TV Review: Camping it up (1994)

Brookside

TV Review from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the history of British TV comedy there has been little to match the comic effect of an outrageously effeminate male camping it up with the best of them. Exaggerated mannerisms and affectations have delighted audiences for decades. Many of the popular sitcoms have had a camp figure of fun somewhere - Frank Williams as the overblown vicar in Dad's Army, the twinkly German Lieutenant in ‘Allo 'Allo, Melvyn Hayes in It Ain't Half Hot Mum and John Inman in everything he’s ever been in are among those that spring readily to mind.

As far as mainstream British comedy has been concerned, campness is the “acceptable” face of an unmentionable homosexuality to the viewers and actors alike, so much so that such a great actor as Kenneth Williams — as camp as a row of tents to the end — could barely admit his own homosexuality to himself let alone anybody else, as his Diaries testify. Williams was clearly aware that camp humour, in his day at least, hinted at homosexuality but rarely endorsed it in any way, being content to remain at the level of innuendo and whimsy. In recent years one or two comics have broken this unspoken rule, most clearly Julian Clary whose full frontal assaults on the sexual sensibilities of the audience have won him an army of gay supporters, but most homosexual actors have kept with the approach developed in the music halls and adapted for TV and film.

The British film and TV industries have been the masters of camp humour. It can still be seen in Coronation Street occasionally, though with the welcome twist that it emerges most notably of all in the affectedness of the definitely heterosexual Racquel. barmaid at the Rovers. More straightforwardly. Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howard and Charles Hawtrey all became household names because of their ability to mince in front of the cameras. Did they do their sexuality a disservice? To the extent that they reinforced one of capitalist society’s most enduring stereotypes, probably, but those homosexuals in the acting profession and elsewhere who took an outwardly hostile stance towards homosexuality for the sake of their public image did a greater disservice still.

Innumerable actors have been paid to betray their own sexuality. A recent re-run on BBC2 of one of the classic Steptoe and Son episodes saw old Albert berating Harold for consorting with an antique dealer he considered to be "a bleeding poof’, in the true style of a working class Tory bigot. What many viewers wouldn’t have been aware of was that Wilfred Brambell, the actor who played Albert, was himself a homosexual convicted in the early 1960s under the British state's anti-gay sex laws. Watching this episode again, it was difficult to raise much of a laugh.

Prisoners all

The current cult TV show among the active gay lobby in Britain is the Australian import Prisoner Cell Block H, which is still showing on most ITV networks. This is strange, as Cell Block H is a programme transparently about Good and Evil, and the active lesbians have generally slotted into the latter category. The leading lesbian, a warder called Joan Ferguson, otherwise known as ‘The Freak", has a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp and the general manner of a woman whose role in life is to cause as much anguish for others as possible. Since Prisoner finished its turn in Australia several years ago. we can surmise that she can soon expect the call-up for EastEnders.

The only reason lesbians can find this show attractive, apart from its marvellously worked-out plots, is that it focuses on the lives of oppressed women. But with what is commonly considered to be a psychopathic "bull-dyke” as the chief character, it is not much of a blast forward for the gay counter-culture. In truth, for all her entertainment value, "The Freak" gives far more succour to the stereotypical image of homosexuals than Kenneth Williams or Larry Grayson ever did.

To find the most realistic treatment of homosexuality on TV we must turn, once again, to Channel Four's Brookside. Here, the unfolding of Beth Jordache’s lesbian sexuality has been tastefully and seriously portrayed, even if her lesbianism is a partial reaction against the sexual abuse meted out by her father. Most pleasing of all, the character of Beth is not stereotyped — on the contrary, she appears to be a normal intelligent teenager confronting bigotry and deceit, and winning support because of the strength of her arguments to live her life without the interference of those who want to impose their own norms on her.

Brookside could have gone for cheap laughs with this storyline, but it is to be congratulated on its approach. For the more the working class see their differences — of colour, gender and sexuality — eclipsed by their common bonds rather than highlighted through division, the easier it will be to achieve a society where stereotyping is remembered primarily as a feature of daft old films and peculiar Australian soap operas.

Dave Perrin

Lather and whitewash (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

"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?

Life outside the box

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.

Between the Lines: Heart of a Heartless World (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Heart of a Heartless World

Marx saw religion as "the sigh of the oppressed". As oppression imposes itself upon people in ever new ways, from the crushing weight of the credit card to the mind-numbing sterility of Madonna, the religious cries in the wilderness become more pathetic, more ridiculous, more religious than orthodox religion. Everyman (BBC1, 10.30pm, 4 August) offered a glimpse into the crazy world of the Kensington Temple, an evangelical church for born-again inmates. They screamed that Jesus is Alive in much the way that born-again Stalinists used to stand on street comers yelling that inflation had been abolished in Albania. The spectacle is highly amusing, until you think that these are potentially intelligent beings throwing themselves before the mercy of an all-powerful invisibility above the clouds.

The documentary showed how one woman had turned from stealing and drug-dealing to running aerobic classes for nifty Christians and reading the Bible with her boyfriend instead of sleeping with him. Clearly, for her the religious hallucinations offered by faith gave a better escape route than the buzz from cocaine. Members of the Kensington Temple wander round street markets offering salvation to wage slaves looking for cheap goods. Fortunately, most of the people approached by them in the documentary told them that whatever else they needed, they did not want to find the Lord. If Christianity is to have a future in places like Britain where most workers are not interested in falling to their knees as a strategy for escape, it is the loud-mouthed, emotionally-crippling, morally-obnoxious evangelicals who will carry the torch. By and large, though, the workers of the more developed capitalist countries will have little time for religion. Secular capitalism creates new gods, one of the oddest of whom is the man who died fourteen years ago as a drugged-exit, drunk-out obese clone who was too incapacitated to even wipe his own backside: he spent his last months wearing nappies, apparently.

