Soaps are in danger, but nothing reflects the country quite like them
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Version 0 of 1. An EastEnders actor appeared on Saturday Kitchen a couple of years ago. During her interview segment – the part of the show where James Martin switches on a blender to drown out the guest whenever they talk because he can't bear the thought of the show not being entirely about him – she spoke in awestruck terms about meeting a former cast member who'd been on the show 20 years ago. People actually watched EastEnders then, she said. Not like now. She had a point. In 1986, one episode of EastEnders was watched by 31 million people. An episode that aired in the middle of June this year, meanwhile, had an audience of just five million. It is the same across the board: all soaps are experiencing plummeting figures. The drop isn't sudden or unusual – audiences have been fragmenting for years now – but it is drastic enough for Russell T Davies to warn that soaps are in trouble. In a new interview with Attitude, he has claimed that they might not even be around 10 years from now. And, if he's right, that would be a terrible shame. Because nothing really reflects the country like a soap. True, they're not particularly great at depicting modern life as it really is – east London isn't that white, Cheshire isn't that orange, Manchester isn't that full of old women who talk like pantomime dames – but they all still emit a dour, specifically British worldview. In the US, a soap is something you watch to see the glamorous lives of beautiful millionaires who all have evil twins and dastardly surgeons. Here, though, our soaps are about miserable grey blobs in horrible anoraks who stand around in the drizzle being depressed all the time, and we lap it up because really we're watching ourselves. Soaps are positioned to reflect and explore serious social issues like nothing else, too. And they do it so powerfully that continuity announcers regularly have to read out the actual telephone numbers of professional counsellors, thanks to the vast likelihood that everyone watching will end up floundering in such a sea of anxiety that they'll become a genuine danger to themselves. That's a huge responsibility, which is perhaps why other strains of television don't even try to copy this tactic. For example, it has been claimed that structured reality shows are responsible for edging soaps out of the market, but imagine watching an episode of Towie – one where Arg bumps into a tray of cakes and falls into a puddle or whatever – and hearing: "If you've been affected by any of the issues raised in tonight's episode …" at the end. You'd think they were taking the mickey. At least the soaps do all seem to be upping their game in response to the ratings crisis. They have realised that the loss of audience coincides with the new golden age of television, and they have at least tried to change their storylines to fit the prevailing mood. Coronation Street's recent offing of Tina was as grim as anything on Fargo; the Lucy Beale whodunnit has turned EastEnders into an elongated remake of The Killing; and even Casualty is getting in on the act, commissioning standalone episodes described as "noir". That might, admittedly, mean that they'll just revolve around Charlie enigmatically blinking in a shadow for an hour, but the fact that it is even willing to try something new is laudable. I hope Davies is wrong about soaps. But if he isn't, at least we're guaranteed one final treat. There is nothing more ridiculous than a soap's final episode. Because, as continuous dramas, soaps tend to be especially – and entertainingly – awful at endings. Eldorado ended with one of the characters sailing away on a boat called Jonathan. Brookside ended with a hanging and a rambling rant about drug prohibition. Crossroads ended with Jane Asher daydreaming the whole series from her supermarket checkout. If soaps really are coming to an end, at least they'll go out with a bang. If it means we get to see Ian Beale pulling off his face and revealing that he was really a dinosaur all along, then at least it will have all been worth it. |