Sheep on the fell, a pub that keeps score, and a handful of families who have never managed to leave one another alone. Emmerdale sits in the Yorkshire Dales, a village invented for television in 1972 and lived in ever since.

Kevin Laffan created it as Emmerdale Farm, and the farm gave the early years their shape: livestock, weather, inheritance, and the friction between people who work the land and people who move in beside it. The village grew outward from there into a whole community with its own pub, church, shops and grudges, and ITV has broadcast it since 16 October 1972.

A soap tells its story without an ending. Nothing builds to a finale, so plots overlap and hand off to each other, a feud runs alongside a wedding and somebody's washing-up, and a character you hardly noticed one year carries the show the next. You can start almost anywhere and let the village explain itself as it goes. Regulars including Jeff Hordley, Mark Charnock, Lucy Pargeter and Elizabeth Estensen have played the same people long enough that their history is the point.

The production has followed the same rural instinct. Interiors come from the Leeds Studios, while exteriors began in Arncliffe in Littondale, whose ancient name Amerdale may have supplied the title, moved on to Esholt, and now use a purpose-built village on the Harewood estate. It suits anyone who wants a long companion rather than a box set to finish.