I think some people turn their noses up at Are You Being Served? regarding its humour as too lowbrow to be worthy of consideration at all, but I love the show so much that I purchased tickets to see John Inman in the pantomime Dick Whittington while in London about 15 years ago.  Unfortunately, he wasn't well enough to attend and sadly passed away shortly thereafter, but the fact that he was so highly regarded as a pantomime performer wasn't surprising and speaks a lot to the versatility he shared with his castmates.  What could have easily have denigrated into a show featuring a group of one-note characters spouting out well worn catch phrases on cue was frequently quite clever too thanks as much to Croft and Llyod's writing as to the extremely talent actors involved.

Mr. Lucas was my favorite character and gave the show a lot of the wit and creativity which it usually isn't credited for.  Lucas was played by Trevor Bannister who once explained how the cast would spend about six days rehearsing and coming up with little touches here and there before recording on the seventh which I think accounts for how much life these characters surprisingly had.  Kind of maddening for a Beatles fan such as myself to know that three of the actors involved (Wendy Richards, Frank Thornton, and Alfie Bass) all had parts in one of their first two films only for two of them to have their scenes be cut and lost to posterity.

I requested Season Two of Are You Being Served? from the library but it hasn’t popped up as yet.

Recently?  No.  As a kid?  Yeah.

Back in the 70s, when I was a kid, there were only the three networks (NBC, ABC and CBS) and public broadcasting (we didn't have an independent UHF station, in our area).  If you were home sick from school and were propped up in bed, with the tv, of under a blanket, on a sofa, watching tv, you could only see cartoons or Sesame Street at certain parts of the day.  The rest of the day was mostly game shows and soap operas.  Any sick day, for me, found me lying on the couch, under a blanket, watching mostly ABC programming.  Mid-day to 3:00 pm, that meant soap operas.  So, it was All My Children, followed by One Life To Live, followed by General Hospital.  Then, programming turned to syndicated fare, like reruns and more game shows.

The two longest running characters, from my era, were Dr Steve Hardy (played by John Beradino) and nurse Jessie Brewer (Emily McLaughlin) who had been with the show, since inception.  The plots were typical fare, revolving around the hospital.  In the early days, Jessie was married to Paul Brewer, played by Roy Thinnes (The Invaders, Battlestar Galactica, Journey tot he Far Side of the Sun), but he was out of the picture by the time I saw any of it.  They introduced a young girl character, Laura Vining, played by Stacey Baldwin.  She turns out to to be the daughter of Dr Leslie Williams, who became pregnant, out of wedlock.  She was led to believe her daughter died after birth; but, later learns that the babies were switched and her daughter was living with the Vining family, struggling on a teacher's salary.  The character appeared for a couple of years, then, was written out of the show.

in 1977, she was brought back, to appeal to a younger audience, and was played by Genie Francis.  She develops a romance with Scott Baldwin, the son of a counselor at the hospital.  Meanwhile, she goes to work at a campus disco, managed by Luke Spencer (Tony Geary), who operates it for a mobster, Frank Smith.  Smith orders Spencer, who has a shady past, to murder a senator and he refuses.  Laura comforts him and he tries to seduce her, during a dance in the closed disco (set to Herb Alpert's "Rise"), and she resists him and he rapes her.  Laura forgives him and tries to hide what has happened, by Scotty finds out and nearly kills Luke.  Laura ends up defending Luke and breaks it off with Scotty and she and Luke become a couple.  They then became the prototype "super couple," around whom storylines were built, as a ratings grab.

Meanwhile, you had a family of doctors, named Webber, which included Dr Rick Webber, younger brother Jeff Webber, and the afore-mentioned Leslie Williams marries Rick Webber and adopts his name.  Jeff Webber was played by Richard Dean Anderson, who would go on to star in MacGyver and Stargate SG-1 (and is the son of Richard "Oscar Goldman" Anderson, of The Six MIllion Dollar Man).  Added into this mix were the Quartermaine family, a wealthy industrialist father, played by Les Tremayne (who was mentor, on the Shazam live action tv series), wife Lila (played by actress Anna Lee, whose career stretched back to the 1920s and was the goddaughter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and their son Alan (yup....Alan Quartermaine...though not Alan Quatermain, as in H Rider Hagard's King Solomon's Mines)., played by Stuart Damon (who co-starred in the ITV series The Champions, in the 60s).  Jeff Webber's wife, Monica.  She had been in love with brother Rick, who was presumed dead, but turned up, alive.  Well, before you know it, they are playing "doctor", together and she divorces Jeff.  Rick is involved with Leslie Williams, gets pregnant by him, falls down the stairs (thanks to Monica) miscarries but the truth isn't known that Monica caused it, until Laura reveals a taped conversation.  Rick marries Leslie and Alan Quartermaine gets sloppy seconds from Monica and marries her after Rick rejects her.

Got all that?

