"Power, sex. greed and money". Not another Sun story about an indiscreet bishop, but the necessary ingredients of a successful American soap opera — according to Leonard Katzman. a producer of Dallas. But for a low-temperature wash, many people prefer the more mundane soaps like Coronation Street. Harry Kershaw, one of its writers and producers, has attributed the programme's success to the fact that "it is a folk opera in praise of, for want of a better phrase, the ordinary people of Britain".
Do you follow a soap opera? Millions do. In California ABC TV broadcasts continuous soap opera from 11am to 3pm every day, while the daily output of Americas three network channels is 11 hours of soap with an average audience of about 35,000,000. In Britain, East Enders glues 23,000.000 viewers to BBC 1 twice a week. Coronation Street enjoys about 10,000,000 visitors and Brookside corners a respectable 7,000,000.
The label "soap opera" was first attached to dramatic sagas broadcast by American radio in the 1930s. Drama of this sort was found to be the cheapest way of filling in the gaps between the commercials for detergents which sponsored the radio shows. Many radio soaps are still very popular, including The Archers, which has a weekly audience of about 3,000,000. Some soap addicts can become a little over-credulous and write letters to the drama characters as if they were real people:
Dear Angie,There's no doubt in my mind now what you should do about Den. Leave him and The Queen Vic and start a new life for yourself. When I left my Terry six years ago . . .
Every week, the television studios receive many letters of love, hate, advice and enquiry relating to people who do not exist. The deluded letter-writers may number only a few but there are undoubtedly millions of people who allow the characters and events of the soaps to become a part of their mental social circles. Whatever you think about soap operas, they are a reasonably influential medium in our society and for that reason, deserving of comment by socialists.
There are many television programmes in this category: Sons and Daughters, Albion Market, Emmerdale Farm, A Country Practice, The Young Doctors, Crossroads and so forth. They are a massively popular form of entertainment — mass commodities, as widely consumed as coke or crisps. But unlike coke or crisps soap operas affect us socially. They promote certain ideas as being worthy of our approval and certain ideas are dealt with in ways which subtly invite disapproval. Someone once described much of what is broadcast on television as "chewing gum for the eyes '. Following soap operas in a relatively uncritical frame of mind over a number of years by way of relaxation will fortify certain popular prejudices about the world. The boundaries of the television fantasies have recently been extended into an accompanying literature. There are over a dozen magazines in America devoted to providing gossip, interviews and story-updates connected with the TV soaps. Soap Opera Digest, the market leader in the USA has a readership of over 4.000.000. In Britain the tabloid press has widened its coverage of the private lives of the famous soap actors and actresses, sometimes going to extraordinary reaches of triviality to dredge up a story. Take as one example the front page of the Daily Star earlier this year — a colour photograph of East Enders Dirty Den (actor Leslie Grantham) meeting Coronation Street's Ken Barlow (actor Bill Roache). There was no real story of any consequence other than the fact that they met. One newspaper editor has suggested that.
Soap operas are as much a part of the national fabric as Sunday Lunch Our readers spend a lot of time watching TV (the national average is about 20 hours per week) and we reflect their interests; part of the success of East Enders comes from the very real characters and very real situations which our readers identify with. (Philip Walker, Deputy Editor, Daily Mirror)
Whether they deal with the pressures of life in a humdrum working-class community or the extravagant affairs of tycoon terrain, the purpose of the soaps is to portray what some drama critics have called a "slice of life". Before making comment on the social effect of these programmes a few observations should be made about life outside of the box. Slices of what, in other words, do the dramas seek to depict?
The society we inhabit — all over the world — is completely dominated by the commercial system, the profit system. It is a class-divided society in which a very small minority of women and men, between them, own and control all of the world's resources. The majority of us own nothing to speak of except our ability to work. We therefore need to sell ourselves to an employer (a company, local government, the state) in order to earn a living. The minority are able to live lives of material luxury from unearned incomes through rent, interest and dividends. It is a society divided between those who produce all of the wealth and possess nothing and those who produce nothing but possess virtually all of the wealth. A class of legalised robbers control society and it is at their behest that we are thrown out of work when it no longer becomes profitable to employ us. It is also at their behest that governments pitch young men and women into war to slaughter strangers when their economic interests — trade routes, key areas on the trade map and regions representing important markets — are threatened.
