Crossroads!

One of my earliest childhood memories was coming home from school and sitting down to watch the teatime serial Crossroads on ITV.Crossroads was the Eastenders of its day with massive ratings in its heyday.It was known for its poor acting and even poorer sets but everyone loved it and the characters and the actors and actresses who played them were household names.
The series started in 1964 as a five time a week show and was produced by Reg Watson who went onto create and produce Neighbours which was looked on in its early days as the Australian Crossroads.I think its appeal was that it had characters people could identify with and like and tackled stories that were about everyday life.Its standards of production were not the best but it did break new ground in trying to tackle issues that were not usually tackled on mainstream television in them days.It was the first soap to tackle racial abuse, rape and single parents. It was also the first to have black and Asian characters and to feature a gay character.Disablity was featured heavily with a regular disabled charcter and a storyline was featured about a Downs Syndrome character that actually lead to the formation of The Crossroads Caring for Carers Scheme now one of the world`s largest voluntary organisations.
I think the series was greatly under rated and really only ended in the end because ITV thought it knew the sort of programmes viewers should watch better than the viewers themselves. It was tragic really when the original series was axed in the eighties because it had under gone a revamp that had really made it one of the best dramas on television that had better writing and acting than any of the soaps we see today.
I still miss it as I don`t think anyone as really produced a better soap since.