Now, into Port Charles (the setting) comes shady multi-millionaire Mikkos Cassadine (played by Batlestar Galactica's Baltar, John Colicos), who is searching for something called the Ice Princess, which falls into the hands of the Quartermaine family.  It turns out, hidden inside are synthetic diamonds.  They are actually components for a device that can control weather patterns.  Luke and Laura discover this, with the aid of Robert Scorpio, a secret agent from the World Security Bureau.  They stow away on Cassadine's yacht, which sails to a remote and private island, where he has his base of operations for his weather machine.  Luke, Laura and Robert Scorpio work to sabotage the machine (which causes frak winter storms, over Port Charles) and contact the WSB, who send in a commando team to blow the place up.  Luke and Laura get married, in a massive ratings hit and their wedding is visited by Elizabeth Taylor, as the widow of Cassadine.

That was about the last storyline I ever saw.

General Hospital, in the Luke & Laura era of the late 70s and early 80s, was a ratings juggernaut.  The overhaul of the show, instigated in 1976-77, brought in younger audiences and soon it was a favorite of high school and college age viewers, as well as the traditional audience.  They got bigger and bigger budgets to do location filming, in exotic places and special episodes.  It was a BIG big deal.

They, however, declined in ratings, as cable sucked away viewers with alternatives and the networks lost viewership and started slashing budgets.  Most of the soap operas I knew, as a kid, were cancelled in recent decades.

During the Luke & Laura period, they introduced a young doctor, Noah Drake, played by Australian actor and singer Rick Springfield.  After being cast on the show, Springfield's Working Class Dog album was released.  Springfield's previous albums hadn't done spectacularly in America.  His acting had been in things like The Six Million Dollar Man, the cartoon series Mission Magic (where he also sang) and he was the ill-fated Zac, brother of Apollo, on Battlestar Galactica, who is killed in the initial Cylon ambush.  For that reason, Springfield was focusing on acting.  Neither he nor his agent expected his album to do well; but, the single off of it, "Jessie's Girl" shot up to number one when fans of General Hospital, particularly teen and colelge age girls, saw that hunky Dr Noah Drake had an album out.  The album peaked at #7 on the Billboard charts and Springfield went off to do concerts and movies.  The concerts sold, the movies bombed and he kind of bounced back and forth between music and acting, while getting messed up on drugs and alcohol.  Quite frankly, Noah Drake was his pinnacle, as an actor (though I haven't seen that movie he did with Meryl Streep), as The Human Target sure sucked.

All mY Children was a good one and was a favorite of Carol Burnette, who would end up playing a recurring guest role on there.  The main villainess, Phoebe Tyler Wallingford, was played by Rith Warrick, who co-starred with Orson Welles, in Citizen Kane.  She used to appear on talk shows and was a hoot.  i recall an appearance on one, where an audience member said her character was such a b@#$h.  Warrick, who was in a wheel chair, after a broken ankle or foot, responded, "Now I'm a b@#$h on wheels!"  The other major character there was Erika Kane, played by Susan Lucci, forever snubbed by the Daytime Emmy Awards.

In between the two was One Life to Live, which kind of coasted on the popularity of the other two soaps.  It had some good moments and one of it's key characters, Karen Wolek, was played by actress Judith Light, who went on to star in Who's The Boss, with Tony Danza, and was recently in Julia, about the start of The French Chef, with Julia Child (playing Blanche Knopf, the head of publisher Alfred Knopf, who published Child's cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking).

Now, GH is the oldest existing soap (since most of the rest were shut down); but, the oldest of those that ran the longest, before being shut down, was As the World Turns, which began in 1956, on the CBS network.  It was put to sleep in 2010.  It was killed off to make room so that Sara Gilbert (Roseanne) and Sharon Osborne (wife of Ozzy) could have a cheap knockoff of The View, which was hardly riveting television in the first place (unless you couldn't get enough of Barbara Walters).

I am sad to say I know that much about General Hospital.

More from the Ice Princess. WSB agent Robert Scorpio fills in Luke & Laura. Note, the agent who calls Scorpio is Billie Hayes, the former Witchiepoo, of HR Pufnstuf.



Agent O'Reilly takes one for the team....



You can see the major events in the Ice Princess saga, and other storyline clips of the era, on this channel.....

Organization is going to depend on the size of the police force and the detective division/CID.  Larger municipalities will have more specialized groups, while smaller areas may be investigating robberies and homicide.  In the US cities, you will have detectives split along lines like robbery, homicide, vice, narcotics (sometimes with vice), fraud/Bunco, etc.  You also have things like Major Crimes Units, which handle serious high end robbery and violent crime, and murder.  For instance, the Michael Mann tv series, Crime Story, was about a Chicago MCU, based on the experiences of show creator Chuck Adamson, an ex-Chicago MCU detective.  Denis Farina, who starred in the series, had worked with Adamson.  The film Heat was also based on Adamson's experience.

Lt Columbo was a Homicide detective; and, thus, dealt only with murder.

In the UK, there are murder squads, in the larger cities, from what I have read.  Usually, detectives will work in several different specialties, over the course of their career, unless they have a particular talent and remain in that area.  The UK series New Tricks had Gerry Standing (Dennis Waterman) mention working vice, a pedophile task group, and other crimes.  Jane Tennison, of Prime Suspect, has run rape, vice and murder units, as mentioned in the series and commands a vice team, in Prime Suspect 3.  Of course, they end up with a murder on their "patch."

One particularly important person in common: Matthew Weiner.