More TV Memories – E Street.

E Street (Ten, 1989-1993)

I am still going through some old Australian singles charts to try and uncover more interesting stories (and they are planned to come soon), but whilst I was going through the early-90s, I suddenly remembered something. This was around the time when Australian soaps were very popular in this country, and for a while, the daytime (and nighttime) schedules seemed to be swamped with them.

Most of these were on BBC1 and ITV, but after a while, Sky One got involved as well, and in 1992, they added an Australian soap to their primetime schedule. It seemed that they were confident that E Street would soon be giving the likes of Neighbours and Home And Away a run for their money in the ratings, and there was a big promotional push for the launch, with an advert in Smash Hits and everything.

E Street had actually started in 1989, so there were three years to catch up on. The memory is a little vague on this one, and the only reason that I ever remember seeing this at all is because I knew some boys who I went to school with who lived on the floor upstairs, and they unlike us they had satellite TV, which was very fancy by my standards, and they often invited me round while they watched Sky One.

Where this was has long gone now, and it’s still weird to think that my bedroom for the first ten years of my life is no longer there, but me whinging about that it’s what you want to know, is it? You want to know about all of the terrific moments that happened in this soap. Well E Street was shown five days a week on Sky One (in half-hour episodes), and this was all about the comings and goings in the fictional part of a city. This one supposedly had more of an edge than the average soap.

I must admit that I don’t really remember too much, and as always I presume that there will be someone somewhere out there who can fill in some of the gaps, but one moment that I do remember me and the boys being rather excited about involved a character called Michael, who died, or it was presumed that he had died, then he came back to life, then he really did die? Phew, that was intense!

Oh, and there was a serial killer on the loose or something like that. There were 404 hour-long episodes of E Street in four years, but I don’t know how many were shown on Sky One, I would very much doubt that it was all of them. And it’s probably no surprise that this ended up not really taking off in this country, with viewers being more than satisfied with their Neighbours for the time being.