Serial (radio and television) usually ran from Monday through Friday at exactly the same time every day. A show called The Smith Family which ran only one night a week on WENR in Chicago during the early 1930s was credited as the "great-granddaddy of the soap operas" by radio historian Francis Chase, Jr. One of the other shows that helped pioneer the daytime soap opera/serial was "The Guiding Light", which debuted on NBC radio in 1937, and then switched to CBS Television in 1952. "The Guiding Light" final episode aired on September 18, 2009, having a total of 15,762 episodes air on CBS. Some
Soap opera "The Young Doctors" (from 1982), "Sons and Daughters" (from 1983), "A Country Practice" (from 1982), "Richmond Hill" (from 1988 to 1989) and eventually, "Neighbours" was acquired by the BBC in 1986, and "Home and Away" aired on ITV beginning in 1989. These achieved significant levels of popularity; "Neighbours" and "Home and Away" were moved to early-evening slots, helping begin the UK soap opera boom in the late 1980s. The day Channel 4 began operations in 1982 it launched its own soap, the Liverpool-based "Brookside", which would redefine soaps over the next decade. The focus of "Brookside" was different from earlier