The cult of Elvis is a minor form of secular worship in the USA, as it is in Britain. Viva Elvis (C4, 10pm, 12 August) was a journey to the outer reaches of human absurdity. There was a woman who has an Elvis museum in her house, including such exhibits as the Great One’s toenail clippings and a wart which he once had removed by a surgeon. Another crank had a shrine to Elvis in his living room which was constantly attended by himself and his son — Elvis, of course. An Elvis look-alike competition was shown in which grown men performed before screaming women who looked like recent escapees from the Kensington Temple. In Mexico a man called El Vez translates Elvis's profound lyrics into Spanish so that those hitherto stuck with the limited offerings of an Aztec past can now sing and sigh to their heart's content about hound dogs and other pressing questions of the day. Why all of this searching for gods? People who are made to feel small and powerless look for something which is big and powerful. They look and are offered a menu of Jesus, Elvis, not to mention Ron Hubbard and Lenin. Shut your eyes and believe in religion; open them wide and you might just catch sight of how big and powerful we all are if only we decide to be.

A Vindication

The newspaper, Stage and Television Today (1 August) interviewed Michael Ferguson who has been executive editor of the awful EastEnders since 1989. Jane Gamer, the interviewer, reports that "He has delved deep into soap psyche and seen battles of good versus evil, the foundation stone of Passion Plays, plus myriad struggles of Common Man and an ability to tap a deep-rooted need in millions of viewers". In this column we have repeatedly stated how soap operas are moralising mouthpieces appealing to alienated workers. EastEnders, in particular, offers its viewers simplistic caricatures of Good and Evil to be followed or avoided in line with the consequences depicted in the drama. We were criticised in the tabloid rag, The People, for making such observations, but now we have it from the horse's mouth; says Ferguson, ". . . there is a strong tie in it for me with the morality plays, there is good and evil. Nick Cotton is the personification of evil . . . Dot Cotton is a good character, she has a high sense of moral duty." Wage slaves used to go to Churches to be told what their moral duties were. These days, those who are not having evangelical orgasms in the Kensington Temple or paying pilgrimage to Elvis's left toenail are watching Saint Dot fight the twice-weekly holy struggle against Wicked Nick to see how the good life must be led.

Cat Sense

There is an irritating ad for Whiskas which says that if cats could do so they would buy Whiskas. Cats have more sense than to buy anything. Cats take what they need. Cats do not go shopping or carry credit cards or have overdrafts or make adverts selling horrible, cheap rubbish. My cat runs a mile every time he smells Whiskas. Come to that, he never goes to Church, worships no gods and has never been seen near the hi-fi when Elvis is on. And he has no sophisticated consciousness like humans do. Come to think of it, humans would not buy Whiskas, or any other commodity for sale, if they thought about it for more than five minutes.

Steve Coleman

A war to end all hooliganism (2000)

TV Review from the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

After several months of being “forced” to listen to the radio (and listening to such insane people as the rabid woman guest on Five Live saying England has a hooligan problem because we haven’t had a war and that the hooligans would be the first to enlist because they’d enjoy a good ol’ war) because the TV rental firm repossessed my box (“Thank you DER”, to employ their ad soundbite!), I have finally got hold of a TV and video on hire purchase.

Thank God! Now I don’t have to spend endless, boring hours talking to friends, painting and reading books. I can switch on and zap. Homer Simpson is right, you know—the remote is a true technical marvel.

I didn’t watch a lot of it when the other firm (not DER) delivered it. I had too much time to spend on moving all my furniture—firstly to make room for the house altar, and secondly, to position my chairs in the correct direction and make sure my plants and art didn’t block guests’ views of it.

After programming the cable channels in, I flicked through to see if all was OK. I watched bits and pieces of all manner of thing. On CNN a debate was taking place on child soldiers. (I wonder if they are hooligans? I always though they didn’t have the money to go and see a game, let alone buy a football.) Apparently they are abducted by the militias, grow up accepting violence as normal, and in peacetime they have trouble re-entering society: they are mentally unfit for anything and have no education to speak of. A UN man said he was working to make sure all countries have a minimum age of 18 for servicemen—how comforting, and philanthropic.

Zap! I caught a scene from the American Civil War soap North and South. One of the characters (Patrick Swayzee) is a slave owner. His friend is a Yankee capitalist—socialists can’t help chuckle at the man’s name: Hazard. Apparently they are friends, although they end up fighting each other (in the two armies). The Confederate looks at the diabolical conditions capitalist Hazard’s workers endure in the factory. “At least they are free—they can go where they want,” says our erstwhile Yankee. Quite. Capitalism needs this “freedom” to operate: you can work for a capitalist or choose to starve.

Zap! At last I can catch up on Eastenders. I see Nick Cotton has a son. He was caught trying to steal money from Dot’s purse by Mark. “Like father, like son,” says our fruit-and-veg philosopher. In 1987 “Between the Lines” was attacked in a dishonest article by the People newspaper, because we called Eastenders a morality play with a distorted view of what our class is like. Fifteen years on and it is still moralising: Nick’s son is “born evil”, and is it right to let Ethel end her life when her cancer is too painful to bear?

Zap! It was awful listening to the Republican Conference on Five Live’s Up All Night show; seeing and hearing it in glorious Technicolor was nauseating. Visions of Nazi rallies sprang to mind—people screaming in adulation at their “strong man”.

Zap! Zap! Zap! I saw Teletubbies in German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Turkish. At least I know how to say: “Time for Tubby bye-bye” in several languages now. I could complain but, then, when I was a kid TV had Happy Days and The Magic Roundabout. I watched the Fonz whilst my old man followed the adventures of “Boing” Zebedee—probably to com to grips with his 60’s acid flashbacks.

Zap! Ah-something good: Woody Allen’s Radio Days film. After that, turned on my radio and listened to Brian Alexander’s show and Up All Night, whilst flicking through a book I was given, The Biology of Art, which studies how Homo sapiens’s need for art developed, through a comparative study of chimpanzees’ paintings.

But no doubt I shall be tuned in tomorrow to see if Mel will forgive Steve and to cry when Ethel snuffs it. Anything else would be boring, wouldn’t it?

Graham C. Taylor

Between the Lines: Know what I mean, John? (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Know what I mean, John?

Given a choice between being stranded in the Sahara Desert or spending a night drinking in The Queen Vic I would without hesitation start to pack my flask. The Queen Vic, focal point for the gathering of all those lovable East Enders, is Hell on earth. Its resident drinkers are amongst the most unlovable lowlives ever to have stained a television screen.

