From Coronation Street to EastEnders, soap operas once dominated British TV. Now, beset by disgraced stars and plummeting ratings, they are struggling to remain relevant
There was a weird interregnum on Coronation Street in 1984. Bernard Youens, the actor who had played Stan Ogden for three decades, died. But the character he played hadn't yet been written out. So Stan carried on regardless, unseen but living, while millions of the show's fans who had read Youens' obituaries knew the truth: the big lug was on borrowed time.
But how and when would the boozy, workshy, adorable slob who had spent 30 years twice a week in millions of British living rooms go? For several episodes his wife Hilda said Stan was sick in bed upstairs at no 13. How we, on the other end of the cathode ray tube, rolled our eyes.
And then, one night in November, Hilda revealed to the nation that her husband had died in his sleep. Alone in her living room, she took her husband's glasses from their case and unfolded them one last time. How we, dragged from mere eye-rolling cynicism into the dark heart of crying-time TV, sobbed.
Perhaps the strange death of Stan Ogden is a metaphor for the British soap opera 2013. We are in a similarly weird interregnum, knowing that Coronation Street, EastEnders, Hollyoaks, Emmerdale and even the longest-running soap in broadcast history, The Archers, are no longer fit for purpose and are waiting for the how and when they get rubbed out.
TV history is littered with the corpses of terminated soaps – Crossroads, Eldorado, Triangle (how could a soap on a North Sea ferry not work?), Family Affairs and Brookside. Now, the whole genre seems spent. Traditional soaps' ratings are calamitously down: in 2010, Corrie could still pull an audience of more than 14 million. Today, it struggles to achieve half that. EastEnders, meanwhile, has been repeatedly beaten in the ratings by Emmerdale – a shocking fact to those used to EastEnders and Corrie perennially vying for the crown of soapland. The most talked about storylines involve the actors rather than the characters they play: Coronation Street's William Roache, who faces charges of rape, and Michael Le Vell , who has been acquitted of rape charges, not to mention Chris Fountain's outing as a misogynist amateur rapper on YouTube.
If Danny Dyer being roped in to become landlord of the Queen Vic is the solution, then British soap's problems are worse than we thought.
Soaps are like printed newspapers or the British monarchy – the only question is when they will do the equivalent of stopping the presses or making the last royal hanger-on live without taxpayer subsidy in a council flat.
Twenty-five years ago, soap operas were delivery systems for melodrama, cliffhangers, women's issues, comedy and social critique, and, best of all, white-knuckle rides on the narrative express. Now? "Soaps are now just seen as something to fill the schedules," says Phil Redmond, the TV producer who brought us Brookside and Hollyoaks. "There's been a loss of vision."
In the early 80s, the most popular soaps – Crossroads and Coronation Street – lost the plot: they had nothing to say about a Britain mired in Thatcher's austerity years. Then, Brookside (1982-2003), set in a Liverpool suburb, and later EastEnders (1985-present), set in a fictionalised east London, gave the British soap a new lease of life by returning the genre to its manifest destiny: right down to the specially built cul-de-sac in suburban Merseyside and the faux-East End Albert Square in Hertfordshire, the new soaps were simulacra that told us about how we really lived. Brookside was, at the time, especially radical since it junked that staple notion of the British soap, that the action must revolve around the local pub. Instead, it depicted an all-too-recognisable, fragmented owner-occupying non-society of the kind for which the then prime minister proselytised.
"With Brookie, we were focusing on the deconstruction of society through the intervention of technology," says Redmond. "Now we're witnessing the deconstruction of society through junk banking – it's just the soaps have nothing to say about it. It's frustrating – there's so much to say about issues like ageing, the influx of different cultures, class tensions. They're losing their souls and, inevitably, ratings."
Of course, soaps have hardly been popular because they have their finger on the pulse of the nation. In their heyday, they were immersive experiences that took their own sweet time developing stories and characters, and thereby made themselves convincing and seductive to mass audiences. "People witter on about The Wire and Mad Men," says soap opera specialist Professor Christine Geraghty of the University of Glasgow. "It drives me mad. British soaps were doing those complicated multi-layered narratives long before HBO was invented. Soaps used to have the confidence to let very little happen sometimes."
Soaps, then, were like Greek drama. What was important was not splashy plot twists – be it car crash, baby swap, lesbian snog or corpse under the patio – but how characters processed such incidents through the medium of gossip. "They don't have the confidence to do that now," says Geraghty. "There's a relentless intensity of plotting that makes soaps often seem daft." Why are they doing that? "Because the big stories capture the intermittent viewer, often at the expense of the regular viewer. The logic is that the more stories you have and the bigger they are, the better you compete with other formats. But that relentlessness eats up people and stories in an effort to counteract what's going on elsewhere in TV. The risk is they look soulless and cynical. It's also a vexed question as to whether those big stories help ratings in the long run."
But what is going on elsewhere in TV? One key development is the rise of reality TV. When Big Brother was launched on Channel 4 in 2000, it may have been conceived as a niche sociological experiment tracking what happened when a group of strangers were locked in a house in Hertfordshire; but it became the defining genre of our age, plundered and bastardised, endlessly mutating until nothing real, nothing but fatuous incident is tolerable. Faced with this mutant telly genre masquerading as reality, soaps have become unreal just when we needed them to be otherwise. In particular, that most perverse mutation in the genre, the scripted reality show, has been aped by the worst soaps. In a word: Hollyoaks has become Geordie Shore and The Only Way Is Essex – as unreal as its purported reality show counterparts.
