Post by Chloe (admin) on Feb 22, 2022 1:57:32 GMT
• It's fair to say that soap operas - also known as serial dramas, continuing dramas and telenovelas - are a staple of television drama in many parts of the world. Different continents have different tastes, however. In India and Latin America, it's the telenovela that audiences lap up: melodramas, often of a romantic nature, which last for anything from 100-200 episodes, before making way for the next one. In some parts though, soaps are actually an alien concept! There are no soap operas at all in eastern Europe, nor in Scandinavia (apart from, randomly, one in Finland). Once a dominant force in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, their popularity has dwindled down under and, with the shock announcement of the ending of Neighbours (1985-2022) in February 2022, only one Aussie soap remains - the perenially popular Home And Away (1988- ).
Western Europe outside of the British Isles has been slow to come round to the soap opera. Many sprang up in the 1990s but never really found solid ground, usually lasting only a few years. However a spate of millennial and early 2000s soaps finally seem to have found their feet in several western European states. In Ireland, English-language, Dublin-based serial drama Fair City began in 1989, and Irish-language Galway soap Ros na Rún (Headland of the Secrets) began in 1996. Both are still going strong today. In Wales, the same is true of both South Wales-based Pobol y Cwm (People of the Valley), which began in 1974 and is the oldest television serial produced by the BBC; and Rownd a Rownd, an Anglesey-based melodrama airing since 1995. Both of these are in the Welsh language and air on S4C.
However, in the United States and United Kingdom, the general trend is that soap opera used to be very prevalent at one time, but since around the turn of the 21st century, the number of them has slowly dwindled, and an entirely new soap opera is now a very rare sight. In the United States, soaps once dominated daytime television made for bored housewives, looking for a bit of mindless escapism (and sensationalist plots). But 2009-2013 saw the shock demise of several very long-running serials. The most notable of these was Guiding Light (1937-2009). Starting off as a popular radio soap for around 20 years before transferring to the small screen, its 72-year lifespan made it the longest-running television or radio drama ever produced, as well as the earliest still on air at the time of its demise. The next earliest, BBC Radio 4 rural drama The Archers, began in 1951. It was also the first serial drama to reach a landmark 10'000 episodes. It will be more than 12 years until the next longest-running soap, ITV's Salford-set serial drama Coronation Street (1960- ), surpasses Guiding Light in duration, but it will do so much sooner in terms of episode count.
Other major US daytime soap victims include As The World Turns (1956-2010) - which also produced well over 10'000 episodes - All My Children (1970-2013), which had nearly 11'000 episodes - and One Life To Live (1968-2013), which boasted just over 10'000 installments. In 2019, it looked as if Days Of Our Lives (which began in 1965) might be in trouble when it was announced the show was being put on indefinite hiatus and all the cast had their contracts terminated. Bizarrely however, it was later renewed until September 2021, and remains on air. In 1990 there were twelve daytime soap operas on air in the USA; today there are only four. The least popular of them is medical melodrama General Hospital (airing since 1963), followed in third place by Days Of Our Lives (1965- ). The #1 daytime serial in the US is The Young And The Restless (1973- ). However its spin-off soap, The Bold And The Beautiful (1987- ), is the most popular serial in the world, shown in many countries and boasting a global audience of 22m viewers.
