Coronation Street watchers are a large and passionate bunch, and not a community of television watchers with which a sensible television reviewer would get offside.
I am, therefore, probably going out on a limb when I describe the last full episode of Coronation Street I watched: it was black and white.
Ena Sharples came rushing - or bustling may be a better description - into the Rovers Return to announce: "The train's gone over the viaduct".
It was dead exciting, a major fictional disaster, and quite the television moment, as I remember it.
I'm not sure why I drifted away from Coro: it was, perhaps, a combination of my short attention span and the move in New Zealand away from just one television channel to two, then three, then more and more and more.
But I, and I know many, many others, have fond, fond memories of that iconic opening, that cornet music, and the 50 years of gritty, realistic northern English drama that has been a staple of Kiwi television since it began in this country, I understand, in 1964.
And what drama: the viaduct incident, in 1967 I well remember, was in the midst of such an exciting period, what with the birth of the Barlow twins in 1965, Elsie Tanner's wedding to Steve Tanner two years later, the murder of Steve Tanner in 1968, and the big coach crash in 1969.
Heady days.
The 50th anniversary of the street will be celebrated in December on TV1, with a series of special programmes including with The Road To Coronation Street on Sunday Theatre on December 12.
The Road To Coronation Street tells the story of how television's most famous soap - which was initially to be named Florizel St - came in to being, with a focus on its creator and writer Tony Warren.
I never tire of being taken back to the early 1960s, when everybody dressed well, men wore ties at the dinner table, ladies had hairstyles that defied gravity, everybody smoked inside with no complaints, and hippies hadn't been invented.
Heady days.
The Road To Coronation Street takes a loving look at the struggle Warren had to get his idea to the television set, and comes complete with lashings of nostalgia.
His plan, to write about something he knew, in this case the gritty streets of Manchester, did not initially go down well with the executives at Granada Television.
He had to push to get as many northern actors as possible on the show, knowing locals would pick a Londoner in a flash.
It is the accent of actor David Dawson, who plays Warren, which is the only fault I could pick in the show, as it drifts from gay to Manchester and back again as the programme unfolds.
But The Road To Coronation Street is worth watching for fans and non-fans alike, particularly the struggle to find an actor to play Ena Sharples.
Plenty of fun.
