WASHINGTON: The US show Guiding Light aired its final episode yesterday, 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.

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.