Tough choices to be made to the stop the soap bubble bursting?

In a recent article in the Guardian (Soap operas: has the bubble burst? http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/oct/01/soap-operas-has-the-bubble-burst) Stuart Jeffries writes that the current UK soap operas are ‘no longer fit for purpose’ and that the ‘whole genre seems spent’. While it is clearly true that all is not well in the world of soap, I don’t agree that the end of soap is nigh.

Why? Because people will always crave stories. Telling stories and listening to stories is a fundamental human activity which makes us who we are. And soap stories do a particular thing that other TV dramas don’t: they tell stories about characters we recognise in places we recognise – people like us – who face tough choices and often do the wrong thing. By doing this, they let us experience what it would be like to do what we hope we wouldn’t do in our own lives.

This isn’t escapism. Escapism is watching Mad Men, The Wire or even Made in Chelsea. After all, not many of us are Madison Avenue advertising executives, Baltimore drug dealers or Chelsea airheads. Watching those lives unfold on screen takes us out of ourselves, lets us experience lives we will never live (though for the record, I’d rather be a Baltimore drug dealer than be made in Chelsea).

So, soaps are serving a different audience than other dramas. And for all the fragmenting of TV audiences, they’re still surprisingly popular. Coronation Street regularly gets around 8 million people tuning in (it was a little misleading for the Guardian article to state that Corrie’s numbers had dropped from 14 million in 2010 to half that now as that figure was for the live 50th anniversary episode and so wasn’t indicative of the usual ratings). Granted, EastEnders isn’t doing as well as it was a few years ago but hopefully the new executive producer, Dominic Treadwell Collins (who was the show’s Story Producer between 2007 and 2010) will be able to turn its fortunes around.

But turning around any soap production is going to mean making changes. There are some tough choices to be made.

In the article, Christine Geraghty of Glasgow University says that it is the ‘relentless intensity of plotting that makes soaps often seem daft’ and I would agree with her. It’s always been true that some soap stories have to be ‘big’ to (hopefully) grab a large audience but I think the problem now lies with the sheer amount of stories needed by the genre. Put simply; the more episodes a week you produce, the more stories you need, the less time you have to work on them.

Perhaps the solution might be to think the unthinkable and have fewer episodes each week. Doesn’t anyone else yearn for having just two half-hour weekly episodes of their favourite soap to watch? And if there were fewer episodes, it would mean the producers and the story teams would have more time to spend on developing the stories and the characters and where they were heading. Is overseeing four or five episodes a week, all year round, too much for any one executive producer to handle, no matter how skilled and experienced they are? Perhaps this is why we’ve seen so many high-profile departures in recent years. Would downsizing the productions lead to a position where more authorship could be taken by the person in overall control of a show – just like it is in the best TV dramas?

And while we’re thinking radically, what about considering the schedules? Do the major soaps necessarily need to be prime-time shows? If that’s just too radical, try this: do all episodes of the major soaps need to be prime-time?

The growth of digital technology means the way we watch television is changing; both how we watch it (e.g. via the internet) and when we watch it (e.g. using an on-demand service like the BBC iPlayer). In the Guardian piece, Phil Redmond talks about how families are less likely to sit together and watch the same show, but that ‘you might get the parents watching the flat screen, the kids on their tablets, and the teenagers watching on their phones.’ In that case, do we need a nightly fix of soap between 7pm and 9pm? What if some or all the episodes were transmitted in a daytime slot? Or exclusively online?

BBC One’s Doctors wasn’t mentioned in Stuart Jeffries’ article (I’d count it as a medical soap) but it’s a show that’s been doing well since it began in 2000. I watch regularly in the 1.45pm slot, but if I miss it then, I’ll watch it on the iPlayer later in the day or maybe later in the week. This is how we watch TV now.

And if a soap could be flexible in the schedule, could it be flexible in its format? Do all episodes have to fill the half-hour slot? Don’t get me wrong, I think 30-minutes is a great space to tell around three typical soap stories in, but what if I wanted to tell one story over 20-minutes? Or 15-minutes? If the big soaps weren’t anchored so rigidly in prime-time, they could be free to play with the storytelling and the format of individual episodes.

Obviously EastEnders did something like this with E20, but that was clearly targeted at a young audience. More and more it is the family (and friends) audience who will be watching in this new alone-but-together way; that is, we might be watching alone but we share the experience together via social media, either while we’re watching (e.g. via Twitter) or later (e.g. via Facebook).

