Guiding Light
Guiding Light (known as The Guiding Light before 1975) is an American television soap opera. It is listed in "Guinness World Records" as the longest-running drama in television in American history, broadcast on CBS for 57 years from June 30, 1952, until September 18, 2009, overlapping a 19-year broadcast on radio from 1937 to 1956. With it 72 years of radio and television runs, "Guiding Light" is the longest running soap opera before "General Hospital" and the fifth-longest running program in all of broadcast history; only the American country music radio program "Grand Ole Opry" (first broadcast in 1925), the BBC religious program "The Daily Service" (1928), the CBS religious program "Music and the Spoken Word" (1929), and the Norwegian children's radio program "Lørdagsbarnetimen" (1924-2010) have been on the air longer.
Guiding Light
The 1970s saw the popularity of "The Guiding Light" dip somewhat. The competition imposed upon "The Guiding Light" during this decade was from other serials such as "The Doctors" on NBC, but it still garnered decent ratings. After four years, CBS bumped its timeslot up by a half-hour to accommodate Procter & Gamble's demand that "The Edge of Night" move to 2:30/1:30, a move that led to the end of that show on CBS three years later. In the meantime, "The Guiding Light" stayed steadily on course against NBC's "Days of Our Lives" and ABC's "The Newlywed Game." In late 1974, ABC replaced "The Newlywed Game" with "The $10,000 Pyramid," which went on to garner strong ratings, but not greatly at "The Guiding Light's" expense. Meanwhile, by fall 1975 (at which point the show had officially dropped the word "The" from its title, although it was still referred to as "The Guiding Light" on air for several years after), the impending departure of "The Edge of Night" for ABC - to say nothing of CBS' planned expansion of some serials - affected "Guiding Light" by pushing it back to 2:30/1:30 once more in December. At that time, NBC still ran "The Doctors" in the 2:30 slot, and ABC had a short-lived hit the next year with an updated version of the game show "Break the Bank." To complicate the picture further, ABC opted to make its first show expansions, that of "One Life to Live" and "General Hospital," in July 1976; each of those shows occupied one-half of a 90-minute block until November 4, 1977.