Blimey! There's been so many duffers but here's a few that have risen the fastest to the top of the cesspit:
"Triangle" - a soap about the lives and loves of a North Sea ferry crew. Mercifully sunk after a few miserable months.
"Compact" - the lives and loves of the staff of a fashion magazine. Shallow, trite with Z-list actors and using the sets that were rejected or left over from "Crossroads"
"The Newcomers" - a forerunner to Eastenders? Not really, because these "-ers" were quite nice people moving into quite a nice rural place. It still stank of the country whenever the wind was in the right direction, though.
"The Brothers" - 70's series about a family who ran a transport company, and each other's lives. All characters were selfish, greedy, adulterous and thoroughly unlikeable.
"Emergency Ward 10" - the gran-daddy of all hospital soaps. One of the main actors still has a late-night, easy-listening program on BBC radio, and that show was from the late 50's!
"Howard's Way" - unlikeable characters with too much money and poor storylines, but nice boats to play with.
"Crossroads" - ran for so long that it became a parody of itself in the end. Resurrected very briefly in the early noughties but should have been left where it had been buried. Did no favours at all for the Birmingham accent.
...but it takes the Americans to produce something as mind-blowingly appalling as the soap which ran for 54 years on CBS TV called "As the world turns". My first M-in-L was addicted to it but even she referred to it as "As the stomach churns". It made "Dallas", "Dynasty" and "Peyton Place" look almost credible. Vomitricious, as Steven Fry might say.
Bring back "Acorn Antiques" and Mrs Overall!
DM