And that connectedness we have now through social media is perhaps the major reason why I believe the big soaps won’t burst and disappear. If the fans of Brookside had had Facebook and Twitter at their disposal when the show was about to be axed in 2003, you can bet that the inevitable online campaign would have kept it on air. Imagine what a kind of campaign would ensue if there were whispers of axing EastEnders, Coronation Street or Emmerdale?

So the soaps won’t die, the major ones at least, but they will have to change. And if that’s going to happen, it’s up to the producers and the channel bosses to face the tough choices and make some difficult decisions – just like the characters in the soaps they make.

RIVER CITY, 21 May 2013 – soap at its best. Just don’t call it soap

Why do we watch soaps? I guess one of the reasons is they reflect our lives while turning the dial up a notch or two. Soap stories play out in the domestic realm, in the houses, flats, streets and squares that we all recognise, but they play out in a big way, a world apart from our own humdrum lives (hopefully).

And like any good story, a good soap story will involve characters who are faced with dilemmas, tough choices that we would struggle with if we were faced with them ourselves. Soaps allow us to vicariously experience the consequences of making the wrong choices in life.

Like the decision to sleep with somebody else when you’re married. This decision, and the terrible consequences it has for all involved, was the focus of last week’s episode of the BBC One Scotland drama, River City.

The A-story of the episode sees Bob Adams (played by Stephen Purdon) coming to understand that his wife, Stella (Keira Lucchesi), has not only slept with their friend, Stevie (Paul-James Corrigan), but that the pair are also in love. As anyone who follows the show knows, poor Bob doesn’t have much luck with women (an understatement if there ever was one), so while this latest tragedy in his love-life might not come as a huge surprise, it has to endear the lovable loser to the viewers’ hearts just that little bit more.

What makes the deception even more tragic is that Bob knows his lack of attention towards Stella caused her to stray into Stevie’s arms. Bob’s been in a bad place recently and his depression has seen him withdraw from the world and from his wife. Add to this that the depression was triggered by the death of his best friend and awfulness of the situation is only compounded.

Stephen Purdon plays Bob Adams

River City, BBC One Scotland, Tuesday 21/5/13, 8pm

This really is drama at its best; layered, emotionally engaging and full of grey areas. It is a story that we can easily relate to but one that we would hope not to have to go through ourselves.

Which can also be said of the B-story of the episode, which concerned two sisters and the impact on their lives of their father’s worsening dementia.

Gina (Libby McArthur) and Eileen (Deirdre Davis), together with their dad, Malcolm (Johnny Beattie), have been at the heart of River City since the very first episode in 2002. To see the sisters struggling to cope with Malcolm’s illness while trying to maintain their own relationships is heartbreaking – and again, great drama.

Add to this a C- story (closely tied-in with the A-story) that has matriarch Scarlett Mullen (Sally Howitt) struggling not to interfere with her beloved son Bob’s marriage crisis and writer Viv Adam gives us all the ingredients of a classic soap episode.

Only River City isn’t a soap, it’s a one-hour continuing drama. The decision was made in 2007 to combine what used to be two half-hour episodes, aired twice a week, into a single one-hour episode transmitted on a Tuesday evening, and since then River City hasn’t officially been a soap. And it’s been clear that from this time, the show has struggled to find a new identity; genre dictates that a soap is 30-minutes long, 60-minute continuing dramas in the slot River City occupies are traditionally precinct dramas like Casualty or Holby. River City is none of these.

For me, and I suspect that for many of the fans of the show who have watched from the beginning, the struggle is a false one – when I watch River City, I am watching a soap. It might be one-hour long, it might be on only one evening a week (though repeated at the weekend), but it is a soap. Soap is in the DNA of the show.

What’s really important isn’t how River City is seen, but it’s that people get to see it. It always grated with me when watching the British Soap Awards (last shown on ITV on Sunday 19 May) that River City was never included, even when it was 30-minutes long, as it’s only shown on BBC One Scotland.

Until it’s aired on network BBC, the real tragedy is that viewers in the rest of the UK won’t be able to enjoy the dramatic goings-on among the Shieldinch community. Because when it is at its best, River City is as good as, even better than, any of the soaps that won awards last Sunday. Just don’t call it soap.