Favourite characters such as Dr Armstrong, Mr Parker Brown, Nurse Price, Student Nurse Katy Shaw, Sisters Chapman/Rocheford/Edwards/Harrington and Washington, porter Arnold Capper, Area Hospital Board Doctor Richard Lindwall - and Parker Brown's arch enemy Richard Kirby! Nevertheless, nostalgia over-rides everything and you won't be dissappointed in this set if you remember following the original stories from day one. Some original colour VT episodes of good quality, though many are monochrome 16mm telecine copies which were used to market the programme overseas. Only 38 surviving episodes of the original 270 from 'series one' (daytime twice-weekly 'soap' format originally transmitted by ATV for the ITV Network at 2pm on Thursday and Friday afternoons) I enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and for middle-aged people like me, this is an entertaining buy. I'd love to know what happened to some of the other, less well know actors though most of them don't appear to have been heard of much after General Hospital, and surprisingly few come up doing a standard internet search. Watch out too for some really famous faces - Alun Armstrong, Bernard Lee, Linda Bellingham, Ronald Leigh-Hunt, Brian Capron and Joanna Lumley (acting everyone else off the screen). Still, to be fair, this is no different from most other soaps of the day! ATV made good use of their Elstree studio complex, and the set design in particular is very good - much better than its stable-mate Crossroads - the hospital interiors still look good even now. The production values aren't too bad, considering the time it was made, although some of the acting is pretty dire, with plenty of fluffed lines and missed cues. Still, despite better production values and more money, today's current crop of medical soaps, such as Casualty and Holby City, are still telling the same stories in the same unrealistic way. Most of the `patients' are pretty thinly drawn (and none of them ever look or sound unwell!), as it's the staff who are focused on here. There's births, illness and injury as a means of driving some pretty daft plots concerning medical imposters, drippy student nurses, opinionated and belligerent doctors, bizarre families and plenty of the staff falling in-and-out of love. The series itself is fairly standard fare of its type - a number of regular characters in the irresistible setting (at least for television producers and executive since the 1950s to the present day) of a district general hospital dramatically, there's very little that can't be tackled in terms of stories and personalities, and General Hospital is no exception. There's a bit of an untold back story here, I am sure, and it would be fascinating to understand why so many episodes were lost and how the ones that we can now see were recovered. On the whole, I didn't find that this detracted from the viewing enjoyment, although obviously it would have been nicer if we were able to see copies of the original colour episodes. Most of the recovered episodes are grainy, with a good smattering of picture jumps and sound problems, which I guess is to be expected. All the episodes are watchable, but some are easier on the eye than others. There are 38 episodes on five discs, a good half of which are in black and white, having been sourced from recovered overseas sales material originally distributed by ITC. This set of DVDs contains all that remains of the half-hour shows, very few of which exist in the ITV archive. General Hospital started in 1972 and ran throughout the rest of the decade, first as a 25-minute daytime drama (270 episodes), before being re-formatted in 1975 into a 50-minute show, and shifted to a mid-evening slot on ITV. This was a real blast from the past, a daytime soap from the early 1970s.
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