The term “national soap opera” is almost exclusively used as a frame for one of the flimsiest justifications for the maintenance of the British Royal Family. We need them, we are assured, because they are the main characters of this ultimate structured reality show. This parade of adulterous paedophiles and alcoholics is a gripping if guilty pleasure.
Soap Opera is a strange label. Maybe unique as genre category in that it describes nothing of the subject. Film Noir at least conveys something of the iconically inky look and moral bankruptcy of tone. Domestic multi-protagonist dramas, soaps, are rarely either operatic or cleansing.
(As I’m sure you know) The term originates for the adverts that originally funded production. Despite this tangential vagueness, it sticks because it defines, belittles and forgives its target audience. These aren’t “car operas” or “clothes operas” or “expensive Japanese kitchen knife operas”. Soaps are soaps because they helped sell soap powder to the 1930’s housewives listening from home. Opera primarily just means “work” but it’s hard not to sense the derision… Forgive the ladies their little drama, this is what passes for high art when you’re elbow deep in household chores. Frothy and ephemeral, these are bubbles.
Yet soaps have sticking power. Coronation Street and The Archers have both broadcast more than five thousand hours of story; a volume of active airtime even the monarchy would struggle to compete with, even counting every minute of the live stream of the Queen still being dead. Compare this to minnows like Star Wars (150 hours including all TV spin offs) Game of Thrones (65 hrs) Harry Potter (17hrs) and Shakespeare (100hrs) and you have to admit that in the bare terms of holding an audience’s attention even Emmerdale (451 hours) creates a compulsion most writers could never dream of capturing.
The strength of the format lies in a fundamental flexibility. Much as how the Mogul Empire drew strength from a willingness to allow religious and cultural diversity to persist, so a soap opera is able to outlive other stories through an ability to let the audience allow it to be totally fucking shit. Which isn’t to say that all soaps are always bad, or that soaps don’t contain incredible writing, they do. The miracle is that moments of real pathos and power are able to sit comfortably alongside work that even everyone involved in making seems visibly aware is ridiculous. A heartbreaking study of the complexity of spousal abuse? Sure. A meandering farce about a lost toy? Oh yeah, why not. Both at the same time? But of course… Anorexia, impotence, a failed MOT, unlikely amnesia, tough exams and terminal cancer, soaps survive by bending to breaking point the Aristotelean ideal of dramatic unity.
One perspective of a story is that it is a narrative of events that creates an understanding, or emotion. To achieve this you need clarity. Most great writing advice boils down to ways of stripping out all the things that aren’t part of that fundamental feeling you want to generate in your audience. Thematic unity means that the essence of your story (love hurts, hope will free you, don’t trust white people) has to be everywhere. The most powerful stories don’t just happen to any person, they happen to the character who best expresses the core of the story. Neither do they happen anywhere, the best stories use setting and place to embody something of their theme.
Done badly this feels programmatic, didactic, forced. Life is random and a story that doesn’t feel random doesn’t feel real. At the same time, a story isn’t life and a story that is random becomes confusing and frustrating. So, smart writers bring in elements that feel random and really smart writers bring in elements that feel random but aren’t. However whilst most stories are held together by a controlling idea, a unity of theme, soap operas are held together merely by unity of geography. Anyone who lives in Albert Square is in EastEnders. It’s messy and incoherent but therein lies the flexibility that keeps it going.
Nations, like soap operas, are stories held together by nothing but geography and, like soap operas, this is both their strength and their weakness. As a political boundary, as an administrative unit, geography is essential. It is far less useful as a source of identity.
As John Lennon said, a working class hero is something to be. Religion, gender, sexual preference, race, class, the whole grumble bag of intersectionality - these are stories of identity that all come with a superior sense of unity. To be Catholic means more than being Scottish. To be black means more than being British. I don’t mean that these identities are better or more important to the individual, just that they are easier to define, they are clearer, smaller stories. Even the most open and fluid understanding of gender creates an identity far more sharply defined than that of being American.
This is the irony of “nationalism” which in most cases is an attempt to impose a narrow intersectional narrative onto a wide geographical people. Being white, christian and straight are all beautiful things to be, until you start imagining they are the only stories open to people who live round here. There’s a powerful clarity to defining your identity through narrow bonds of sameness. Being part of an amazing novel about women is a more satisfying story than being yet another character in the badly written soap of a small island. Yet, though this narrow story is easier to write, it cannot contain all of anyone’s contradictions. Telling the small story of identity inevitably denies you the fullest understanding of your own randomness.
This sort of “nationalism”, which afflicts anyone who paints their self portrait only in primary colours, tends to act as if protecting something in danger of being lost. Yet for true longevity it is the weakness of definition that is strength. Soaps get cancelled when they stagnate; same way empires crumble and nations decline when they too closely bind their geography to some smaller sense of self.
What’s that you say? What happens when the majority of our social interactions occur in spaces disconnected from our direct physical reality? What will happen to our flexible understanding of our community when we increasingly live within tightly defined virtual bubbles? I stare at my screen as you read these words and somehow we stare directly into each other’s eyes to be continued ROLL THEME SONG AND END CREDITS.
I can’t write about soap operas without sharing my favourite section of The Day Today, also notable for the way Patrick Marber invents Tom Hardy.
My screenwriting course returns in the autumn with an all new level 2 for anyone with a completed screenplay and questions. Before then I’m back with three stand-alone workshops where I’ll take a magnifying glass to each of the essential building blocks of your film or tv script. First up…
Does your film or tv script turn to mush in the middle? Or are you getting the note that the ending doesn’t work (a sure sign that actually your middle is all wrong)? Do you even know what the middle of a story should do? Join Ben Blaine for a closer look at the hardest and most overlooked part of any story.
All for only £31. For more information and booking click here.