Can anybody tell me when it became mandatory to like soap operas? When I was a kid it was quite acceptable for educated adults to be snotty about a programme like Coronation Street or Crossroads (especially Crossroads) and be sure of receiving either a nod of approbation or a polite enquiry as to what exactly this Crossroads programme was. These days, if you dare to suggest that something like Footballers' Wives is unmitigated trash, in which a series of ludicrous scripts wholly lacking the redeeming merit of - say - an overarching theme, well-constructed dialogue or good characterisation, is badly acted by a series of day-glo men and women apparently refugees from a nuclear incident in a tanning salon, you are dismissed as some kind of media luddite.
Today soaps are everywhere. We have graduated from a time when the only soaps were Corrie, Emmerdale and Crossroads (with Waggoner's Walk and The Archers on the radio) to a time when Corrie lords it over most weekday evenings, Emmerdale is promoted from lunch time to prime-time and both are joined by Eastenders, Family Affairs, Doctors, Neighbours, Home & Away, The Bill (long given up being a police procedural), Casualty (long given up being a medical drama), Holby City (never tried to be anything but a soap), Footballer's Wives, Hollyoaks ... the list is apparently endless (and I haven't even mentioned Pobol Y Cwm).
Everywhere you look in the TV schedules there's another set of 2-dimensional characters (nb no, having a lot happen to you does not make you 3-dimensional: look at what a character like Pauline Fowler's been through since the start of Eastenders, but she's still the same miserable harridan she always was) going through the same eternal sequence of storylines - engagement, marriage, divorce, betrayal, crime, death. Occassionally things are "spiced up" by a special storyline, but these usually relate to the kind of sexual kink which on the internet leads to "alt.sex" newsgroups but on TV leads to overexcited reviews from Mark "So, 'Wife Swap', I presume the producers were hoping they'd have sex with their new partners" Lawson. Give a stern look to any mother on a UK soap and they'll instantly go into the whole Evelyn Mulwray "My sister, my daughter" bit from Chinatown (only to be acting as if the whole thing had never happened 3 weeks later).
Today, there are plenty of apparently sensible people who claim that soap operas are the repository of some of the finest writing and acting talent that this country has ever seen. Frankly, I find it rather hard to believe. Admittedly, many very good British TV writers have gone through the soap opera mill and I have no doubt whatsoever that it is a superb apprenticeship. Surely, however, that's the point - it is only an apprenticeship. As to the actors, if they're all so marvellous how come they only seem to work successfully on soaps? In Eastenders Letitia Dean and Ross Kemp were stars, need I say more?
Soap operas are big and dumb. They lumber across our screens like dinosaurs, dominating the TV ecosystem and crushing all in their path. I have no problem with that. The thing about TV is that you can switch over or switch off, and besides there are plenty of plucky little programmes out there in the undergrowth, eking out an existence by asking viewers to put their brains into gear. What I have a problem with is not the dumbing down of television but the dumbing-down of TV criticism: dear Lord, if we're willing to hail something like Emmerdale as a dramatic pinnacle what's next up for cultural reassessment? Chucklevision?
2 comments:
It's not just soaps. As you allude to, programmes like "Big Brother", "Wife Swap" and "What Does Your Shed Think Of You, Eh?" are treated as if they are vital, state of the nation social commentaries, rather than just lowest common denominator tat that even Alan Partridge or "The Pilot Show" wouldn't dream up. Mark Lawson is one of the worst offenders in this. Sometimes I wonder if I am better off just watching CBeebies.
You think your soaps are bad, Spanish soaps operas are worse. They don't go on for years. The average length of a Spanish soap opera (Novela) runs from 6 months to a year. The worse part about it is the theme is the same in all of them. Good vs. Evil, a lot of crying, a lot of violence, a lot of pretty people who don't seem to age, a lot of nonsense. But what gets my goat is that my mother still watches them and will not pick up the phone when I call her in the middle of one. I don't get it. Are there that many people not working that they have to run so many senseless soaps? Or is it that there are so many senseless people in the world?
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