The successful use of OBUs to film The Riordans made international waves in broadcasting, given that all soap operas elsewhere, notably Coronation Street, were entirely studio-based. In the early 1970s, Yorkshire Television, which, aware of the success of The Riordans, was planning its own rural-based soap opera, travelled to Ireland to see how The Riordans was made on location. Its new soap, Emmerdale Farm (in 1989 renamed Emmerdale) was heavily influenced by what its makers had learnt from watching the making of The Riordans. By the late 1970s and 1980s, first Coronation Street, then EastEnders and most dramatically Brookside were influenced in their greater use (or in the case of Brookside complete use) of on location filming started by The Riordans and brought to Britain by Emmerdale Farm. Recurring themes As with all soap operas, The Riordans was centred on various tensions, rivalries and relationships. Among the central ones were generational - conservative parents (Tom and Mary) and radical young son and heir (Benjy); Batty Brennan and his wife Minnie Brennan, as the old people in the community, against everyone else. mother versus son - Mary against Benjy, which some critics likened to John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World; liberal versus conservative - radical priest Father Sheehy versus his older parishioners; conservative parents Tom and Mary against liberal children Michael and Jude; conservative Catholic Tom and Mary versus their contraception-using daughter-in-law, Maggie Riordan; outsider versus insider - the Riordan family, with their middle class farming background, against orphan Maggie, wife of Benjy; members of the nomadic Irish traveller community versus the settled, non-nomadic farming community; Class - well-to-do characters like the Church of Ireland upper middle class wife of the doctor, Mrs. Howard, and the middle class farming Riordans, against farm labourers Batty Brennan and Eamonn Maher. community gossip - as with most soaps, The Riordans contained a 'local gossip' character, Minnie Brennan, who, typically for such characters, proclaimed no interest in gossip at all, but nevertheless became the source of local information on the lives and loves of the community. One additional twist to the series was that the elderly gossip, Mrs Brennan, though considerably older than all the other characters (and actors) in the series except her onscreen 'husband' Batty Brennan (he had to be written out of the series suddenly when the actor playing him died), was played by the elderly Annie D'Alton, the