TV CULTURE: SOAPS

Features

1) little originality. In Britain, the IBA complained in vain about the low quality of the low-budget Crossroads. Originality and 'quality' are 'high cultural' values associated with individualism: soaps are communal experiences)

2) soaps are high on dialogue and melodrama ('melodrama is a form of the tragic for a world in which there is no longer a tenable idea of the sacred' – Peter Brook)

3) Problems like racism and violence are dealt with emotionally, not in a structured way.

4) Flow – frequent commercials with no intervening frame.

Types

1) Daytime: low budget, aimed at women (Neighbours, Crossroads, Bold and Beautiful).

2) Evening: big budget, often aimed at 'total' audience (Dallas, Dynasty).

3) 'Realist': characteristic of British series (Eastenders, Coronation Street)

Women and soaps All audience surveys show a majority of women viewers for all types of soap. Patriarchy is experienced and often diagnosed, but there is no prospect of change. Feminist fantasies are totally absent.

The pleasure principle: Freud maintained that pleasure is always under control in modern society, ruled by the work ethic. The child is is no sense a 'hard worker' and must be educated, against all the evidence, that hard work will bring success and power. In every individual there is the dilemma: should I grow up, recognise reality and give up pleasure, or change reality to recover lost sources of pleasure? The bourgeois aesthetic judges an art object by extremely formalized, 'universal' criteria which are totally devoid of subjective passions and pleasures. Popular aesthetic, however, cannot tolerate such repression and deferred fulfilment. Roland Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text (1975) compares such popular pleasures to sexual desire, which breaks down class barriers, social taboos and race laws (as in the old South Africa). It is a product of nature rather than culture and therefore is not subject to the same social and ideological control. Although reading is an individual activity, pleasure can also be shared and collective, as in the building of utopias like the kibbutz system, or the risk-taking of a filmed car chase. In soaps, pleasure is based on the metaphorical value of the plot, an insight missed by intellectuals who watch fitfully and are searching for literary values like consistency and 'realism'. Instead of empirical realism, giving a 'true' reflection of the world (e.g. the News), soaps follow 'emotional realism': the surface is totally unreal, but we can identify at the level of feelings

Reading List Ien Ang, Watching Dallas, 1985.

Richard Kilborn, Television Soaps, 1992.

Go home.