I’ve just been reminded of a Culturewatch article I wrote back in 2004 about soap operas, and thought it might be worth posting it here. Bear in mind that it was six years ago that I wrote it, so the references may seem a bit dated.

Soap operas go back eighty years to the days of radio drama in 1930s America. Fifteen minutes serial dramas like Ma Perkins and Just Plain Jane were targeted deliberately at housewives so that soap powder manufacturers could sponsor the programmes – hence the ‘soap opera’ label which has stuck ever since. In the 1950s they started appearing on television but radio soaps continue, most famously in the UK with The Archers which has broadcast over 14,000 episodes since it first aired in 1951.

Over the decades, the female associations of soaps have largely faded away. Although some soaps are still very much ‘daytime television’ – and so regarded as having a primarily female audience – others have a central role in evening television schedules. Soaps have become a fixed part of the daily routine of many families, and individuals of both sexes. Soaps consistently command some of the highest viewing figures of any television programmes. Coronation Street – the world’s longest running television drama serial – has only failed to make the annual list of top ten ITV programmes once since 1961. And Dirty Den’s return to Albert Square attracted more than 16 million viewers in 2003 despite the proliferation of television channels splitting the audience in ever more directions. EastEnders‘ biggest audience was 30 million when Den handed the divorce papers to Angie. Mind you, that’s nothing to the 100 million who regularly watchRamayan in India.

Soaps have a number of key characteristics: short frequent episodes, very short scenes, several interwoven story-lines, no central character, a domestic location – usually centred on some public space (the Rovers Return, the Queen Vic, various coffee shops and cafés), ongoing narratives that are never completely closed, based around relationships between characters living in something close to real time, and centred on social and relationship issues.

For many people, the events which unfold in soaps day after day are hugely important. We feel like we share in the character’s lives. Dorothy Hobson, in her book Soap Opera (Polity Press, 2002) says that soaps work ‘because the audience has intimate familiarity with the characters and their lives. Through its characters the soap opera must connect with the experience of its audience, and its content must be stories of the ordinary.’ We don’t know the characters but it feels like we do; it feels like they’re real people whose lives continue when we’re not watching. We talk about them at home and at work; we sit in judgment on their actions and motives; we join in with their gossip. We even begin to miss them when we can’t see an episode. OneHollyoaks fan on an Internet discussion board offered £10 plus postage for a recording of an omnibus edition which she had missed.

Soaps are essentially realistic fiction. That’s not to say that every storyline is realistic, or that the incredibly turbulent lives of many soap characters are realistic. But the vast majority of the events that take place are the kinds of things that really do happen to people. Soaps give us a highly compressed and sometimes exaggerated view of life. They work best when they don’t stray into unreality too far. Dirty Den resurfacing after fourteen years of being thought dead was stretching things too much. His adopted daughter Sharon seemed to agree:

Sharon: A postcard would’ve done . . . Or a phone call.

Den: It just wasn’t possible.

Sharon: I chose your coffin, I buried you, so anything’s possible, isn’t it?

Den: I couldn’t take the risk.

Sharon: Oh please – you couldn’t risk contacting your own daughter to tell her you weren’t dead?

John Yorke, former Executive Producer of EastEnders, says that, ‘Bizarrely, it’s not sensation that gets soap its biggest ratings, it’s truth’ (www.bbc.co.uk). He, like Dorothy Hobson, believes that soaps deal with the real issues of life:

EastEnders essentially tells of the age old struggle between good and evil and all that flows from that: heroism, suffering, loss, betrayal, self-sacrifice, the human struggle with moral frailty; the struggle to bind together as a community; comeuppance and redemption.

He also claims that, although many people accuse soaps like EastEnders and Coronation Street of being depressing and only dwelling on bad things, they would not keep their audiences if this was always true. He says, ‘despite the twists and turns of the plot all [the] conclusions are essentially moral. Good triumphs, evil is punished and the value of human life is asserted.’ Overall, soaps give us happy endings – but the best soaps are those which are most true to life and give us tragic endings too. But in difficult circumstances, soap characters are generally good at pulling together and being supportive. John Yorke again:

People watch drama by and large because they want to be uplifted, they want to feel better about themselves, about life. They want to feel joy. If EastEnders is about one thing, it’s about that. It’s about the Blitz Spirit, it’s about however bad life gets, however terrible things are, you don’t give in, you don’t feel sorry for yourself, you fight back – you support those around you, you come together as a community and you shout from the roof tops, life IS worth living, it IS worth fighting for. Yes of course people get depressed in EastEnders – terrible things happen to them, but they don’t wallow – they don’t feel sorry for themselves, they fight back. (www.bbc.co.uk)

An example of that comes from an exchange between Dot Cotton and Dennis Watts:

Dennis: Well, in this life you’ve got to look out for yourself, ‘cos no one else is going to do it for you.

Dot: Don’t I know it, better than most. You know, you don’t like people to know it, but deep down you’ve got a very good heart.

Dennis: Yeah, well, don’t go spreading it around, eh?

Or take Lou Carpenter’s departing comments as he and Trixie left Ramsay Street for a while:

We couldn’t ask for a better bunch of friends and neighbours. We’re going to miss you all. So until we see each other again you all take care – be kind to each other.

Maybe that strong sense of fighting back and of pulling together is part of the reason why the boundary between fact and fiction sometimes gets a little blurred. When Deirdre from Coronation Street was wrongfully imprisoned in 1998, the tabloid newspapers all joined the ‘Free Dierdre’ campaign. Tony Blair and William Hague even expressed their support, as did a number of celebrities. In fact, the campaign was the creation of a marketing company on behalf of Granada Television (www.robellclubs.co.uk). Nevertheless, the huge public support was a fascinating measure of just how much viewers engage with their soaps and the issues within them. BothCoronation Street and EastEnders have deserved repuations for dealing with some of the major issues of our time including terminal illness, euthanasia, child abuse, race, infidelity, infertility, etc.

