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 mid- to late 1970s. "Pobol y Cwm" was briefly shown in the rest of the UK in 1994 on BBC2, with English subtitles; it is consistently the most watched programme each week on S4C. Daytime soap operas were non-existent until the 1970s because there was virtually no daytime television in the UK. ITV introduced "General Hospital", which later moved to a prime time slot. In 1980, Scottish Television debuted "Take the High Road", which lasted for over twenty years. Later, daytime slots were filled with an influx of Australian soap operas such as "The Sullivans" (aired on ITV from 1977),