Thirty million people came to watch Dirty Asylum and Angie by East Enders on Christmas Day 1986.
Even in the flourishing world of soap, it was something of a bomb. At the end of an episode of EastEnders late last month, George, the new owner of the Queen Vic Hotel, called his long-vanished ex-wife «Rose». Since the call is not answered, we move to the pool scene where «Rose» turns out to be… Cindy Beal.
The revival of Cindy, played by Michelle Collins, almost 25 years after she left Albert Square and then supposedly died in childbirth, certainly fits with modern soap excess. However, for some, it also felt like a desperate play for a genre in crisis. Gone are the days when, in 1986, 30 million people paused the Christmas celebrations to watch «Dirty» Den Watts serve his wife, Angie, with divorce papers. Last Christmas, EastEnders managed to garner the soap's biggest ever audience, with just 3.17 million viewers watching Danny Dyer's Mick Carter drown as the Dover love triangle went awry. On ITV, the ratings of Emmerdale and Coronation Street are but a shadow of what they once were.
Of course, the consumption of all conventional TV programs has plummeted, but with soap operas, the fall is felt especially sharply. Last year, Neighbors and Holby City (technically an «ongoing drama») joined the great soap graveyard, taking their places alongside Crossroads, Eldorado, Family Matters and Brookside.
“The problem with these shows is that they need to make noise in order to survive, which used to be fueled by moments at work the next day,” says an insider who worked at the soap opera at an executive level. and who prefers not to be named. «Now it's much more fueled by social media and to get people talking you need to increase the scoop a lot.»
According to an insider, the best example of the law of diminishing returns governing the notorious soap conspiracy was Brookside, which ended in 2003 with the lynching of an unpopular local drug dealer. jpg» />“The series, based on socialist realism, has moved into the world of sieges, carnivorous killer viruses and helicopter crashes. And before you know it, you go from sensational to total implausibility when the game is over. Bringing characters back can work if you can make it believable, but it's pretty tricky when you've been telling the audience for so long that they're dead.»
Such «spirals of the absurd,» as an insider calls Brookside's unfortunate demise, are a fatal departure from soap operas' primary goal of reflecting everyday life with contemporary issues and gripping drama. So while murders do happen in real life, for example, this suggests that there were four in the first 30 years of Coronation Street, and 21 in the second 30 years.
Even when done well, the classic, more prosaic soap formula can be easily resisted in an age where streaming services are oversaturated with high-quality, mega-budget TV. A recent PwC report predicts that UK viewers will spend £4.2bn on pay-per-view video-on-demand services by 2025, including Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV, which for the first time exceeded the amount spent on traditional pay-TV packages from companies such as Sky and Virgin Media.
However, the series have spent a lot of money to survive; Last year, the BBC began filming EastEnders on a new £86.7m HD-ready set replacing its old Albert Square set after several years of delay and a budget overrun of over £25m. sterling. This January, fans of Coronation Street got their first look at the new 1960s-inspired shopping district.
But with the exception of regular deposits, the budgets have not increased. “Given the choice between something that is still filming pretty much the same as it was 50 years ago, with budgets that haven’t increased in 20 years, a younger audience is likely to be looking for the same emotion in a more complex and expensive setting. . — adds an insider. Stephen Murphy, former editor of Inside Soap magazine, recalls the era of soap supremacy. “They were on fire from the early 2000s until around 2009,” he says. «I think the channels got greedy because economies of scale meant it wouldn't cost a fortune to add an extra episode every week.»
It also raises the challenge of reflecting communities that almost no longer exist in, say, a real Victorian square in East London. «I mean, every house in Walford would cost about a million pounds, and a pub would be a gastropub if it wasn't converted into luxury apartments,» the soapmaker tells me.
The Ken-Deirdre-Mike love triangle on Coronation Street swept the country in the 1980s. Photo: ITV
«You're always dealing with this tension and you have to be very careful not to become an exercise in nostalgia, which means losing relevance to a younger audience that you need to survive.» Soap series have long faced the challenge of attracting and reflecting the lives of new viewers while keeping loyal old ones satisfied. Last week, some newspapers reported that viewers turned off EastEnders after feeling alienated by storylines about climate change and Brexit, among other potentially divisive issues. (The corporation noted that viewership per night always drops when EastEnders moves to BBC Two during Wimbledon, and that iPlayer streaming performance for the show has been good.)
In 2014, screenwriter Russell T Davis, a soap fan who briefly worked on Coronation Street in the 1990s, warned that soap might not survive another 10 years. With another year to go, Davis' accurate prediction of the soap's demise might be a little off, but the text remains on the wall as the audience continues to shrink. (Like ITV and the BBC, Davies declined to discuss the state of soap operas for this article.) «They're still in survival mode,» says the first insider.
This fall is a great shame. British soap operas have been woven into our culture and national identity for more than six decades, perhaps reflecting the joys and hardships of real life far better than their cheesier or more sensational counterparts in the US or Latin American telenovelas.
The irony is that the quality is still there. “EastEnders is doing so many good things right now,” Murphy says, referring to recent storylines such as the long struggle of Lola Pierce, a young mother who recently died of a brain tumor. “It was funny, it was tragic, it broke your heart at the end, and these are the kind of stories that are just told really well, with real sensitivity and understanding of how soap works, this is a show you don't have to do. a bunch of stuff, let's-let's-blow it.»
Murphy is also keeping a close eye on the revival of Neighbours, just a year after it was canceled by Channel 5. It will air on Amazon Freevee and is the first time the streamer has launched a soap (in the UK). However, even he, a longtime soap fan, admits «you can't turn the tide» on the threat to soap in the streaming era. Cindy's return will be a test. After a shocking poolside event last month, the character is set to return to Walford later this summer, along with her ex-husband Ian Beal (Adam Woodyatt), whom she once hired as a hitman to kill, as well as Ian's mother Cathy (Gillian Tailfort). , which was itself exhumed in 2015.
The BBC must want to make it as easy for viewers to return as it is for dead characters.
New home, NEW neighbors… and a lot of old ones too. 🏘️
Right! #Neighbors will return with a brand new series in 2023 exclusively on @AmazonFreevee, along with thousands of episodes from previous seasons to watch for free! 🎉 pic.twitter.com/TEhPL6ggdx
— Neighbors (@neighbours) November 17, 2022 How our shows are lagging behind
EastEnders
Starting in 1985, this series was once a TV ratings titan — and has also received critical acclaim throughout the years in the 1990s and 2000s. This year's highest-rated episode (both live and streamed) reached 3.47 million viewers for the week beginning June 19.
Coronation Street< br />The original, and for many, the best. Tony Warren's 1960 soap served as good drama (Hilda Ogden mourns the death of Stan's husband) and swept the nation in a similar Ken-Deidra-Mike love triangle. If once the audience reached 27 million, now the number of episodes has reached 5.1 million.
Emmerdale
What was once a gentle lunchtime soap released under the name «Emmerdale Farm» in 1972 became a primetime hit with explosive storylines. Its audience has dwindled by 22% over the past six years.
Hollyoaks
The teen soap began in 1995 and has become a haven for models-turned-actors the world over. . Created by Phil Redmond, the series has entered the era of streaming, with episodes premiering online before they are scheduled to air on TV.
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