Ronn Moss ... or as he is better known - Ridge Forrester baby, Ridge Forrester. Source: National Features
Sarrah Le Marquand, The Daily Telegraph, reports
There are two types of people in this world: Those who are dreading the looming departure of Ridge Forrester from The Bold and the Beautiful and those who pretend they have never heard of Ridge Forrester.
For the uninitiated - or at least those who insist on feigning ignorance of the high-rating soap opera - the impossibly chiselled-jawed Ridge has been a mainstay since its debut 25 years ago.
Now, after countless brushes with death, several hundred weddings and an ex-wife who rose from the dead on more than one occasion, the eldest son of the Forrester clan is about to wander off into the sunset.
There hasn't been a bigger event in daytime TV since a certain talk-show host walked off the set of The Oprah Winfrey Show for the final time last year.
For a genre which relies on the melodramatic potential of the shocking death of a main character, producers have resisted the urge to kill him off, assuring fans Ridge will eventually return.
We won't be seeing his perpetually married-divorced-remarried partner Brooke in black as she mourns the loss of her great love. Perhaps the notion of a grieving leading lady was too much for the wardrobe department.
A far more likely real reason, however, is that with Ridge's alter ego - actor Ronn Moss - reportedly declining to renew his contract due to a salary dispute the powers-that-be are clearly hoping that a few months of unemployment might prompt him to reconsider.
But if he refuses to return? Then it will be time for one of the peculiar staples of daytime soaps - the recast - in which the hunt will begin for actors who bear a passing resemblance to the 60-year-old.
Will viewers accept anyone other than Moss in a role he first originated in 1987?
In a series that over the years has served up storylines of bigamy, mistaken paternity, psychotic stalkers and mothers who accidentally sleep with their daughter's husbands (don't you just hate it when that happens?), stranger things have happened.
With Ridge's final episode scheduled to air in Australia in early December, a seminal moment in daytime television is fast approaching.
Critics might scoff, but with the long-running soap delivering Channel 10 double the audience of its rival networks each weekday afternoon, it would be a foolish programmer who underestimates the unacknowledged power of The Bold and the Beautiful.
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