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 (1970–79)
On November 5, 1975, the name was changed in the show's opening and closing visuals from "The Guiding Light" to "Guiding Light" in an attempt to modernize the show's image, and, at the same time, the show adopted the harp-and-string-laced "Ritournelle," by Charles Paul, as its theme song, accompanied by a somewhat abstracted visual of sunlight filtering through leaves on a tree. The serial was still called "The Guiding Light" by CBS (and the show's staff announcers, most notably Alan Berns who began his tenure with the program in 1969 and would last as show announcer until the spring of 1997) until fall 1981, when "The" was completely dropped from references and a more upbeat musical theme was adopted.