Around the world, 350 million people tuned in to find out the answer, which makes Line of Duty’s viewing figures look paltry. The cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers, the shooting saga dragged on for eight months, via twists, turns and tie-in T-shirts. Not as bad as Crossroads yet still completely implausible, Dallas wrote off its entire 1985-86 season – including Bobby Ewing’s highly unpopular death – by claiming it had all been the hyper-vivid dream of his wife, Pam. But, 14 years later, it was revealed that, like many a Briton before him, he had faked his death and moved to Spain. Like Harold, Leslie Grantham’s Den was presumed dead when he was caught up in some cut-price Krays business with “the Firm”. However, an underground leak – and not, gladly, the weird stench of decomposing flesh – led to his discovery. When his wife, Mandy, could no longer stand his abuse, Trevor Jordache ended up six feet under in this infamous soap plot. Mandy (Sandra Maitland) and Trevor Jordache (Brian Murray) in Brookside.
There have been few culls bigger than Emmerdale’s fiery air disaster, which wiped out half of the cast and sent the formerly sleepy daytime soap into TV’s big leagues. The soap’s early-00s revival, plagued by poor ratings, was explained away in its final episode as some kind of hallucination on the part of a supermarket worker, with the show’s characters merely customers in the shop where she worked (yes, really). The first rule of writing – do not, under any circumstances, use the words “It was all a dream” – was flagrantly flouted by Crossroads. Surely a heart attack on the edge of a cliff would be enough to finish anyone off? However, drowning proved no biggie for Erinsborough’s resident tuba fan, who was found five years later at a Salvation Army shop, having apparently been afflicted with amnesia and assumed the name Ted. But, really, what would the fun be in that? Here are the most outlandish, most memorable soap plots of all time. “As other TV fiction has become busier and darker, perhaps the soaps need to aim lighter and slower,” he adds. The likes of Coronation Street and EastEnders are in crisis, he says in the latest issue of the Radio Times, because they are “ catastrophe after crisis on the best-known characters” in order to boost flagging ratings. A ccording to the writer and broadcaster Mark Lawson, it’s time for soaps to tone things down.
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