Here in the United Kingdom, the definition of a soap opera is more flexible. Historically it consists of a half-hour format of episodes airing anywhere from one to six times per week, and usually with a fixed timeline (e.g. episodes airing on Christmas Day will also be set on that day). However this is not always the case, especially in recent decades. As mentioned previously, Gaelic dramas Rownd a Rownd, Ros na Rún and also River City (2002- ), a Glasgow-set soap which airs in Scotland only, have floating timelines and in some cases do not air all year round. But they are considered soaps because they consist of several long-running storylines which tend to pick up where they left off in a previous episode, even if a cliffhanger is not immeditely picked up on in the next episode. Often they include open-ended cliffhangers, which pause the story without the need to follow it up immediately in the next installment. More complex examples of this format flexibility include:
• The Bill (1984-2010) - a once very popular police procedural which maintained a twice-weekly, pre-watershed format until the late 1990s, when it became a one-hour format, which later moved into a post-watershed timeslot. A combination of 'story-of-the-week' plots and more traditional soapy elements - such as affairs - which came later in the show's run
• Casualty (1986- ) - a weekly medical drama that has aired mostly on Saturday nights in the 8 o'clock hour. Once gritty and realistic, the show became notably more soapy in the 1990s and is now largely topical and issue-led
• Doctors (2000- ) - a daytime, low-budget medical drama set in and around an English Midlands general practice surgery. A good example of the hybrid soap/continuing drama format, with its combination of story-of-the-day plots and long-running storylines - which are written by seperate teams of writers - and a floating timeline. Doctors tends to take a long summer break and is also off air over Christmas. Many former soap stars and veteran actors appear in short-term roles, whilst others get their first television break on the show, especially those from the Midlands itself
Soaps having been popular staples in the 1970s and 1980s, things slowly began to change from the mid-80s onwards. Albion Market (1985-6) - an ITV rival to the smash-hit BBC serial EastEnders (1985- ) - and Eldorado (1992-3), a sun-kissed soap about British expats living on the Costa del Sol and intended to appeal to fans of the Australian soaps - were both disastrous, lasting only one year. Long-running motel serial Crossroads, which had aired since 1964, was axed in 1988 after a flop revamp led to dwindling viewing figures. Scottish serial Take The High Road (1980-2003) was originally networked, but a review of all long-running drama output at ITV Network Centre in 1993 saw ITV dumping the low-rating soap. However due to viewer complaints, it was restored in several ITV regions, but only on a franchise-by-franchise basis. That is to say, in some areas the show was never aired again, but in others it continued, albeit at different paces. Such was the backlog of episodes that the serial did not finish until 2003, even though filming had ended in 2000 and the studios it was filmed at since demolished.
A perfect storm was also affecting the ITV rural serial Emmerdale (1972- ). The failure of Eldorado, coupled with falling ratings and pressure to compete with more popular soaps like Coronation Street, EastEnders and Brookside (1983-2003), had left Emmerdale in a vulnerable position. This was only hampered by the network's drama review - in which essentially all of its long-running dramas were put on notice - and Carlton Television (the then new ITV company in London) threatening to pull Emmerdale in the London area, where it was unpopular. This led Yorkshire Television (the regional company who produced the show before ITV merged into a single company in 2004) to recruit Brookside creator and writer Phil Redmond into coming up with a major storyline which would boost ratings. And so the seeds of the now infamous Emmerdale plane crash plot were sown. And it is fair to say that this storyline would change the face of British soap operas forever. It was not without risks: the special effects alone cost £1m (a fortune in 1993), and there was controversy about airing a plane crash plot so close to the fifth anniversary of the very real Lockerbie plane crash in 1988. However ITV did try to placate things as much as possible: the Lockerbie bombing was a terrorist act, but the Emmerdale plane crash was a natural disaster. The plane crash episode aired well over a week after the Lockerbie bombing anniversary. From 1973-2022, Emmerdale was broadcast at 19:00, but as this was the time the Lockerbie bombing happened, they rescheduled Emmerdale's plane crash episode on 30th December 1993 to 18:30, for one night only.
The hype and advertising campaign about this storyline was phenomenal - unheard of for a serial drama in Britain - and it was arguably the most talked about soap plot since the Ken/Deirdre/Mike love triangle on Coronation Street captivated the nation back in 1981. It was heavily advertised - stars of the show appeared on daytime television to talk about it and - for perhaps the first time ever - there was a buzz about this episode of Emmerdale that the show had never previously experienced. There was a sense that this was a real moment in soap history; even people who had never watched a single moment of Emmerdale - or who had stereotypical views of it as a sleepy, old-fashioned rural melodrama - were expected to tune in. When the episode finally went out at the end of 1993, it scored a whopping 18m viewers, about 6m more than usual, and to this day the show's highest ever ratings. And many of those viewers stayed. With a larger audience to cater to and a more modern feel to the characters and storylines, the big gamble had worked. But the humble English soap opera would never be the same again; there was now pressure on other prime time soaps to deliver big, dramatic storylines, and as they became more and more talked about by both public and press alike, the number of episodes began to expand. Once solidly twice-weekly affairs, two became three, three became four and, ultimately, five became six.
