Do Soaps Represent 'real' life?

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521109                                   Media, Culture and Society                                 22/02/04

Do Soaps Represent‘real’ life?

Soap operas are viewed by millions of our population every day; on average Eastenders has a viewing coverage of approximately 13million. There are a number of reasons as to why soap operas appeal to such a large and diverse audience. In this essay I will be examining these reasons with reference to my own attraction to soaps, and seeing how the soap stories fit into the everyday lives of the millions who watch them. Furthermore, I will investigate the way in which the construction and conventions of a soap opera relates to ‘real’ life. My discussion will include different aspects of a range of the most popular British soaps, for example, Crossroads, Coronation Street, Hollyoaks and Eastenders.

         It is hard to prove that soaps represent real life.  Surely if they were truly reflective, we would all have fallen tragically into at least one coma by now. And we would have come out of it, too, with better hair and a new contract. It is true that the murder rate in Britain is at a record high. But if soaps were to be believed, it would be a whole lot closer to Colombia’s murder rate. You’re no one on the small screen until you’ve been whacked. The incidence of animal-print evening wear has also skyrocketed in this country. But it could never reach soap-opera Bet Lynch proportions. Similarly, the use of the phrase “If you ever come back here again” has peaked on soap operas at a level impossible to sustain in real life without a face like Phil from Eastenders and the gravelly, ‘I-will-whack-you’ voice to go with it. There are, also, many illegitimate children born in Britain today. About 40 per cent of all births are now “out of wedlock”. But if the soaps were anything to go by, that number currently would be nudging something much higher.

It seems that you don’t get married on a soap so you can have children together. You do it so you can put on a fancy dress and sneak around to the back of the semi-detached/pub/café for a brief/extended/bittersweet interlude with the ex-husband/wife, who is now gay/lesbian, but with whom you are still deeply in love because you are/she is carrying his/your baby.

        In her book ‘The Drama of a Soap Opera’, Dorothy Hobson states,

        ‘Soaps have always been seen as escapist or fantasy programmes through which women could realize the romance missing from their own everyday lives’

(Hobson.D, 1982, p34)

The fact that approximately twenty years ago, ten to twelve soap operas were shown daily, each an hour or half an hour long would support this notion.  The first went on at 10am and the last at 3:30pm, (the hours during which the majority of women were at home).  There was an obvious pattern running through these soaps, they were generally set in small towns, involved two or three families connected with one another.  Families were often composed of several generations from a range of classes on the social scale, although most identifiably middle – class.  Men and women worked outside the home, usually in professions such as law and medicine. However, the focus of the programmes was on people discussing personal and domestic crises.  Occasionally controversial social problems such as rape and murder were included and were for the most part, handled in a sensitive manner.  However, in spite of the fact that soaps contained more references to social problems than any other form of entertainment at the time, critics tended to fault them heavily for their lack of realism.   The fans and audience (the women) would insist on the soap operas lifelikeness, but the fact that blacks and other minorities were almost completely excluded as well as other underlying problems and exclusions would suggest that these soaps were no more ‘real’ than a fictional story.

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        Some people may suggest that soap operas have moved on much further from the days of the early Crossroads, I mean just look at the ‘modernised’ Crossroads. There are many men and women portrayed in the storylines that come from a variation of ethnic minorities, Asians, Nigerians, Indians, the list goes on.  And it’s not only Crossroads that has these kinds of ethnic minorities, it is Eastenders and Hollyoaks and Coronation Street also.  If you are a keen supporter of either Hollyoaks or Eastenders, you may even notice that the most recent additions to each cast were families from ethnic ...

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