US soap Days of Our Lives to air in the UK

The show will be screened weekdays at 9.10am on Sony Channel from 20th January.

British soap fans are being invited to take a look through the famous hourglass and join in with the romance, adventure, drama and mystery that surround the Horton, Brady and DiMera families.

Sony Channel will pick up from season 53 which begins with the DiMera’s 2018 NYE party and introduces a new storyline featuring villain, Vivian Alamain who has returned to Salem to shake things up with Stefan O. DiMera, a brand-new character claiming to be Vivian’s son.

The episode also sees three midnight kisses lead to two developing romances and one complicated love triangle.

Since it first aired in 1965, the popular, multi-award-winning daytime drama chronicling the trials and tribulations of the fictional American town of Salem has garnered 57 Emmy Awards, including most recently 2015 and 2018’s Outstanding Daytime Drama, and multiple People’s Choice Awards, GLAAD Media Awards, and Prism Awards.

However, TVLine recently cast doubt over the show’s future by reporting that it was to go on an “indefinite hiatus” and that the cast could be forced to accept a lower salary in the uncertain event of a renewal.

“It’s actually a shrewd, if cynical, business move,” an insider told TVLine. “If Days gets picked up, Corday can offer the actors new contacts at a reduced rate and with a take-it-or-leave it attitude. Worst case scenario, they lose half their cast. Best case scenario, everyone agrees to return at a lower salary.”

Chandler Massey and Kristian Alfonso are just two of the Days actors to have since rubbished the reports with the former, who plays Will Horton, posting on Twitter that the show is being paused “because we are so far ahead of schedule and it saves $” while Alfonso, who plays Hope, shared a video insisting that she and her co-stars “are still here… and we are not going anywhere”.

It was also noted that the Corday and Sony Pictures Television co-production, which airs on NBC stateside, films eight months in advance meaning that episodes are in the can through to summer 2020.

The Sony Channel is on Freeview 48 / Sky 157 / Virgin 189 / Freesat 142.