Don’t Forget Your Friends - in soap, family matters, but it’s good to have friends too

The arrival of new families has been in the soap-related news recently, first with the appearance of the extended Carter family in EastEnders, then with the announcement that Coronation Street is soon to get its first Muslim family in the show’s history.

Traditionally, family has always been at the heart of soap stories (and a lot of other TV drama too – the wonderful Game of Thrones is all about rival families, albeit on a larger scale and with fancier costumes than you’ll find in most soaps) and it’s not difficult to understand why; familial relationships provide the potential for conflict that many other relationships don’t as they are build on the most powerful bonds.

And conflict is the lifeblood of drama; it fuels the engine that drives drama. Hence the reason for the central role of families and family life in soap opera set-ups and stories.

But as we all know, it’s good to have friends. And this is as much true in drama as it is in life. TV soap writers and producers have understood this from the earliest days of the genre: think of Ena Sharples gossiping with Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst in the snug of the Rovers Return in only the second episode of Coronation Street.

For a start, where do you go when you need to talk to someone about the problems you’re having with your family (or your lover, or your enemy)? You go to a friend. Everybody needs a trusted confidant, someone to spill your deep, dark thoughts and feelings to, and soap characters are no different.

This can actually be pretty handy if you’re a soap writer and need to let the audience in on a troubled character’s emotional turmoil; you could have them muttering to themselves about the desire to murder a treacherous sibling or turning to camera to do the same, but having them tell a friend is ultimately more believable and satisfactory.

Another thing a focus on friendship offers is relief from the very conflict that’s needed to drive stories. It’s good to be able to pull back from the problems, arguments and strife and experience a little lightness, warmth and humour. That’s why it’s healthy to spend time in Streetcars with Lloyd, Steve and Eileen, now we’re fretting about Roy’s whereabouts, just like it was good to hang out with Minty and Garry in the Arches when there was a lot of yelling going on in the Queen Vic.

So friends can offer the promise of positivity amid the darkness of a dramatic life; they can back you up in the midst of family failings, like Fatboy being there for Tamwar in EastEnders just now (or Bronn being there for Tyrion in Game of Thrones for that matter) and they can also help save you from yourself, as Bob Adams did with his hapless pal Deek Henderson in one my episodes of BBC One Scotland’s River City, when Deek spiralled out of control and into a dark place after the death of his mother.

But because of the very fact that characters do open up to their friends and trust them with their innermost secrets, this can lead to the possibility of that trust being broken. Which is great for creating dramatic tension: we might need to unburden ourselves to a pal but what might they do with those dark secrets in the future? Can we trust them? Will they betray us?

And what if the confidant learns something they didn’t want to hear, that a friend has done something illegal perhaps? The moral dilemma that this kind of situation generates is often the thing that really grabs an audience and pulls them into the drama; we lean forward in our seats as we experience the character’s emotional and ethical struggle for ourselves.

Perhaps one of the finest examples of this kind of moral struggle happened when a much-loved soap character was asked to do something illegal and against her every belief and principle for her closest friend. We surely all remember the trauma experienced by Dot when Ethel, suffering from cancer, asked her to assist in her death. This was a friendship so important, so solidly build on love and trust, that Dot’s steadfast religious beliefs had to buckle under the strain of the request. And it made great viewing.

So it’s clear that significant friendships, like family relationships, are vital in drama, especially soap.

It’s great that the Carter family have been such a successful addition to EastEnders; I just hope that we see each of them develop strong bonds outside of the family over the coming months. This has already started to an extent, with Johnny’s budding friendship with Whitney (now all that initial confusion has been dealt with!) and the tentative bond developing between Linda and Sharon – something that’s bound to bring them as much strife as joy.

As the rest of Kal Nazir’s family hasn’t appeared yet, it’s too early to say how the Coronation Street story team will handle their friendships. But, for me, it’s a good sign that the introduction of this new family has started not with them arriving en masse, but with Kal and his growing bond with Dev. But who knows where this new friendship will take the pair, especially as they have begun to mix it with business? We can only keep watching to find out.

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.