If you are in any doubt about the nature of the class society you live in consider the evidence. In 1986 government sources show that the top 10 per cent of the population own 54 per cent of all marketable wealth, and most of the rest is owned by a small percentage of people directly below the top 10 per cent. If you are working-class in Britain today, your child is twice as likely to die at birth than children from the wealth-owning class. Richard Wilkinson of the Centre for Medical Research (University of Sussex) has pointed to "a clear widening of differences in death rates and in life expectancy between social classes. Infant mortality figures which have been released, show that mortality rates are now increasing in lower social classes while they continue to fall among the more privileged". A recent report by the Office of Health Economics suggests that up to 1,000,000 people in Britain are suffering from mild mental handicap because of poverty rather than any detectable brain damage. (Mental Handicap: Partnership in the Community? 1986.)
Capitalism is a society of contradictions because its main aim is the quest for profit and not the satisfaction of human need. There are now more "surplus" bricks in Britain than ever before. There are about 400,000 construction workers who want to work but who are prevented from doing so because it is not profitable for them to be employed. Alongside this stagnant potential — enforced by the economic interests of the construction industry shareholders — there are an estimated 70,000 homeless families. Earlier this year, in July, there was a move in the London borough of Tower Hamlets to "solve" the acute housing problem there by dumping many of the 650 desperately needy families into a redundant passenger ship in the Thames and calling it a "floating home scheme" While this piece of imaginative inhumanity was being seriously discussed by the local authority pundits in their forlorn efforts to patch up the perennial problems of the profit system, there was no shortage of luxury homes (for the right sort of person) being advertised in the "quality" press. From Berwick to Belgravia, 40 acres . . . 50 acres . . . 2,000 acres, swimming pools, private cinemas, all you need is a tidy £500.000 and that will do nicely.
Under the commercial system, the majority of people experience life in a weak and strenuous fashion, like a person with nasal congestion trying to breathe fresh air. We live in an atmosphere of stifled creativity where the human potential for imaginative flair is choked and suppressed by routine and wage-slavery. Gazing at soap operas, slumped in an armchair with a cup of tea, is an example of the perverse pleasures we are encouraged to enjoy.
What socialists want the working class to do — what we are organised to achieve — is to abolish this social system and establish in its place a classless, moneyless society. A society without property relationships, employers or employees — a society where the sole principle of production will be "from each according to their ability, to each according to their self-determined needs". No legislative reform can make any significant difference to the basis of class-society. Socialism is the only thing worth acting for. Do soap operas help or hinder the revolution in social ideas which is necessary for the majority of people to establish socialism?
Soaps as soap boxes for socialism?
Most soap operas have no distinct social message, let alone a message for social change. Channel 4's Brookside though, does have a reputation for advocating changes to benefit workers, or at any rate it is supposed to expose aspects of capitalism which cause working-class misery. Jimmy McGovern, one of Brookside's scriptwriters has said.
I can have more effect as regards the bringing forward of an alternative society than Howard Brenton (the playwright) could ever have. It's a cosy programme but a powerful speech coming from a character you know and love can have a great impact — there is a potential for really subversive drama and it's exploited now and again. There will always be the argument that it's losing its balls, but that will go on forever — and that's good.(Guardian, 9 July 1986)
In my own view, Brookside usually produces a very high quality of drama but politically it clearly opposes socialist arguments. Several of the programme's scriptwriters are self-avowed supporters of the Labour Party and the continuing political implication of Brookside's script is that a Labour government replacing the Conservative one is something that workers should aim for. This message is not expressed to the viewer directly but by a subtle process of showing a selective series of workers' experiences, seen from a particular point of view and scripting the characters to form certain conclusions which their subsequent experiences demonstrate to be "right" or "wrong".
It should not be forgotten that the Labour Party stands for the continuation of capitalism. It professes to be able to preside over the profit system in a way which benefits employees and that is an impossible objective, like trying to run slavery in the interests of the slaves. Labour administrations have been in government for about half the time since 1966. During that time the basic wealth structure has remained almost exactly the same. Labour governments have developed the nuclear bomb, introduced the vicious Special Patrol Group (now re-labelled). broken strikes, frozen wages and sent workers to war to protect the economic interests of the bosses. Compared with the quality of medicine available in the opulent, high-tech private hospitals, the NHS only offers a second-rate first-aid service because of the financial constraints it suffers. This is not surprising when you consider that its purpose, as implied in the Beveridge Report which proposed the NHS, was to mend broken workers with as little cost and fuss as possible. Yet there is in Brookside a recurring innuendo that the NHS is essentially a good idea which just needs a bit more money.