There are the vicious Mitchell brothers (Grant the ex-army psychopath and Phil the cheating lout); there is their moronically empty sister, Sam, whose big aim in life is to make it on to Page Three; and her pathetic wimp of a wage-slave husband, Ricky; not forgetting her spite-filled wastrel of a best mate, Mandy. Then there are the older East Enders: "Arfur" Fowler who has graduated from nicking the Christmas fund to cheating on his boring wife; Pete Beale, the bar-stool philosopher worthy of the National Front; the anti-social, self-pitying Pat Butcher who drove while over the limit and then expects sympathy because she killed a girl; the Bible-bashing Dot Cotton and her thieving, murderous family; and Tricky Dicky, the conniving northerner who isn't fit to clean the pavements down Coronation Street. The characters in East Enders are all detestable specimens of the worst in humanity. "So don’t watch it", I hear you cry. But that is not the point. Millions do. And they are shown the images which they are shown for a reason. Of course, part of the reason is to entertain: keep the proleys amused with simple dramatic episodes twice a week. But why these characters, why this image of humanity?

The East Enders are how they are because that is how the makers of TV (mainly "educated” people who imagine themselves to be creative and middle class) think that the working class is. When they see young working-class men they expect to see the Mitchell crooks, when they see young female wage-slaves they expect the Sams and Mandys and Sharons, when they see middle-aged proles they are surprised if they do not find a Pete Beale or a Frank Butcher — or better still a Big Ron. a huge proletarian lump who never speaks in more than monosyllabic grunts.

It is well known that if teachers expect non-whites or girls to be inferior learners their prejudiced prophecies will often result in reality: the non-whites or the girls fail in line with the prediction. And if the TV producers expect the workers to be mindless low-lives and they transmit that image twice a week it has the same effect.

East Enders is an insult to the working class. There are working-class pubs, some of them in the East End, where people discuss music and films and books and even political ideas. Some of them do it intelligently — more intelligently than in the pretentious late-night "culture" discussions on BBC2. But it does not suit the makers of East Enders to depict that image of our class. Let the workers think they're dumb and they're more likely to act dumb.

Without a doubt, there are pubs like the Queen Vic. There are plenty of nasty, narrow and mean-minded wage-slaves. Just as there are plenty of bent cops. But it is rather more than an accident that The Bill shows us only the occasional bent cop, whereas East Enders shows us nothing but working-class trash. The choice is political.

Know what I mean, Boris?

The cultural journey from Albert Square to Red Square is not all that far these days. Last summer Russian TV showed a 24-part Mexican soap opera made in the 1970s. Seventy percent of the Russian viewing audience watched it: a staggering 200 million daily viewers, making it the most popular TV drama in the history of the world. Set amongst the privileged echelons of Mexican society, it was called The Rich Also Cry. Something handy to think about when you’re queueing for sausages, eh?

Capitalist nonsense for beginners

Germany Means Business (BBC2, Tuesday, 2 February) was a rather dull documentary about how the Dresdner Bank is becoming the largest banking instituted in eastern Germany and is training young east Germans to become good little bank employees. The thrill of these poor wage-slaves at the chance to be trained to work in a bank (which is a lot more rewarding than learning the thrills of mass unemployment) was pathetic to see. The trainers were teaching them all the nonsense of how to see themselves as being part of the prosperity of the bank. In the final scene the trainees were shown at a dinner which was laid on for them. As for the growing number of unemployed workers in eastern Germany, one fast-learning girl explained that their trouble was that they didn't want to work hard. She could go far.

Killers on the box

Last month saw a set-piece moral debate about whether it was ethical to have shown a TV interview with a serial killer. In the same month both BBC and ITV carried interviews with Malcolm Rifkind, the Minister of Defence. After the bombing of Baghdad they interviewed the glorified mass killer. Storming Norman. What is the difference?

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: The Born Villain (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Born Villain

Is Nick Cotton trying to poison his mother? (EastEnders, BBCl. Tuesday and Thursday. 7.30pm). This is not the most significant question of the early 1990s. It is not like asking, Will the Russian Empire survive under Gorbachev or Will Germany re-unify or Will Dr Habgood become the new Archbishop of Cant. Less important maybe, but a lot more workers are concerned about the case of Nick Cotton.

Let us try to explain to readers who are used to only watching TV documentaries about pollution in the Ukraine or televised operas on BBC2. EastEnders is one of the most watched programmes in Britain. Millions of workers relate to the made-up goings-on in Albert Square with a passion which we socialists usually reserve for the Paris Commune. Dot Cotton is a familiar character in this soap opera She is the sort of woman that we have all encountered once, usually for too long. She invents illnesses to torment herself with, indulges in futile gossip and is a dedicated Christian. She is the sort of person that every soap opera needs. Her husband. Charlie, is a cockney ne'er-do-well: the sort of hapless proletarian dope one might expect to find in a George Gissing novel. Charlie is a petty-crook and adulterer and he makes Dot's life more miserable than it would otherwise be We are supposed to laugh at Charlie—the affable old rogue. Now, Dot and Charlie have a son called Nick. He is a villain. A real soap opera villain. A proletarian Flashman. The sort of lout who would have sharpened the knives for Reggie Kray in' the Sixties and carried the leaflets for the National Front in the 1970s. Where Charlie is pathetic. Nick is dangerous. Over the years Nick Cotton has served as the East Ender without a heart of gold—heartless, conscienceless, morally off the edge.

As we have pointed out in this column on previous occasions, EastEnders is essentially a twentieth-century version of a medieval morality play. Its function is to show the proles what is right and what is wrong and how it shall come to pass that wrongdoers shall perish. (In Coronation Street the adulterous thief, Alan Bradley, literally did perish—knocked down and killed by a Blackpool tram as he was about to murder Rita). Some weeks ago Nick Cotton returned to Albert Square after a lengthy absence at Her Majesty's Pleasure He returned at a time when the ever-miserable Dot was rather less miserable because she had just won a fortune in a local newspaper competition. (Documentaries about pollution in the Ukraine are so much easier to follow, for a start) Anyway, Nick returned.

