasure trove of information about the show) says that Andrea's aunt Rowena was Jingles the Clown, not Zoe. Zoe, however, had given Rowena the clown outfit along with instructions to give Andrea meds (laced with weed killer) every night. The Somerset register is indeed a treasure trove of information, and your post has jarred and clarified my memory. Yes, you are correct: afraid of getting caught, herself, Zoe Cannell manipulated batty Aunt Rowena into "helping" give Andrea Moore her medicine (which Zoe had poisoned) by donning the Jingles the Clown costume and visiting Andrea at night. I should have written, "As it turned out, Zoe Cannell, Carter's sister and Julian Cannell's wife, was the one BEHIND THE PLOT TO KILL ANDREA MOORE. She was afraid that her husband Julian was falling for Andrea...." All of this is in my SOMERSET scrapbook, which I maintained during the show's run, and I should have referred to that for verification instead of relying on my memory. Color me embarrassed. With senior moments like this, I appear as dotty as...Aunt Rowena! Sorry about that! When it comes to technology, I am the single most clueless person on the face of the planet. I have no clue whatsoever how folks upload anything to the internet. We can talk about this more in a PM.

The entire Jingles scene in this episode was very clumsy. I don't believe that Carter would not have sensed someone behind the door, or even sensed movement a few feet behind him as Jingles ran out of the room. His claim that no one had been in the room, when he had not even bothered to LOOK, was silly. There was one early Jingles episode that was very creepy, with carnival-type music playing in the background, and blinking, strobe lighting on Jingles as "he" crept into the room. Eeeek! I enjoyed the eccentric Moore family. It was wonderful seeing Lois Kibbee on a soap again, after her great work on TEON. Most of the family did not last very long, but they were fun while they lasted. I have not listened to any of the SOMERSET audio recordings yet; I only found out about them yesterday, when you kindly let me know about the video episode. It amuses me that folks are uploading audio-only material onto the web, and that fans are eating it up. I have many soap episodes from the 1970s on audio, but I've always figured I was the only one weird enough to listen to audio-only episodes of my favorite shows. Before the advent of VCRs, when I was away from home, I used to set up a tape recorder in my bedroom and another one in the basement, and have a timer turn them on and record the shows so I could listen to them later, in the evening. Everyone in the family told me I was crazy, but now...40 years later, I discover that I was not alone!

It never made any sense to me either. I think they did it to free up Matt, and because they likely felt viewers would eventually start wondering where his children were and why they weren't coming back. It was stupid. At least Corrie never made the mistake of killing off Peter and Susan as children (although they never did anything of value with Susan anyway). When you get to early 1974 I've been uploading some episodes on another channel. There's a character named Dryden you may like. Yes, upon reflection, I also figured that freeing up Matt by eliminating all remnants of his past was the motivation for killing off the twins. Still...ugh! Jack Sugden had a son named Jackie whom they axed too. And why kill off poor Joe Sugden, out there in Spain? If writers had decimated the Waltons like this, viewers would have been hysterical with rage. I know that Annie married Amos, a few decades after he first proposed to her, and he moved to Spain with her. Is he still alive? Most references to Annie I've heard seem to suggest that she lives out there alone.

I've been watching many of the show's vintage eps on youtube. The earliest episodes from the 1970s were a chore to get into at first, being too cold and dry for my taste, but you get into it the more you watch. I've gotten through the death of Annie Sugden's daughter, Peggy, which was rather grim to watch considering that all three of her adult children would die before her. BUT! What I found gratuitously gruesome was the death of Peggy's twins. Whose stupid idea was that? I hate when soaps kill babies, but to kill off both of Peggy's children for no discernible reason just irked me. The Sugden family is cursed, I swear.

