Emmerdale is an award winning and critically acclaimed British soap opera, set in the fictional village of the same name (known as Beckindale until 1994) in West Yorkshire, England. The series was known as Emmerdale Farm until November 1989. Much of the action takes place within the fictional village pub, The Woolpack. The show was created by Kevin Laffan, with Keith Richardson serving as Executive Producer since 1986 and Anita Turner as Series Producer from January 2008. Her first produced episode aired on Monday March 3, 2008.

Emmerdale is the third most popular soap opera on British television, behind EastEnders and Coronation Street.

The series is produced by Yorkshire Television and broadcast on the ITV network, and was first aired on October 16, 1972. It was originally conceived and broadcast as a daytime programme in an afternoon slot, moving to its current position as an early evening programme in 1978 in most ITV regions. Anglia and Thames followed suit in the 1980s.

Emmerdale is shown from Monday to Friday at 19:00 on ITV. Every episode lasts 30 minutes, except the Tuesday edition (or Thursdays if ITV screen UEFA Champions League football on the Tuesday and if all ITV regions have no live football commitments on the Thursday), which lasts one hour. Repeat episodes and the omnibus of the show can be seen on ITV2.

October 2007 saw Emmerdale celebrate its 35th anniversary in dramatic style with a huge explosion ripping through Annie's Cottage caused by Victoria Sugden pouring petrol over the furniture after demanding to know who had killed her mother Sarah Sugden, seven years previously.

In June 2008, Emmerdale celebrated its 5000th episode with the marriage of Eric Pollard and Val Lambert.

The basic premise of "Emmerdale Farm was very similar to the BBC radio soap opera "The Archers" - focusing on a family, a farm, and characters in a nearby village.

The farmyard filming techniques of Emmerdale Farm were originally modelled on the revolutionary soap-opera The Riordans, made by RTÉ, Ireland's broadcaster, from the mid-1960s to the end of the 70s. The Riordans broke new ground for soap operas by being filmed largely out of doors (on a farm owned, in the storyline, by Tom and Mary Riordan), rather than, as was the norm in British and American soap operas, being almost totally shot in studios (even 'outdoor' scenes were sometimes filmed indoors). The Riordans pioneered farmyard location shooting, with real farm animals, and actors driving tractors. In the 1960s and 1970s, outdoor filming of television programmes using OBUs (Outdoor Broadcast Units) was in its infancy, due to the far higher costs involved, and the reliance on things like the weather that were out of the control of the programme makers.

Emmerdale is extremely well known for the amount of disasters and dramatic stunts it has featured over the years.

The success of The Riordans showed that a soap opera could be filmed largely out of doors. Yorkshire Television sent people to The Riordans set in County Meath, Ireland to see the making of the programme at first hand.

Until 1993, Emmerdale was largely ignored by press and viewers alike, in the face of much more well-known soaps such as Coronation Street, EastEnders and Brookside. This, however, was changed when Emmerdale's plane crash storyline brought Emmerdale into the public eye, giving Emmerdale it's highest ever viewing figures of 18.6 million, and consequently keeping the show as one of the most watched soap operas on British television.

As well as the plane crash storyline, there have been several other major storylines, including the famous storm of 2003, the Kings River explosion of 2006, the Tom King kidnapping of 2006, and the murder of Tom King on Christmas Day, 2006.

The show is now ranked high in the British popularity stakes, being outdone regularly only by the two major mainstream soaps, Coronation Street and EastEnders.

Links.
Full episodes of Emmerdale
ITV website
Emmerdale Forum
Recaps
What's On TV - Emmerdale

Here's a video of the Beautiful Emmerdale Girls