The inhabitants of Albert Square were less than happy to see that this born villain had resurfaced. But there lies the question. Was Nick Cotton a born villain? Is anyone born to be anti-social? Nick claimed to have transformed his personality and been "born again". The street-wise locals were unconvinced. "Once a villain always a villain", concluded Pete Beale, the fruit stall-holder and moral philosopher. Well, to cut the story short—bearing in mind that your reviewer and several million others followed the saga for many weeks—it turned out that Nick Cotton was far from a changed being. In fact, his reason for returning to his mother was to poison her so that he could get her money. The details of this tedious plot are not important. But the message should not escape us: the conservative belief that leopards never change their spots. Rogues are just like that—it's in their genes or something. Capitalist ideology is obsessed with the illusion of innate evil. EastEnders has served to fuel a sense of popular cynicism which sustains that ideology and helps to prop up those old myths about human nature

Old Myths and Ancient Bigots

Last month saw the unelected Lords' decision to prevent the prosecution of the old Nazis who had taken refuge in Britain, and also we witnessed the sick activities of newer Nazis who desecrated a Jewish cemetery in North London, leaving swastikas behind as a mark of offence. Two TV programmes made it clear that such mindless racism is still alive and . . . kicking is the appropriate verb, it would seem.

In Russia the Jew-hating racists of Pamyat are spewing out their poison in the new atmosphere of glasnost. World in Action (ITV, 4 June. 8.30pm) showed how Jewish workers in Leningrad were being indiscriminately attacked by these fascists. One boy in a Leningrad school was kicked down a flight of stone stairs by a PE teacher who had told him that he did not like Jews; a Jewish woman interviewed explained how her flat was broken into by Pamyat racists who killed her husband in the course of the vicious attack. Dmitri Vasiliev, a personification of poisonous ignorance who leads Pamyat, blamed the Jews for the Bolshevik revolution; "They may denounce Communism today, but they gave it to us as a present. Because Marx is a Jew and, I might add, they crucified Christ". So, after over seventy years of state-capitalist rule in the name of socialism the state has not even succeeded in wiping out the cancer of racism inside Russia. On the contrary, the utter failure of the Bolshevik experiment has led workers to seek scapegoats in order to take out their anger at the wretchedness of their impoverished lives.

But why make Jews the scapegoat? Shadow On The Cross (C4. 6 June, 9pm) was a very informative documentary about the historical role of Christianity as a machine for propagating anti-semitic racism. The programme quoted from the bigoted writings of the Christian saints (St Gregory: "The Jews are murderers of the Lord, rebels and detesters of God companions of the devil, darkeners of the mind . . . enemies of all that is beautiful" ) and showed how most of the anti-Jewish actions of the Nazis had been predated by papal edicts. For example, in medieval Europe, Jews were forced to live in ghettoes and wear yellow circles as marks of inferior identification. Luther, the father of protestantism. was quoted as asking: "What shall we do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? First, to set fire to their synagogues and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man need ever again see a stone or a cinder of them. This is to be done in honour of our Lord and of Christendom. so that God might see that we are Christians".

Is it any wonder, the programme asked, that when the leading Nazi anti-semite, Streicher, was on trial at Nuremburg he pleaded that he was only obeying the teachings of Luther? It is a decadent and outmoded social system which concocts such poisons for workers to swallow.

Steve Coleman

The Sunny Side of the Street (1995)

Coronation Street, 1995

TV Review from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the visual litter of second-rate soap operas, sitcoms and gameshows one programme has stood out like a beacon for over thirty years now. If the unthinkable ever happened and it was removed from our TV screens, a storm of protest would be guaranteed. It is well written, superbly acted and tremendously likeable. It is, of course, Coronation Street.

Coronation Street is what the pundits like to call a ‘national institution' and watching it it is easy to see how they came to that conclusion. At an emotional level, not only does it hold a special place in the heart of many viewers (unusual itself for a TV programme these days) it reflects a wider set of social values which viewers can easily identify with. It is a cosy, homely type of programme that you can curl up in front of on a winter's night. As has been tirelessly pointed out. the only real problem with it is that it does not reflect a cosy, homely world. Indeed, Coronation Street, its detractors claim, does not reflect reality at all. It portrays a world that does not exist anywhere any more. It is a terraced Victorian street with cobbles, a corner shop and an old-fashioned English pub. the sort of self-contained community that is dying out everywhere. Furthermore, Coronation Street largely neglects the type of problems associated with this decline.

At the time of writing, there is not a single unemployed person on Coronation Street. There is nobody with a drug problem. Nobody, apparently, even on anti-depressants or tranquilisers. Only one person. Emily Bishop, with a past history of mental illness. No one is active in a pressure group or political party of any sort, and there do not appear to be any trade unionists. Most bizarrely, for an inner-city Manchester street, there is not one Asian family and interestingly — as has been spotted by many a comedian with an axe to grind — the corner shop is run by a white couple called Reg and Maureen. Throughout its entire history, in fact, Coronation Street's corner shop has carried the flag for white Middle England. And of course, there is no one in Coronation Street who is — you know — in any way ‘funny’, sexually. Raquel's recent dalliance with Curly Watts is as close as it gets.

This all sounds like a terrible indictment, and in some ways it is. Coronation Street is a hopelessly unrepresentative television programme. Even if we momentarily disregard the sociological breakdowns and the discrepancies they reveal, comparatively few characters in the Street are in any way likely. Most are quite bizarre, though often entertainingly so. Has anyone ever met anybody in real life remotely like Reg Hallsworth? Or Mavis and Derek? Or Raquel? The question is superfluous — of course nobody has. and certainly not in the one little street. They are extreme characterisations of the comic variety, exaggerated almost — though not quite — out of recognition altogether. In truth, they have far more in common with comedian Harry Enfield than with anything or anyone to be found in miserable old Albert Square. Enfield’s “Mr ‘You don’t want to do it like that"’ seems to draw heavily on Percy Sugden.

Paradoxically for the greatest British soap opera, its characters are often more in the tradition of the British sitcom — more Captain Mainwairing or Gordon Brittas than Arthur Fowler, more Hattie Jacques and Joan Sims than Mandy Jordache. They are not, to hazard a guess, meant to be real people at all. It is hard to think of other characters in any other British soap opera who fall into this category.