Traditional soaps now look like British Leyland in the 70s faced with the looming German automobile invasion. Out-thought, outperformed and underdone. None of this would matter much so long as our existing soaps were running smoothly. But they are not. The leading ones are in crisis at the very moment they need to be at the top of their game.
That failure of nerve is evident on EastEnders, whose last executive producer has quit after only 16 months in the post. Yes, Lorraine Newman won Baftas for the show during her oddly brief tenure but she also presided over one of the soap's most disastrous ratings debacles since its inception. Newman wouldn't speak to the Guardian, but one ex-EastEnders producer who declined to be named said: "The pressures on writers to deliver big stories and on producers to deliver ratings are more intense and more unreasonable than ever. No wonder she went. It's a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. A lot of people are now hoping that her replacement [Dominic Treadwell-Collins, a former story producer who left EastEnders three years ago] can steady the ship – whatever that means."
Where did EastEnders go wrong? "If you're asking me if there was a story or a character that tipped EastEnders over from being sensible to silly, I don't think I could give you an answer. But certainly some characters have become more pantomimey than we would have stooped to make them in the early days. Kat and Alfie, for instance, have become more lurid and their stories more unconvincing to my mind."
EastEnders was once watched by more than half of the British population. Yes, you say, but 1986 had a very different telly ecology, compared with that of today. There were only four channels then. But today's soaps are no longer nationally unifying entertainments. Instead they are niche formats competing against each other for dwindling demographics.
Soaps ruled during the era of terrestrial channels, not the audience-fractured, multi-channel, on-demand, increasingly net-based viewing milieu we have had since the millennium. But here is the corollary of that argument: once it would have mattered if soaps died. They were so popular that what happened in Albert Square or Brookside Close could provoke questions in parliament; today they are so marginal to British TV and national life that it is difficult to imagine that happening again.
But if things are bad in Walford, they are worse in Weatherfield. While EastEnders is slowly fading into irrelevance, Coronation Street is raging against the dying of its light. The latter's main problem is that its best narratives aren't the ones that spool from scriptwriters' laptops but the ones howled in caps-lock hysteria from the red tops. Stars have been caught tweeting about useless beauty products given to them by a bogus company. Producers have been mired in bizarre product placement rows. Morale is reportedly low on set. In such promisingly dismal circumstances, the Daily Mail dispatched a journalist to find that something was rotten in the state of Weatherfield. "Fans are ditching the soap in their millions," Christopher Stevens duly reported. "Almost half its audience has switched off in the past three years."
Significantly, Coronation Street was born in 1960 in the aftermath of the kitchen-sink revolution in British drama and during the rise of British cinema's social realist new wave. "That's true," says Geraghty, "but even when Coronation Street was launched, it was, for all its claims to realism, self-consciously recreating a Britain that was on its way out – where the social hub was the pub, for instance." Reality on British soaps has to some extent always been a fantasy.
By the mid-1980s, the British soap tackled social issues – racism, sexism, industrial collapse, class politics, HIV, violence against women, child abuse, cot death, Down's syndrome – in ways scarcely conceivable across the Atlantic.
But not for long. I remember one of Brookside's leading writers, Jimmy McGovern, telling me in 1996 how the problem for the show began when, as he put it, "inflation set in". More episodes per week, more focus on ratings, more demand for high-octane and frequently implausible storylines.
If one moment demonstrates how the British soap sold its soul for ratings, it is the 1993 Christmas special of Emmerdale. In this episode a plane crashed into Beckindale, previously a place of safely grazing sheep and whiskery Yorkshiremen supping pints.
What happened to social and political relevance? Nowadays, when a British soap tackles a social issue, more often than not it does so ineptly. Take the recent racism storyline in Coronation Street. During a darts game at the Rovers, a white character, firefighter Paul Kershaw (Tony Hirst) said: "Play the white man!" to Steve McDonald (Simon Gregson), at the very moment a black character, cabbie Lloyd Mullaney (Craig Charles) came into the pub.
Lloyd called Paul a racist, most of the overwhelmingly white pub's customers agreed, but Paul refused to apologise, saying the remark was not a slur. The story went on for – customary eye roll – ages before Paul eventually apologised properly. "I think it's one of those modern stories that will get everyone talking," said producer Stuart Blackburn at the time. It did, but not as Blackburn intended: it got many of us wondering if Corrie really had a handle on what racism is and, more importantly, despair over its writers' abililty to dramatise the issue.
Remaining hardcore fans doubtless hope traditional soaps are not on the way out. But they are a conservative bunch. Typical of the resistance to change is the furore over ex-EastEnders producer John Yorke's stewardship of The Archers. The Radio 4 drama is now being attacked for losing its rustic soul à la Emmerdale.
It is clear that traditional soap operas must reinvent themselves. But how? "The mass soap is over," says Redmond. "You'll never get a family to sit together and watch the same thing. That said, you might get the parents watching the flat screen, the kids on their tablets , and the teenagers watching on their phones."
"Broadcasters aren't thinking creatively," says Redmond. "They should forget about mass-audience soaps and have an over-55 soap. That's where the money and viewers are."
So, is the future for soaps really so bleak? "They're not what they were but I don't think soaps will wither away," says Geraghty. But if they did, would it matter? "Of course it would! They have traditionally been seedbeds for talent – for the great writers, directors and actors of tomorrow. Without soaps a great deal of the best of British TV simply wouldn't exist, so we need to nurture them." Whether they will be remains to be seen.
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