It has also been argued that soaps about working-class life, especially programmes like Coronation Street, help foster a better class consciousness by allowing workers to see their own plight through other characters. at a distance on the box. With your own problems, the argument runs, you're so entangled that you can't really see the wood for the trees. Watching the struggles of wage-slavery as an armchair observer rather than a hassled participant is supposed to provide a sharper picture of what's wrong with society. The trouble is that there is absolutely no evidence to support this argument. How many socialists has 25 years of Coronation Street produced? There can be no substitute for direct and clear socialist argument. Before socialism can be established there will have to be a revolution in the ideas of the majority of people. Such a change of ideas will not come about if we rely on people reading between the lines of television drama and forming the uniform conclusion that wage-slavery must be abolished.
Then there are the American soaps. It has been said, perhaps not very seriously, that programmes like Dallas, Dynasty and The Colbys help fuel the class war by flaunting the ostentatious wealth of the privileged. By showing how the idle rich live, the programmes are alleged to be encouraging some viewers to see this social parasitism for what it is. Certainly, these serials don't skimp on the spectacular. Dallas (the most commercially lucrative programme in the world) is produced as five-star escapism. Chic fashion, lavish decor, sumptuous food and drink. All this interwoven with the torrid affairs of the tycoons, as active with their bed sheets as their balance sheets as they glide through the pleasures of their latest company merger.
We are invited to sit in poverty and peer at their prosperity. A prosperity which has been produced by us, not them. It's all a bit twisted when you think about it. Most avid viewers when asked for their opinion about this sort of programme reply along the lines of saying it’s exciting to watch and it would be nice to' have that sort of money. Nothing more or less than that. To have no ambition beyond getting vicarious pleasure from watching your exploiters revel in the wealth which we produce is to be played for a sucker.
It must be concluded that there is nothing to speak of in any of the soaps which does anything to promote the cause of socialism.
Soaps and brainwashing
Most soap operas, for most of the time, play a part in confirming social prejudices which support capitalism. Implicit in the drama, or as the critics say "written into the sub-text", are all sorts of notions about the world we live in. Many of these are quite wrong, would not stand up to scrutiny nor cope with the evidence of history, biology, anthropology or political economy. Yet tucked away securely in-between the lines they never have to come out to defend themselves. They satisfy themselves with being self-evident truths rather in the way monarchs who could think of no other justification for tyranny would claim to be ruling by divine right. What are these notions tacitly accepted by soap scripts? They include the ideas that people suffer from something horrible called "human nature" — an incurable condition which can only be softened or controlled but never removed. It means that people are innately anti-social and irrational. Other assumptions include the idea that the majority of people are not intelligent or responsible enough to exist socially without bosses, political leaders and police forces to keep them in order.
The television programmes reinforce the prejudices of the commercial system in two ways. One is by showing a picture of society in which particular institutions are presented, like day and night, as being a part of an inevitable scheme. So you get rich people and poor people, peace time and war time, palaces and prisons. You are encouraged to lament the worst horrors these contradictions cause but never to question the need for the institutions themselves. The other way that the programmes give a misleading picture of society is by what they don't show rather than what they do show. It is not just swearing (which is carefully edited out of the "realistic" soaps); neither the more gruesome parts of working class suffering nor the sheer bloody monotony of daily routine are presented on the programmes.
That the programmes create a sort of resignation in many people to the problems of class-society is not so surprising when you consider the essentially conservative outlook of some of the influential writers. Harry Kershaw has been involved in Coronation Street as a writer and producer since it began. Commenting on the Street's audience over the last 25 years he has said it
. . . may have become a little richer, a little healthier, and rather better informed but, basically, they still have the same worries and the same aspirations as they had 25 years ago. The car in the garage and the VCR next to the TV set may point to material change but the important factors of life remain the same.(Coronation Street 1960-1985)
He may be right in the sense that politically nothing has really changed for the working class over the past 25 years but programmes like Coronation Street do nothing to alter the route of the grim march hitherto going nowhere.
Finally, consider the view of Agnes Nixon, a prolific writer for American soap opera and the creator of three of them from scratch. Barry Norman asked her what she thought was good about soap operas. "In soap operas" she replied, "everyday is a new day just as in our lives and we can't predict what will happen in our lives from day to day. We sort of think and plan, fools that we are. and think that we can have some control over our destiny and we have none." (Barry Norman's Guide to American Soaps, 1986). No control over our destiny? It's all in the lap of the Gods? There's one life for your JRs and one for your Jack Duckworths and there's nothing we can do about it — fools that we are? Are we? Are you?
Gary Jay
Blogger's Note:
On a related note, the following year Steve Coleman wrote a similar type 'soap operas are "chewing gum for the eyes" ' piece in his Between the Lines column and it was subject to a sneering smear attack from the Sunday tabloid, the Sunday People. For more background on what actually happened, click on the link. Sadly, I didn't see this hit piece at the time . . . we were a News of the World and Sunday Mirror household.
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