Not them again.

Extreme characterisations often provide for good comedy, and this is one of the secrets of the Street's success. Compare it to BBC I‘s EastEnders and this becomes apparent very quickly indeed. While EastEnders goes in for a highly distorted version of ‘social realism’, the Street doesn't bother its head — its philosophy is that it is drama and laughs that people want more than murder, mayhem and misery. And that is precisely why it is held in such affection by millions of workers. Without too great a leap of the imagination, it gives them a sense of what life might be like if it wasn’t so bloody boring most of the time. lts appeal may be less obviously based on escapism than racy Dallas or glitzy Dynasty, but escapism it is nevertheless.

Despite their occasional traumas, the characters in Coronation Street are genuinely interesting specimens who are, encouragingly, rather nice with it. They are, as they say up North, decent folk. Has Alma a malicious bone in her body? Have Sally and Kevin, or Rita? It would not appear so. Best of all, they seem to inhabit a real community in every sense of the term. Not a sprawling housing estate plagued by packs of dogs and discarded syringes, nor the amorphous sprawl of suburbia but a place where people genuinely care about one another and then nip in to the local boozer to finish off the day with a pint and a gossip. It is a bit of a fantasy, true, but a lovely one.

It would be easy enough to sneer at all this, but Coronation Street deserves better. It cannot even be dismissed as a mere capitalist utopia, for although there are clearly elements of this, it is a strange utopia where the inhabitants live in poky, claustrophobic little terraced houses without any greenery in sight. Instead Coronation Street is best seen as an antidote to the myriad other TV programmes that portray the working class as vicious morons without an ounce of feeling or compassion in their entire bodies. If the producers of EastEnders got their grimy little hands on it, Nicky Platt would soon be selling crack cocaine on the corner of Rosumund Street and giving heroin to little Sarah-Louise while Betty Turpin would be running a brothel above the Rover's Return. Would that be more realistic? Hardly. It would simply be to swop one excess for another.

Though it has its faults, Coronation Street has more going for it than most soap operas. Crucially, it has never really endorsed the ethics of the market driven economy, and its least likeable characters. Mike Baldwin and Steve MacDonald are both petty capitalists, interestingly enough. And when realism — in a genuine rather than the over dramatised form of otvher soaps — rears its head, it is often for Vera Duckworth or Curly Watts to bemoan their existence as a 'wage slave' after a long day in the supermarket. Most of the characters, though idiosyncratic enough, appear reasonably intelligent — only screaming, bawling Tracy Barlow seems to have caught the EastEnders disease so far, and this too is encouraging.

Coronation Street will surely continue to do what it does best: provide an engaging pastiche of working class life with humour and vigour. It can generally leave the issues campaigning and 'social realism' to Brookside, the petty arguments and grind to EastEnders and the gratuitous violence and bad sets to Prisoner Cell Block H. It has little to learn from any of them while it continues to depict a working class with humour, a certain degree of confidence and more than one brain cell to collectively rub together. For this alone, its deficiencies can be forgiven. That is its greatest achievement over thirty years and more, and in a world dominated by a cynical, bitter and twisted media, it is not to be sniffed at.

Dave Perrin

Between the Lines: Return to EastEnders (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Return to EastEnders

The piece in this column in the March issue on the BBC’s EastEnders provoked a mixed response from readers. Michelle Howard, of London, protested:

  I wish to comment on Steve Coleman’s review of the TV series EastEnders in which he describes the characters as, amongst other things, “unlovable, mindless lowlives” and “working class trash”.
 Using the “self-fulfilling prophecy" theory, he argues that viewers “internalize these ‘negative’ images as portrayed in EastEnders" and actually become “detestable specimens of the worst in humanity".
  I meet many, many people who are similar in personality and character to some of the “EastEnders” and, far from being the scum of the earth, are warm likeable and intelligent human beings. They may not be University-educated but that does not make them stupid. The essence of EastEnders is surely about human relationships and the kind of problems that can arise in everyday living.
 Whilst I feel that the programme romanticizes working-class life in the sense that we see a community where isolation is impossible and mutual support in abundance, I feel that it has handled a number of topical issues in a very sensitive and educational way (Cathy’s rape, Mark's HIV).
  I have shown the review to four friends (all Marxists) and they also find it patronizing. Can we have an explanation?

Joe Kenyon of Barnsley, on the other hand, asked if he can reproduce it in the newsletter he prepares for the Claimants and Unemployed Workers Union:

  The Between the Lines article by Steve Coleman was very, very apt and most interesting. It echoed my constant criticism of the East Enders. Indeed in our house we often refer to the EastEnders as "What a Rotten Lot". We sing it along with the signature tune. I was wondering if Steve Coleman would let me use it, with a few more expletives added, in a future newsletter which I am preparing (Of course you can use it—anyone can— but don't forget to say where it came from—Editors).

Please send in more letters like these: the TV column seeks to arouse heated debate. Needless to say. whether or not you are a socialist is not determined by your view of EastEnders: being a socialist means an active commitment to the establishment of a global society where resources are owned in common, controlled democratically and there is production solely for use. Whether you think that the Mitchell Brothers or Pat Butcher are “warm, likeable and intelligent human beings” is secondary.

It is secondary, but not irrelevant to how you see the world. Most novels published in the last century either ignored reference to the working class, lest the presence of the majority disturb the prettified imagery of the free and wealthy “characters” or it depicted workers as being somewhat slow-witted, untrustworthy and mob-like. In many respects the soap opera is the much more popular contemporary successor to the novel. We know that soaps have a huge influence upon viewers by offering a picture of reality to serve as an image of what living in this society is really like.

Some American soaps repeated the old novelists’ pattern of completely ignoring the working class. For example, Dallas relegated the wage slaves to voiceless Mexican servants, while the "real characters” (mainly oil millionaires, billionnaires and their lovers) dominated the action. In Britain there has been more of a tendency to try to depict the workers in soap operas. Now, there is no doubt much about workers in EastEnders which you would find amongst any group of workers in any area.

