We continue this week’s theme of “things that make boatloads of money although nobody admits to consuming them” with another cheaply produced golden goose: soap operas.

Being named after the detergent manufacturers who originally used to be the sponsors of this kind of shows (back when they were on the radio) they feature complicated interwoven never-ending stories and often have a very loyal fan-base. Some very successful representatives of the genre were “As the World Turns” in the US, that ran for a whopping 54 years, “Lindenstrasse” in Germany or “Neighbours” in Australia, which was very popular in the UK as well and made it to almost 9000 episodes before it was cancelled earlier this year.

One of the early stars of Neighbours was Kylie Minogue, who played a tomboyish mechanic and was already quite famous down under when she travelled to London in 1987 to work with the successful production team of Stock Aiken Waterman. Alas, that was not the case there and they in fact had forgotten about her arrival and therefore churned out “I Should Be So Lucky” in about 40 minutes while she waited in front of the building, and then had to sing it line by line. She was not a happy camper, to say the least, and when the song became a huge international hit and markets were asking for a follow-up Mike Stock had to travel to Australia and crawl a hundred yards on his knees, begging the actress for forgiveness.

In the coming years she would continually reinvent herself, becoming the best-selling female Australian artist and the first to have a top-selling album in the UK in each of the five following decades.