Soap opera only lasted one year. Nevertheless, soap operas gained increasing prominence on UK television schedules. In 1995, Channel 4 premiered "Hollyoaks", a soap with a youth focus. When Channel 5 launched in March 1997, it debuted the soap opera "Family Affairs", which was formatted as a week-daily soap, airing Monday through Fridays. "Brookside"s premise evolved during the 1990s, phasing out the politicised stories of the 1980s and shifting the emphasis to controversial and sensationalist stories such as child rape, sibling incest, religious cults and drug addiction, including the infamous 'body under the patio' storyline that ran from 1993 to 1995, and
Soap opera but the experiment was largely a failure). Due to the masses of episodes produced for a series, release of soap operas to DVD (a popular venue for distribution of current and vintage television series) is considered impractical. With the exception of occasional specials, daytime soap operas are notable by their absence from DVD release schedules (an exception being the supernatural soap opera, "Dark Shadows", which did receive an essentially complete release on both VHS and DVD; the single lost episode #1219 is reconstructed by means of an off-the-air audio recording, still images, and recap material from adjacent episodes). Due to