If Michelle Howard really knows people like that and really likes them, good for her. The present writer would rather sit in a cold bath with copy of the telephone directory than have to spend a social evening with a bunch of any three of the detestable characters of Albert Square.

The assumption of the people who produce EastEnders is that the working class are, as Joe Kenyon amusingly suggests, a pretty rotten lot. In the idealised world of Albert Square there is a mean mindedness to life; nobody ever does anyone much of a favour unless there's something in it for them: every expression of affection can usually be expected to conceal dishonesty and corruption; in discussions, the politics of the fascistic gut feeling is rarely far beneath the surface.

That is a very patronising image of the working class. It is one which leaves this viewer feeling that there is no coincidence in the fact that workers who read, workers who play musical instruments for pleasure, workers who attend serious political meetings and workers who care and share with one another are so conspicuously missing from EastEnders. It is as if the programme producers are of the view that mere prolies would never do those sort of things.

So. the argument with EastEnders is about what reality is actually like—and what was argued in this column two months ago was (a) that workers are not as one-dimensionally brutish as EastEnders shows them to be, and (b) the depiction of our class in this way on their media is no coincidence, but a political choice, even if an unintended one.

Any more views?

Steve Coleman

Proper Gander: Soap Gets In Your Eyes (2016)

The Proper Gander Column from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you’re watching EastEnders and your mind starts to wander away from its latest round of tragedies, you start noticing the odd little conventions of soap operas. Why do characters in soaps never sit down to watch soap operas, for example? How do they find the time to go to the pub several times a day? Why do so few families have washing machines and instead air their dirty linen in the launderette? Why does every conversation end with one person looking pensively into the distance?

Since it began in 1985, EastEnders has clocked up over 5,300 episodes, and attracts audiences of around ten million viewers when there’s a big shock storyline. It’s more dour than rivals Coronation Street and Emmerdale usually are, and right from its inception was intended to reflect everyday issues facing Londoners.

So does EastEnders really represent ‘working class life’? We rarely see characters at work, except when they’re behind a bar or a shop counter and chatting. Having a job would get in the way of their complicated, convoluted relationships. Issues like debt, loss of employment etc are frequent sources of struggle, but the characters never talk about politics. Phil and Grant Mitchell didn’t have a discussion about which way they would vote in the EU referendum, for example. In fact, the referendum wasn’t even mentioned. Albert Square doesn’t get affected by real-world concerns like elections, wars and The Great British Bake Off.

But do we expect soap operas to be realistic, and mirror life within the sound of Bow bells? If Albert Square was a real place, no-one would want to live there, given the number of murders and disasters which happen, especially every Christmas. Thankfully, real life tends to be more humdrum, and if EastEnders really was realistic, hardly anyone would bother tuning in.

Or should we say that soaps are realistic to the extent that the characters behave authentically in an unrealistically constant succession of calamities and other life-changing events? As writer Steve Neale described, soap storylines are shaped by coincidences, chance meetings, revelations and last-minute rescues, far more than real lives are. Recently, EastEnders’ characters have faced alcohol addiction, miscarriage, homophobia, murder and redundancy, among other issues. The producers often consult with specialists about how the most emotive subjects should be approached, partly to shape our perceptions of them. A storyline about domestic abuse, for instance, would be carefully planned to raise awareness among viewers of the hurt and damage it causes and the support available. Soap operas therefore have some value and influence in highlighting social issues, even if they don’t relate them to a wider social context. This means that soap characters don’t necessarily behave in ‘realistic’ ways, but in ways which reflect what the programme-makers want to say. All drama is, by definition, contrived and even something improvised can’t reflect the ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty of real life. So it’s too much to expect soap operas to copy real life.

We gawp at soaps partly for schadenfreude – watching the characters live through each misery. When a prominent character is about to get killed off, this is often ghoulishly advertised with trailers and on TV guide magazine covers. But we wouldn’t keep tuning in if we didn’t find the characters engaging. Characters in soap operas are, to some extent, vicarious friends and families. We can snoop on their dodgy deals, affairs, lies and rows, because their lives tend to be more eventful than our own. Soaps also give us a vicarious sense of community. How many of us know as many of our neighbours as the residents of Albert Square do? Or in other words, how many of us know Dot Branning or Ian Beale better than we know some of our neighbours or colleagues?

Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered why they’re called ‘soap operas’, it’s because these dramas originally tended to be sponsored by soap manufacturers. This term is appropriate, given that the characters and settings are set in a soapy bubble, away from everyday life.

Mike Foster

Between the Lines: Chasing the dragon (1994)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chasing the dragon

Aaah! Just when you thought it was safe to come out in the dark, she’s hack . . . and Nicholas Broomfield was out to make a documentary about her whether she wanted him there or not. (C4, 9.30pm, Thursday, 19 May.) The subject in question is Margaret Thatcher, a one-time Prime Minister who said that there was no such thing as society. See the Postcards from Hell on other pages for a more vivid guide to her preferred habitat. Broomfield, who is used to following around confirmed fruit and nutcases (it was he who made that superb documentary about the mad Boer, Terre Blanche), was as welcomed by the Thatcher groupies as a cockroach at a cocktail party. It Is good to see just how small and foolish "the mighty" really are.

In the same week the BBC was chasing the story of the Chinese political prisons where countless detainees are locked up for speaking out against the government. Down at the BBC they have no need to lock up the journalists who are vetted by MI5 before they can have a job and then only allowed to interview those whose words have not been banned by government edict. That’s what they call capitalist democracy, that is. On Newsnight (BBC2, 10.30pm, Wednesday, 18 May) Jeremy Paxman interviewed a smarmy businessman who insisted that human rights abuses should not interfere in commerce. Paxman put it to him that to trade with a state that can do this makes him and his fellow capitalists collaborators. Quite so. And what’s new about that? When have a few camps filled with tortured victims ever stood in the way of a healthy profit? Perhaps next time Paxman interviews Douglas Hurd he would care to ask him whether as a major arms-seller to Indonesia his government feels just a tiny bit like collaborators in the slaughter of the people of East Timor.

What’s all this then, Arfur?

ARFUR: 'Ang on Phil, I’m reading this ’ere election manifesto.

