THE Happy Valley powerhouse of Sally Wainwright and Sarah Lancashire owes much to a television genre that is facing extinction - soaps.

Sally Wainwright wrote for Coronation Street, Emmerdale and The Archers long before she was a Bafta-winning screenwriter. And Sarah Lancashire’s five years as ditzy Rover’s barmaid Raquel Wolstenhulme in Corrie was a springboard to her remarkable career.

Many of TV’s top writers - Jimmy McGovern, Russell T Davies and the late Kay Mellor among them - cut their teeth on soap operas. The careers of actors such as Sue Johnston, Suranne Jones and Anna Friel were launched on soaps - and Hollywood heavyweights Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Margot Robbie and Russell Crowe started out on American and Australian ones.

For more than half a century, soaps have dominated TV schedules. But in an age of mega-budget dramas and streaming, soaps are losing relevance. They remain the big ratings-pullers - but for how long?

I have always watched soaps. It started with General Hospital, which a neighbour used to watch while minding me after school. Aged seven, I sat and watched it with her, and that was that. As a teenager in the 1980s, when soap was in its prime, I was juggling Corrie, Brookside and EastEnders with the big guns, Dallas and Dynasty, and Australian soaps Neighbours, The Young Doctors and Sons and Daughters.

My generation grew up watching soaps because our parents and grandparents watched them, and because we only had three, then four, channels. But the way we watch TV has changed radically, and sitting down to thrice-weekly episodes of continuing drama (as soaps like to call themselves these days) is so old-fashioned you might as well be wearing a hairnet and curlers.

Younger people don’t watch TV the way I did growing up. And they don’t tend to watch soaps. The only way soaps can continue, longterm, is to attract younger audiences, and this will mean releasing episodes on-demand, so viewers can watch a whole week, even a month, early. With ITV and BBC pushing their streaming services, this could be happening sooner rather than later. But is it enough to keep younger viewers interested? Or has soap had its day?

It would be a shame if soaps were lost forever. They’re part of our storytelling heritage. Russell T Davies, whose three-part drama Nolly, about the rise and fall of Crossroads matriarch Noele Gordon, has just dropped on ITVX, told the Radio Times that “memories of an old soap opera are very precious and beautiful and as important as a good book, or any wonderful experience you could have”.

Soaps are often dismissed as frothy nonsense, but to those of us who watch them they’re a big part of our lives, and our memories. At their best, they’re beautifully written, with scenes of great poignancy and deliciously catty comedy that stay with you forever. And any actor who’s been in a soap will tell you that, with a fast turnaround of episodes and limited rehearsal time, it’s the best way to learn on the job.

As Russell T Davies says, once ‘Who shot JR?’ made the evening news, soaps “supersized themselves”. They became huge in the Eighties - in July 1981 more people watched Ken and Deirdre get married than Charles and Diana - and they were huge for the next 20 years. Alas, not anymore.

If, like Neighbours, our soaps end up being axed, what will provide the entry-level training for our next generation of actors and writers?