Soaps are modern morality plays. As we see characters struggling to work out how to act, and as we see the consequences of their actions, we are forced to consider what we would do in similar circumstances. And if the soap is being true to life, our circumstances may not be all that different.

Yorke is very clear about soaps’ moral function:

In a fractured incoherent world, where community no longer means what it did, people hunger for drama and for universal truths that give them something to aspire to; something to make them feel better about humanity and about themselves . . . I love the fact that people want to watch stories that centre around one pivotal question – how do we, as citizens, in a bad and malevolent world, live a good life? How do we love? And most importantly what should we give up for others? (www.bbc.co.uk)

Those are profoundly theological questions. Our answers spring out of our deepest beliefs about the nature of God, the universe and human beings. The Christian conviction is that Jesus Christ has given us very clear answers to those questions in his life, death and resurrection. And maybe watching soaps might help us to work out how to apply those big answers in the nitty gritty of the circumstances we face day after day.

Related posts:

1. Why bother with marriage? Two 3d gold wedding ring, laying on a glossy...

It’s very good to see Lars Dahle joining the blogosphere. Lars is Principal of Gimlekollen School of Journalism and Communication in Kristiansand, Norway, where I am now an adjunct lecturer. He’s heading up the media and technology stream for Cape Town 2010 (3rd Lausanne Congress). A couple of his early posts have focused on the question of how we engage with the news. He proposes twelve questions to reflect on while watching the news:

We need to actively engage the news. If not, we don’t appreciate the demanding and significant work of the journalists. Nor do we become critically aware of the explicit angles and the underlying perspectives in the news.

I propose the following set of criticial questions when watching, reading or listening to global, regional, national and local news:

• To what extent did the various news stories engage you, interest you and captivate you? Why?
• What themes, issues and conflicts are represented in the selected news stories? Why do you think those have been chosen?
• Which of the stories are highlighted as major news? How and why?
• Which sources and interviewees have been selected in the major news stories, as far as we can tell from the published news? Why do you think those persons have been selected?
• Which perspectives and angles have been chosen in the editorial introductions, the actual interviews and in the graphic presentations? Why do you think these journalistic and editorial decisions have been made?
• Whom do you identify with in the major news stories (if any)? Why?
• Would you describe the major news stories as essential and important? Why? / Why not?
• What kind of essential areas, topics and perspectives are missing in these news stories (if any)? Why? To what extent may this be representative for the news industry?
• What kind of professional and personal values do you discover among the journalists in the major news stories? To what extent do you identify with these values? Why? /Why not?
• If the Christian faith, Christian organizations or Christian individuals are covered in the news stories, how are these portrayed? Why?
• To what extent did the news stories leave you with a sense of involvement, hope, excitement, indifference, despair – or maybe with a mixture of such feelings? Why?
• How do a classical Christian view of humanity and the world help us to understand the wider context of the major news stories?

It’s a very helpful framework, not just for watching television news, but for reading the newspaper or engaging the news in any other context.

Related posts:

1. Twenty Questions to Consider When Watching a Film Movie Time from Crestock Photos These question are based...

This is a fabulous interactive infographic of all the Doctor Who monsters (not all of them are villains, really – the Ood, for example) since the first episode in 1963.

Related posts:

1. Doctor Who I co-wrote Back in Time: A Thinking Fan’s Guide...

Patrick Barkham (The Guardian, 14 October 2009) writes:

Get out of our living rooms. This country is in danger of becoming a politically controlled nation closer to communist China. That’s all very well if you have three hours to wash the dishes, but some of us need to get things done. Gee, these toddlers are up to no good. What are they up to? Wait for it – they’re watching television!

The outrage that has greeted reports that the Australian government is to issue cautious guidelines advising parents and carers to prevent children under two from watching television seems remarkably acerbic. Across the world, however, the same debates flare up every time it is tentatively suggested that the electronic screens we began by placing in one room at home and now carry everywhere in our pockets may not be good for the development of children’s brains.

Television is no longer merely the drug of the nation, it is the pacifier, babysitter, wallpaper and teacher for our children. Increasingly it intrudes on the very first months of their lives. In Australia, young children spend more time watching television than any other activity. The average four-month-old gazes at the box for 44 minutes every day. In the United States, under twos watch 1.2 hours a day on average. In Britain, older children have been calculated to spend five hours and 18 minutes watching TV, playing computer games or online each day, just over an hour less than the US average.

Read more on The Guardian website.

Posted via email from Tony Watkins

It’s keeping it moderated which is the key. For some people, at some stages (especially with young children), the best way to do that is to have no television. That was not much of an option for us, given my professional life! It is vital to help kids develop a life which doesn’t revolve around television; it’s vital to help them integrate with their peers, so they’ll need particular support if you’re still a no-TV household when they’re getting older; and it’s most vital of all to help kids process what they’re seeing (and hearing and reading), learning to evaluate the ideas and value and attitudes.

Related posts:

1. Why should children study religion Earlier this year, Bjørn Ulvaeus wrote an article in...

This is very weird. On yesterday’s Blue Peter (available on BBC iPlayer until 9 June 2009), the team were making a film in 24 hours for this year’s ‘Me and my movie’. They had Anthony Head, of Buffy and Merlin fame, involved. At one point (8 min 20 sec in) he’s shown looking for inspiration in Idea magazine, from Evangelical Alliance. And there’s a very brief shot of him looking at my article on justice:

Anthony Head on Blue Peter

Related posts:

1. Shaped by suffering – 1 Peter 4:1–11 My sermon at Above Bar Church, Southampton on the...