New York  - A US television soap opera known as the mother of them all has gone off the air after 72 years without much fuss from its audience.

The final episode of Guiding Light, a show that people in the television business call a daytime drama, was broadcast on September 18 from New York, and with its demise the fictitious town Springfield and the made-up Bauer, Spaulding, Cooper and Lewis families also went into the dustbin.

Guiding Light began as a radio soap opera on January 25, 1937. It later transferred to television and gathered a strong following made up mostly housewives.

"I've been watching Guiding Light for the past 20 years," said Ashley Dos Santos, an account executive and pop culture expert with the Washington-based public relations firm Crosby-Volmer. "I think it's really, really sad," she told CNN.

But there aren't many viewers like Dos Santos around any more. The number of daytime drama fans has been dwindling for decades. When it premiered, Guiding Light provided housewives an hour of entertainment during the day. Sponsored largely by companies that made soap, such shows became known as the soap opera genre. By the end of the '30s there were dozens of them, said Sam Ford, a media analyst with the communications firm Peppercom.

Guiding Light has author Irna Philips to thank for its success. She won over sponsors such as soap maker Procter & Gamble, creating a financial base for the show. She also wrote screenplays. She could write for as many as six soap operas at the same time, according to a story in the New York Daily News. Blessed with an abundance of imagination, Phillips created the dialogue of her characters while playing them. She ad-libbed the lines and two secretaries wrote them down.

Soap operas use a basic formula: They are slow-moving, have multiple plotlines, and multigenerational casts, and they often take place in seaside towns or local hospitals. But they became boring and stale after their heyday in the '60s and '70s.

"The public thrives on real-life drama. I'm surprised soaps lasted this long," said Michael Sands, a Southern California-based media consultant, speaking to CNN.

Soap operas face a grim future because of two other factors: time and money. The core audience, US housewives, has shrunk. Today, women come home in the evening from the office with no time to watch their favourite shows, which they might have recorded. Compared with reality shows, soap operas are also more expensive to produce.

To save money at the end Guiding Light was being filmed with simple equipment, including hand-held cameras. But that didn't help. The network felt ending the show was justified as it had dropped to the bottom of the league among the seven remaining soap operas.  (dpa)