Families

Families is a daytime soap produced by Granada Television and created by Kay Mellor. It chronicles two families - the Thompsons of Cheshire, England, and the Stevens of Sydney, Australia. Filmed at Studio 6 within Granada Studios, Manchester, the series unfolds around a central hinge: Mike Thompson, a businessman who abandons his family on his birthday and flies to Australia to be with his true love, Diana Stevens, whom he had left years before. Unknown to Mike, Diana has given birth to his son, Andrew. When circumstances shift dramatically, Andrew travels to England and encounters Mike's daughter Amanda, born to Mike's English wife Sue, and the pair fall in love - yet neither one realizes they are half-siblings. The premise bore similarities to the opening arc of the popular Australian soap Sons and Daughters, which had enjoyed daytime visibility on ITV since 1983. Originally aired twice weekly at 3:20 pm, the debut episode aired on 23 April 1990. Each episode was also replayed on Thursday at 10:40 pm in Granada's region as part of the '10.40-extra' strand. After two years, plots involving the Thompson and Stevens clans - and the UK-Australian crossover - concluded, with several characters either deceased or moving on. In their place came the wealthy Bannerman family, introduced in the summer of 1992, who relocated to the Thompsons' Cheshire mansion from a Manchester suburb. Additionally, several Australian-based characters were relocated to England.