Nuanced, subtle storytelling is long gone from today's daytime dramas, alas. The scenes with Jingles the Clown were often quite terrifying, and the storyline went on for an extended period. As it turned out, Zoe Cannell, Carter's sister and Julian Cannell's wife, was the one under the disguise. She was afraid that her husband Julian was falling for Andrea, and with a husband as handsome as Joel Crother's Julian, could anyone blame her for being nervous, LOL? Actress Lois Smith (of EAST OF EDEN and TRUE BLOOD fame) was mesmerizing as the deranged Zoe. This was Writer Henry Slesar at his delicious best. We were so lucky to have him pen exciting, intricate, layered mysteries on TEON, but his work on SOMERSET was also very good. I only found OLTL weak under his pen, but he was not alone at the helm of that show. Yes it is. So Joel Crothers was on Somerset too before EON? Where there any other Somerset stars that moved onto EON afterwards. And do you think that Slesar struggled at OLTL b/c it was a different beast from what he was used to? Now that I have watched this vintage episode of SOMERSET, I must say that the Jingles the Clown scene was not effectively executed at all; certainly, many other episodes in which the clown appeared were much more effective, probably because of the creepy music used, and more subtle, suspenseful direction. It was fun to see Ernest Thompson, the best of the Tony Coppers, knowing that he would later become an award-winning screenwriter for the film ON GOLDEN POND. Yes, Joel Crothers became a major player on SOMERSET. His character was enormously popular, and lasted through many writer and producer turnovers. Richard Shoberg played Mitch farmer on SOM and the first (and better) Kevin Jamison on TEON. Holland Taylor played a policewoman named Ruth Winter on SOM and also later turned up on TEON as Denise Cavanaugh. Dorothy Stinette, so great as SOM's Laura Cooper, went on to play TEON's Nadine Alexander. Susan MacDonald, an original cast member of SOM as Jill Grant was later the first Jinx Avery on EDGE. Bibi Besch played Susan Forbes on TEON first, and then later starred on SOM as Eve Lawrence. Many folks don't know it, but some actors who later became quite famous played roles on SOM. like Sigourney Weaver, Ted Danson, and JoBeth Williams. Danson was rather wooden, IMHO, but Weaver and Williams were great. Williams had enormous chemistry with her leading man, Gene Bua (who was so magnetic, he'd have chemistry with a rock). It's hard to say why Slesar's tenure on OLTL was so tepid. He worked with Sam Hall for the first year, then by himself for a couple of months before getting replaced by the Corringtons. OLTL had originally been an intelligent interpersonal-relationships drama with social issues and class struggles at its core, but it changed drastically--and not for the better--in the early and mid-1980s. Jean Arley was the producer for most of Slesar's tenure, and the show floundered under her reign. It's hard to say why. Network interference? Incompetence on Arley's part? Slesar's "not getting" the show? In any case, the writing was mediocre. Not dreadful, on a Chuck Pratt or Jean P-Libidizone level, surely...but tepid. If I had to guess, I'd lay the blame on network tampering, because Slesar was so great elsewhere, but I guess we will never know.

Nuanced, subtle storytelling is long gone from today's daytime dramas, alas. The scenes with Jingles the Clown were often quite terrifying, and the storyline went on for an extended period. As it turned out, Zoe Cannell, Carter's sister and Julian Cannell's wife, was the one under the disguise. She was afraid that her husband Julian was falling for Andrea, and with a husband as handsome as Joel Crother's Julian, could anyone blame her for being nervous, LOL? Actress Lois Smith (of EAST OF EDEN and TRUE BLOOD fame) was mesmerizing as the deranged Zoe. This was Writer Henry Slesar at his delicious best. We were so lucky to have him pen exciting, intricate, layered mysteries on TEON, but his work on SOMERSET was also very good. I only found OLTL weak under his pen, but he was not alone at the helm of that show.

That's right. After the Jonah Lockwood story, the Whitney family was not featured on the canvas for an extended period, but then came word that Geraldine's husband and son had died suddenly, and that Geraldine and daughter-in-law Tiffany were on their back to Monticello. In their reintroduction scene, the camera took a long, slow pan across the empty Whitney living room, with all the furniture covered up as if for storage. Then the front door opened, and Geraldine and Tiffany entered. In complete silence, the women slipped into the house, with a look of agony on their faces. No words, no dialogue, just the actresses' talent to convey their pain. Brilliant scene. It still gives me chills when I think about it. Dialogue is not always necessary when strong direction and acting can say more than words.

WORD. Those Stewart girls were dumber than a pile of rocks, and painfully tedious much of the time. if I were David and had to deal with those morons, I'd be testy all the time, too.

Uh-oh. Now you've done it. My mind is awash with indecent, overheated fantasies of Pete and Andy doing the nasty. Of course, the only person I want Ross to do the nasty with...is me. I'd make him forgot that Donna ever existed.