PHIL: Reading? You goin’ soft or something Arfur?

GRANT: You want me to sort him, bruv. That’s how we do things in the East End see. We put the boot in first and ask questions later. Right?

ARFUR: It says ’ere in this ’ere Socialist Party manifesto that all politicians are out to take us for a ride. Now, I’m only a simple bloke, as you well know, but 1 can’t ’elp thinking that they might have a point. What you think Michelle . . . I mean, you’ve been to that there university, ’avn’t you?

MICHELLE: Well, according to what I’ve been reading this totally leaves out of account the post-modernist critique of metatheoretical discourse. I mean, haven’t these socialists ever read Lyotard? Anyway, I’m off to tell my daughter that’s she’s really my cousin.

GRANT: Yeah, and I’m off down the Arches to sort out some geezer with a shooter who reckons Minder was just a comedy.

[Enter an old drunk with a blue suit and a political rosette who looks a cross between that dodgy lawyer used by the Mitchell Bruvvers to get them off at their last court appearance and at least half the members of the House of Commons]

SWINDLER: Hello there, jolly working folk. I’m your candidate . . . 

ARFUR: Ah, perhaps you can ’elp us. I was just reading this Socialist stuff about the likes of you being a lot of useless leaders. They reckons ’ere that the emancipation of the working class can only be the . . . 

SWINDLER: Put it away, my good friend. Subversive nonsense. Pure idealism. You can’t run your lives without us. Any chance of a G and T?

PHIL: You saying we can’t run the world without being led by a load of old duffers like you?

GRANT: Want me to sort him, bruv?

SWINDLER: No . . . what I’m saying is that the likes of you — decent working chaps that you are — need the likes of me — educated at Jesus and the bar, you know — to do a few things to improve life for you. A couple of new beds in the local hospital, for example. And free chiropody for all those of ninety-five and over. Jobs for everyone . . . 

ARFUR: Well thank you very much indeed. I’ll put this socialist stuff away right now. And buy this man a large G and T on me.

DOT: Did somebody mention Jesus?

BIG RON: Did somebody mention a late bar?

MICHELLE: Oh, hasn’t anyone ever told them that they’re just pathetic caricatures of workers invented by people who drink in wine bars. No wonder they’re stupid enough to be taken in by another bloody politician.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: Increasing Misery (1994)

The Between the Lines column from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Increasing Misery

Marx once wrote that as capitalism develops the mass of misery of the working class grows progressively worse. This is all the more true if one bears BBC1's EastEnders in mind (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 7.30 pm). For never in the history of television has a TV programme been so dedicated to spreading misery among the working class.

Let there be no doubt about it — EastEnders is a truly horrendous soap opera and anti-working class to its core. At best, its portrayal of working class life is a caricature which bears little relationship to the way workers actually conduct themselves. At worst, its aim appears to be to convince you that life is one long emotional roller-coaster which we are entirely powerless to change. To this end, few characters in EastEnders have any interests other than conducting screaming matches with those they profess to hate, which at any given point in time is roughly half of the rest of the cast. When they are giving their lungs and their fists a break, they play a curious game of treading on eggshells with one another until an unsuspecting actor puts a foot wrong and another extended bout of ranting begins. Some characters, including the psychopathic Grant Mitchell, Pauline Fowler and her son Mark, exhibit mood swings the like of which are rarely seen outside of hospital psychiatric units. Their emotions are seemingly uncontrollable, ebbing and flowing wildly above treacherous depths like storm tides over a beach of quicksand.

Other characters are simply “write-offs" they were apparently born evil and will always stay that way. Their only pleasure in life lies in causing trouble for other people. Such is the lot of "Tricky Dicky", the market stall manager, and homeless Mandy, whom the other characters treat like Satan’s Daughter, only not as politely. “Tricky Dicky" and Mandy, indeed, are the only remotely stable characters in the series and their stability is one born of calculated malice and an effortless contempt for others which some characters in the series appear to secretly envy.

Happy Half-Hour

In the episode of Thursday 2 December one character — Frank Butcher — smiled, through only at the prospect of someone else's misfortune, but for this character it was still a definite advance. Ironically, the actor Mike Reid who plays Frank Butcher used to be a comedian of sorts, but really do any of the characters in EastEnders ever have the wit to say something funny. That would be to display signs of intelligence, and the scriptwriters can't be seen to be having any of that. The characters they create and manipulate have to be humourless and stupid if they are to appear to be convincingly powerless.

Neither can the characters been seen having stable long term relationships with one another. A quick fumble behind the Queen Vic is all that most of them are capable of until the inevitable bitching and recriminations commence. A case in point was Arthur Fowler's tawdry affair with Mrs Hewitt, so unsophisticated and furtive as to be reminiscent of Howard and Maria from Last of the Summer Wine, only without the humour. Though a bit of sex always spices up a dull script, other soap operas manage without the constant transfers of sexual allegiances that occur in EastEnders, and we can only suspect that it is again a deliberate policy to portray the working class as shallow, feeble and fundamentally untrustworthy.

Nay, Nay and Thrice Nay

The really bad news for the future is that the BBC apparently have plans to increase the dose of this anti-working class nonsense from twice to three times a week. There are reports of unrest among the cast at this prospect, and some prominent cast members like June Brown and Peter Dean have already left the series in disgust at the way things are going. Their view is that the “golden age" of EastEnders is over, but in truth, there was no such cultural nirvana in Albert Square to start with. Even at its peak EastEnders always glorified in portraying the grosser aspects of working class life and unlike other soaps largely shunned humour and pathos. Its leading characters have inevitably been thoroughly unpleasant creatures and its message a hopelessly bleak one. Twice a week has been bad enough, three times a week would be to extend the cycle of misery to breaking point.

Dave Perrin

Between the Lines: A Workers' Guide to the Soaps (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the August 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Workers' Guide to the Soaps

What political function do soap operas perform under capitalism? This might look like one of those pretentious academic questions which sociologists like to make meaningless noises about, but it is in fact a question worth asking. Millions of workers watch serialised dramas known as soap operas. (The term was coined in the USA where the soap companies used to sponsor TV serials.) The top two programmes in the British TV audience ratings — before news output or variety entertainment — are soap operas: EastEnders and Coronation Street. When a star in one of these dramas marries, falls ill, has a fight at a party or dies it is national news: remember the death of Pat Phoenix, who played Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, which made front-page headlines in the national press last year?

