Friendships, flatshares and fallings-out in one invented corner of Berlin, running without a break since 1992. Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten, GZSZ to the people who grew up with it, is RTL's soap about the residents of a fictional Berlin neighbourhood and the romances, rivalries and reinventions that move through it.

German viewers have folded it into the evening routine for decades. RTL began broadcasting it in 1992 and never stopped, so there is no first season to catch up on and no ending to wait for. You join the street wherever the story happens to be and pick up the threads as you go. That is the deal a soap offers, and this one has been offering it to German households since before most of its current characters were written.

The ensemble skews young by design. Over the years the cast has been refreshed around characters in their late teens and early twenties, aimed at a young audience, while a core of faces German television knows well holds the neighbourhood together: Wolfgang Bahro, Ulrike Frank, Daniel Fehlow, Felix von Jascheroff, Gisa Zach and Eva Mona Rodekirchen. The pleasures are ordinary and cumulative. Romances take years. Friendships fray and mend. The street keeps filling with new people.