But with the main players now firmly established in the evening schedules, it was difficult for newer soaps to find their feet. After ITV lost the rights to broadcast Home And Away in 2000, they wanted to fill the gap it left behind. So in 2001, it launched not one but two early evening soaps - a revived version of Crossroads and a new, offbeat serial called Night And Day. However, these did not last beyond around 18 months. A 2008 attempt at a coastal soap, Echo Beach, also stalled. In the mid-2010s, there was talk of a new daytime soap opera on ITV which would have been a British-Canadian co-production, and even gossip about a dayime Emmerdale spin-off. However, this all ultimately came to nothing. When BBC One lost the rights to Melbourne-set serial drama Neighbours (1985-2022) to Channel 5 in 2008, they helped Australian network Channel 10 co-fund and co-produce a new serial, Out Of The Blue. However this was a ratings flop also; in Britain it was soon moved to BBC Two before being dropped altogether, and in Australia the rest of the run was shown in a graveyard slot. It was becoming clear in the 2000s that the age of new soap operas was ostensibly over.
But there are a few success stories post-1980s. Channel 4 took it slow with youth-oriented serial Hollyoaks (1995- ), which initially only aired once a week. This gradually went up to two, then three, and ultimately the now very familiar five episodes a week. Medical drama Holby City (1999-2022) - a midweek spin-off of the much older Casualty (1986- ) - proved to be a hit. However the later police spin-off Holby Blue was a ratings disaster. Ireland's gritty police procedural Red Rock (2015-2020) was initially a ratings winner in the country, and later in Britain. However constant schedule changes, the show disappearing for months on end without explanation, the loss of most of the regular cast over time, and the rebranding of Channel 3 in Ireland from TV3 to Virgin Media One, were all problems that ultimatley became insurmountable for Red Rock, and contributed to its demise.
In Britain, the last truly successful nationwide soap opera to launch is the aforementioned Doctors, which began in 2000, and is the only soap opera ever made to randomly start on a Sunday! Also a hit is River City, but this is only shown in Scotland. Whether or not there will ever again be a hit new soap opera remains to be seen. The genre in the United Kingdom is consolidating rather than developing, and as of March 2022 faces an unprecedented new challenge - two prime time serial dramas, EastEnders and Emmerdale, going head-to-head with each other four nights a week at 19:30, the first time two British soaps have had to compete in the same timeslot on rival channels in prime time. There could be three outcomes to this: one is that the audience diverge so that, in all likelihood, an older audience tunes into EastEnders whilst a younger one to Emmerdale. A pragmatic view might be that they attract different audiences anyway and so neither will be adversely affected; early indications show little change in ratings between the two despite the clashing. A bleaker scenario is that this competition could see one of the two long-running stalwarts fall completely. And the soap universe would shrink further still!
On Pure Drama though, be under no illusion - we LOVE soap operas! And this board is the place to be when it comes to them. Discussion, video clips and still images - whatever it is you want to share about soaps, feel free to do so here. The Pure Soap board is split into three categories. The most popular soaps in the world have sub-boards on the Pure Soap board itself. Defunct Soaps is a board to discuss serials which no longer air. Foreign Soaps consists of current, non-English language soaps broadcast in Europe (excluding Ireland). Finally, Other Soaps is a board for significant but less popular serials; this consists of soaps which have a modest but loyal audience, such as Casualty and Doctors, or are generally only popular in their country of origin, such as Fair City and Pobol y Cwm. Feel free to add threads of any soap you want to discuss that is otherwise not included, and if they become popular they may be promoted to board status at some stage. Likewise, unpopular boards may be demoted to threads over time.
Finally, if you have any questions or queries about Pure Soap, which don't directly relate to the shows themselves (or are too vague to be posted about on a sub-board), please use this thread to post your comments, which either I or other forum members will be more than happy to help with!