Actually, on an intellectual level, I agree with you about the Jackson story, and how he finalized his plans for suicide too quickly. The show could have been more socially responsible by allowing viewers to see him get extensive and proper psychiatric care before he decided his life was over. On an emotional level, however, I could understand the character's giving up after realizing that such a huge part of life was now lost to him. When I was a teenager, a friend of the family was in a freak accident and ended up in the exact same situation as Jackson. He simply did not want to live any longer, in that condition, and no amount of physical and psychiatric care ever changed his mind. I think I became so emotionally involved with the plot, and accepted Jackson's quick decision with relative ease, based on that. Currently, I find the show frustrating because we do have some great individual scenes, and some wonderful acting, but it's inconsistent in the storytelling, with too much reliance on hype rather than substance. is it better than any of the US daytime soaps? I would say yes, but I don't feel as emotionally involved as I was during the earlier years.

I drop my favorites soaps for long stretches of time, too, when they annoy me. I'm curious: what part of the Jackson storyline did you find "offensive"?

Yes, but brief focuses on characterization and interpersonal relationships is not enough, IMHO. I know different viewers enough different sorts of material, but personally, I think characterization and relationship drama should always come before shootings, plane crashes, and all the other contrived gimmicks which soaps use to get attention.

Henry Slesar was a genius whose TEON mystery stories were so often intricate, surprising, and suspenseful, yet he wove multi-dimensional characters into the mix. I never realized how spoiled I was, being lucky enough to enjoy his work, until I had to endure the painfully awful material of other soap opera writers whose skill at penning mysteries was non-existent. EMMERDALE originally hooked me with the Aaron and Jackson storyline, at a time when characterization and interpersonal relationships were at the show's core. I find it so much less involving now, with all the stunts and the focus on "plot" over characterization.

The Alice/Steven/Rachel triangle lasted an impressive seven years (1968-75) and remained consistently enthralling, regardless of even Harding Lemay's opinion that it was already an "overextended romance" by the time he took over as headwriter in 1971. The best thing about this saga was that viewers did not only want to wait and see what WOULD happen, we enjoyed seeing what DID happen, on a day-ti-day basis. Agnes Nixon and Lemay both knew how to play all the beats, milk every confrontation, and so all the chapters of this story were fascinating from beginning to end. Of course, the fact that Jacqueline Courtney and George Reinholt had strong, obvious chemistry added immensely to the show's appeal during this halcyon period. This really was the golden era of soaps.

The third installment is also available. This is a great read, and so far, a very accurate recap of the greatest story ever told on soaps! http://www.welovesoaps.net/2015/08/Steven-Rachel-Alice-3.html

TimWill, that is a very engaging commercial, and Jack McMullen really is adorable. I just want to pinch his little cheeks! (Um, you know what I mean, LOL!)

Thank you so much, UK LAW! Do you happen to know the name of the actor who is sitting directly behind McMullen in the video?

I have no idea. I think Danny Miller is cute as a button, but this other guy is adorable as well, so I was curious as to his identity. Of course, there's always the chance that he is not an actor or someone famous at all, but rather just Miller's friend, cousin, or whatever.

I have recently discovered that Danny Miller (Aaron) is part of a charity football team called Once Upon a Smile, whose members can be seen on youtube, lip-syncing to various popular songs. Does anyone know who the young man is, sitting directly beside Danny Miller? He's just the cutest thing, like a puppy! And who is the guy sitting directly behind the puppy, the hunk who gives a peace sign in the first few seconds of the video? Salacious minds want to know!

If the producers are smart, Ross will indeed turn up alive. It's certainly possible, considering how we saw him "die," and how Pete disposed of the body in such a shallow grave. Heaven knows, other villains like James Stenbeck (ATWT) and Roger Thorpe (TGL) have made triumphant returns from the dead.

Yes, the US soaps long ago dropped any pretense of being adult, character-based, quality dramas, and their reliance on gratuitous stunts and pointless character deaths has dragged them down. The endless stunts have also become commonplace and tedious. With a major disaster like the helicopter crash, however, it can be worth it if the writers follow through and use it to provide ripple effects and longterm story. We'll see how the show handles it. If this were GH or DAYS, we'd already be moving towards the next disaster or act of violence. I'm annoyed that they have apparently killed off Ross. Of all the Barton boys, he is literally the last one I would have eliminated from the cast. The character was complex, and Michael Parr is a good actor and sexy as hell. I'd bump off Pete, Adam, James, or even Finn if need be, to save Ross from the chopping block. Studying the history of the show, I ask myself, "Why does anyone choose to live in Emmerdale? The place is a death-trap, deadlier than any war zone!"