Guiding Light, America's longest running soap opera, airs final episode

 Patricia Wheeler starred as Peg on the US soap opera Guiding Light in 1954.
Patricia Wheeler starred in Guiding Light in 1954. Photograph: Getty

In the end, the characters on television's longest-running soap opera lived happily ever after.

The US show Guiding Light aired its final episode today, 72 years and more than 15,000 episodes after its first broadcast as a CBS radio programme in 1937. The show, the story of three families in fictional Springfield, USA, moved to television in 1952 and first broadcast in colour in 1967.

In the typically sudsy finale, the main characters, Josh Lewis and Reva Shayne, decided to marry "again", then drive off in Josh's vintage pickup truck on an unspecified adventure.

"You ready?" Josh asked Reva.

"Always," she replied.

"It really is hard for someone who doesn't watch a soap opera to understand the effect it has," said Lynn Leahey, editor of the magazine Soap Opera Digest. "It becomes like a neighbour that you have coffee with every day."

Lynn Rydzik, 36, started watching the show in 1979 with her grandmother. "They were more consistent than pretty much anything else in my life," she said.

It has been a long and rocky run for the show's main characters who have married, divorced and remarried one another.

Reva drove off a Florida bridge, washed ashore on a Caribbean island and married a prince there. The prince's evil brother dumped her into the ocean and she was swept back to the US.

The character, played since 1983 by Kim Zimmer, was also presumed dead three times and did die once.

"I flatlined on a Friday, woke up on a Monday and walked out of the hospital on a Tuesday, yes," Zimmer told CBS news.

The show's core audience, and that of most daytime television, was women, who have entered the workforce in droves and are no longer at home during the day in large numbers to watch television, Leahey said. Only seven daytime television soap operas remain on the air in the US, down from as many as 17 in the 1960s and 1970s, she said.

According to a tally by Entertainment Weekly magazine, over the years 15 characters returned after being killed off, 10 became romantically involved with both a father and a son or a mother and a daughter, and seven were paralysed and confined to wheelchairs before miraculously recovering.

Other soap opera finales

Guiding Light, the world's longest running television show, ended today when main characters Josh and Reva agree to get married "again," and drive off in Josh's vintage pickup truck. Here is how some other soaps have finished:

Channel 4's flagship soap opera ended in November 2003 after 21 years, as the houses of Brookside Close were about to be demolished to make way for a waste incinerator. On the way out the residents lynched baddie Jack Michaelson - his name was said to be a play on Channel 4 executive Michael Jackson, who axed the show.

Cuna de Lobos (Cradle of Wolves)
This Mexican telenovela ended in 1987 when one-eyed villain Catalina learnt that her beloved son Alejandro had been inadvertently killed in the plane crash she engineered to murder her stepson Jose, and that her crimes had been exposed. She dons a blond wig and dark overcoat - her disguise from a previous killing - and drinks poisoned orange juice, the same cocktail with which she murdered her husband.

In the last episode of this US soap in 1987, heroine reporter Sloane Denning was hauled before a firing squad in the Middle Eastern country Baracq, which had been ruled by her dead lover Ali. The episode ended before it was revealed if she had survived.

In the 1993 finale, bad boy Marcus Tandy's flash sports car unaccountably exploded at high speed. Tandy reappeared unscathed 20 minutes later, then mouths his - and the soap's - last line: "You can't trust anybody these days, can you?"

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