The simplistic answer to the question posed is that TV controllers like to entertain viewers with fascinating drama and soaps do that. If we were living in a society where making people happy — satisfying their needs — was the criterion for production, then we might find such a reason for producing soap operas plausible. But we don't and it isn't. So. why do TV companies spend vast fortunes on producing soap operas? The first social function which they perform is to reinforce a picture of 'reality' — to show a designer-created world of social reality which viewers can use as a model for 'life as it is . . . and always will be'. Soaps reflect all of the capitalist myths about human nature (a negative and unchangeable condition, of course) and the apparently inevitable ways of the world, including possessive relationships. buying and selling, employment and the rest of the anachronisms of life under the profit system. Soaps show workers that they are not alone in the madhouse of capitalism — everyone is in it and in it is the place to be.

Secondly, soaps perform a moral role of telling workers what is right (according to the ethics of the owning class) and what is wrong. Characters on soaps are shown to lose out if they do wrong and to prosper even if not at once — as a reward for good behaviour. In recent times the crude attempts at moral propaganda made by the soap producers have become more transparent than ever.

Thirdly, soaps are about continuity: because they are on regularly they offer a rhythm — presented as a natural rhythm — to life. Bombs may be exploding in Ireland, kids starving to death in Mozambique and riots going on in Leeds, but at 7.30 every Monday and Wednesday normality is resumed because the familiar theme music to Coronation Street is on the air. It used to be said that civilisation would collapse if the ravens ever flew away from the Tower of London (a more foolish example of nationalistic rubbish it would be hard to think of), but the modern equivalent is that as long as the locals in Albert Square are in their places between 7.30 and 8pm on a Tuesday and Wednesday life as we know it is still intact.

These three functions which the soaps perform are of great political importance to the capitalist system, for remember, it is a system which is wholly dependent for its power upon the unconsciousness (politically) of the working-class majority who are the consumers/victims of the soaps. It used to be the Churches which performed the role of explaining reality to workers, of laying down the moral code, and of providing a continuity and regularity to the life of the system. Now that the Churches are emptier than ever the TV screen is the new medium for such indoctrination and the soaps are an important means of achieving propaganda success. It is not being claimed that soaps are a conspiracy to make workers accept capitalism. The way that capitalism conditions its victims is more complicated and subtle than that. Regardless of how consciously the soap opera producers intend to serve the system, that is the political function which they perform.

The most crass soap opera of them all — a programme which has almost carved a reputation out of being so bloody atrocious that it is compelling viewing — is Crossroads. The acting and scripts have been the subject of many a TV critic's merciless scorn, but the programme is not just dramatically awful: it is also a political drama. For example, it has for years conveyed the message that those who own wealth (in this case, the motel) do so as a result of hard work and, above all, superior intelligence. Conversely, the workers are all somewhat affable fools, lucky to be employed at all. My favourite character in Crossroads (a programme which, like everyone else who watches it regularly or occasionally, I deny having ever seen except by pure accident) is Benny, the mentally retarded skivvy who exists to be exploited by his bosses, patronised by his workmates and periodically ridiculed by the scriptwriters who evidently believe that being mentally subnormal is a terrifically funny condition and one well worthy of a few good laughs at the unfortunate Benny. In fact, Benny represents the ideal English wage slave: thick, compliant, loyal, uncomplaining and more willing to work than a horse on hormone injections. Benny is what they want us all to be. Don't laugh at him: you might just be laughing at your own reflection in the TV screen.

EastEnders is a truly hideous soap opera. Indeed, for my money it is the worst. As a result, I do my best never to miss it. Its heavy-handed moralising is sickening; its stereotyping is offensive; its romanticised picture of life in London's East End is a complete distortion (and worse still is its distortion of the East End's past); and its manipulation of viewers' emotions by means of cheap dramatic explosions is sinister. One of very many examples of what is foul about the programme is the recent story of Arthur Fowler, the unemployed and uninspired caricature of a prole. Arthur was caught stealing the Christmas Club  money, had a thoroughly unconvincing nervous breakdown in order to physically repent for his ultimate crime of taking money which was not his, went into a psychiatric hospital and came out an 'adjusted' man. Now Arthur — sorry, Arfur — takes every day as it comes, is genuinely thrilled when he is offered occasional casual work and realises how wrong he had been to transgress the law of property and how right the state had been to send him to prison for his sin. EastEnders is a programme about sin and repentance: most characters are usually in one or the other states. In times to come it will be seen for what it is: blatant, rotten propaganda of a pernicious form. Entertaining. yes: but then, so was witch-burning, I suppose.

Brookside is by far my favourite soap. You can see it on Mondays and Tuesdays (8pm, C4) or on Saturdays (5pm, C4). Like all soaps, you need to watch it for a few weeks before you will get into it, and my recommendation is that it is worth the time investment to do so because Brookside is probably the best TV drama available at the moment. It is clearly an anti-establishment soap and its depiction of life under capitalism is head and shoulders above the other soaps. But it too is a highly moralistic programme, setting out sometimes all too transparently to radicalise the viewer. Indeed, it is perhaps by watching TV manipulation being well executed in a programme like Brookside (where the temptation is to see the manipulation as an edifying process) that one can see much more clearly how the same techniques, but for different ends, are used in the other soaps.

Will there be soap operas in a socialist society? Who can tell? It is not for a small minority of socialists in 1987 to lay down a blueprint for how the socialist majority will decide to live. But the functions which soaps now perform will not be needed in a social system which has overcome the intense alienation of capitalism. Moralising drama will not be required in a society without leaders or led. The problems which occupy the minds of most of the characters in most of the soaps most of the time will simply not exist in a socialist society. That's my view anyway — and in the absence of letters from readers expressing your views mine is the only view you're going to get.

Steve Coleman

Your letters about TV programmes which you have liked or disliked and think worthy of comment from a political angle, or your comments on points made in Between the Lines should be sent to The Socialist Standard and will be considered for publication.