When Dirty Den Watts gave his alcoholic wife a present in the Queen Vic on Christmas Day 1986, 30 million viewers were watching. “This, my sweet,” Den snarled at Angie, “is a letter from my solicitor telling you that your husband has filed a petition for divorce.”
It’s easy to be wise after the event, but Angie’s mistake was to get drunk on the Orient Express on the way back from the couple’s second honeymoon in Venice and then blab to the barman that she didn’t really have only six months to live. Den, naturally, overheard this admission and realised that Angie had dreamed up the lie to bring her philandering husband (who had made 16-year-old Michelle Fowler pregnant, earning the enduring rage of her mum, Pauline) back into something like conjugal felicity.
The days when a British soap could attract more than half of the population are over. Thirty-five years later, EastEnders is struggling with ratings. Last Christmas, the BBC soap pulled in just 2.9 million viewers, landing it in 10th place of the top 10 most-watched programmes on Christmas Day. The 40-minute episode promised two weddings and a big reveal (which turned out to be that Dotty Cotton isn’t Nasty Nick’s daughter, but Rocky’s), but prompted disaffection on Twitter. “What the hell was that?!?” wrote one. “Where were the two ‘actual’ weddings? Why did not a single one of them walk down the aisle?!? Where was the big Nazi storyline? That was probably the most mediocre Christmas episode ever! Why did no one die?!”
I know what you’re thinking: Nazi storyline?
It’s not just that, for some, soaps have lost the plot. Rather, soaps have lost their place in the national discourse. When, for instance, in Coronation Street in 1998, Deirdre (née Hunt, later Langton, Rachid and Barlow) was jailed for fraud while her conman lover, Jon Lindsay, walked free, the prime minister, Tony Blair, supported the Weatherfield One and promised to intervene. William Hague, the leader of the opposition, told the House of Commons: “The nation is deeply concerned about Deirdre – Conservatives as much as anyone else.” As late as 2009, Barbara Windsor’s Peggy Mitchell pulled a pint for the London mayor – Boris Johnson – after a tyre on his bike was punctured outside the Queen Vic. “If you have any ideas how I could help Walford,” Boris oiled at Peggy, “here’s my card.” Not the first time our leader had mistaken fiction for fact.
Today such a waste of parliamentary time and stomach-churning cameos are scarcely conceivable, and not just because politicians have more important things to worry about. As the television ratings expert Stephen Price puts it: “The soaps’ dominance of traditional TV appears to be on the wane, no longer impervious to challenge from the linear opposition and losing fans to the streamers.” By “linear opposition”, he means shows such as Bradley Walsh’s Breaking Dad on ITV and BBC One’s The Repair Shop. By “streamers”, he means the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime and catchup services such as BBC iPlayer and Channel 4’s All 4. While TV viewing as a whole fell by 9% between 2017 and 2019, Coronation Street’s audience fell by 19%, while Emmerdale’s went down by 22% and EastEnders’ by 37%.
All soaps are ailing, then, but last month two soaps were terminated with a ruthlessness akin to the moment in Coronation Street in 1989 when Rita Fairclough’s nemesis, Alan Bradley, was dispatched by a Blackpool tram. BBC One’s Holby City was axed after 23 years, while Channel 5 decided to stop broadcasting the 37-year-old Australian soap Neighbours, prompting its production company, Fremantle, to cancel it. Kylie Minogue, who found fame on the show as Charlene Robinson (née Mitchell), tweeted: “We had no idea how big the show would become and how passionately viewers would take it to heart. Pure love! I can still hear Madge calling … CHARLENE!!!!” Minogue was recalling Neighbours’ glory years: when Charlene married Scott Robinson (Jason Donovan) in 1987, nearly 20 million Britons watched. Today, the Neighbours audience on Channel 5 averages 1.2 million – undeniably small, but double the 600,000 who watch Hollyoaks on Channel 4.
“It’s sad to see Neighbours go,” says Phil Redmond, the creator of Brookside, Grange Hill and Hollyoaks. “But the truth is the world has moved on.” Television history is littered with terminated soaps: Crossroads, Eldorado, Family Affairs, Brookside. But if the axe can descend on Neighbours, a fixture on British and Australian TV for decades, perhaps no soap is safe.
In response, Britain’s leading TV soaps are being moved around the schedules, but that may seem as futile as relocating the deckchairs on the Titanic. Coronation Street will broadcast three hour-long episodes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, instead of dividing Monday and Wednesday into two separate half-hour chunks with another programme in between. Also on ITV, Emmerdale has moved from 7pm to 7.30pm, Monday to Friday, in order to accommodate an hour-long ITV News programme. In response, BBC One has moved EastEnders to a consistent 7.30pm time slot, Mondays to Thursdays. Emmerdale is currently winning the 7.30pm ratings battle.
Even as their ratings plummet, though, soaps are investing in the future. Despite MPs worrying about the outlay of the licence fee, the BBC spent £87m on a new set for EastEnders. A patch of wasteland next to the original set has been transformed into a new one, complete with replicas of the Mitchell brothers’ garage, the Beales’ fish-and-chip shop and, according to media-watchers’ decoding of drone footage, the dramatically rich juxtaposition of a mosque next to the Queen Vic.
Last month, ITV announced that construction work has started on an expansion to the Coronation Street set, across the Manchester ship canal from MediaCityUK in Salford. “It’s a testament to the confidence ITV has in the show that it is investing so much in our future,” says John Whiston, the managing director of continuing drama and the head of ITV in the north. “Mind you, I guess it won’t be long before we blow it up, burn it down or crash a tram into it.”
Are soaps still a worthwhile investment? Traditionally, they were appointment-to-view telly. After Larry Hagman’s diabolical Texas oilman, JR Ewing, was shot in 1980, 83 million people in the US tuned in to watch the episode in which his killer was revealed. Viewers had to wait from the finale of series three to the fourth episode of series four to discover whodunnit. This sort of cliffhanger, or so you would think, is inimical to the binge-watching culture of Netflix and Amazon Prime. The drum “doof-doofs” marking the cliffhanger at the end of EastEnders was predicated on deferring gratification until the next episode, when viewers would learn, for instance, if Ethel ever did find her little Willy (spoiler alert: Willy was a dog – a pug – and he usually came back).
But, in 2007, the Netflix executive Ted Sarandos revolutionised how we watch TV, by drastically cutting the time between the cliffhanger and its resolution. “The television business is based on managed dissatisfaction,” Sarandos told me in 2013. “You’re watching a great television show you are really wrapped up in? You might get 50 minutes of watching a week and then 18,000 minutes of waiting until the next episode comes along. I’d rather make it all about the joy.”
Another problem for soaps is that the “water-cooler effect” is no more. “There never was a water cooler – it was people talking about last night’s telly on the bus,” nitpicks Tony Jordan, a scriptwriter and series consultant who was for many years the driving force behind EastEnders. “But the principle remains: soaps were the original Fomo. You were afraid of missing out. That’s how we got audiences of upwards of 26 million.”
But time-shifting technologies and binge watching don’t necessarily mean viewing is no longer communal. Beau Willimon, the creator of the Netflix drama House of Cards, argues that the end of the singular, common viewing experience has been replaced by smaller “concentric circles” of conversation. He has a point: the water-cooler effect may be obsolete, but it has been replaced by virtual communities. Live-tweeting your joy at the return of Ozark or your disappointment at Killing Eve’s lamentable new series on a mobile device to fellow fans while watching on another screen is what communal TV looks like in the digital age.
It is also simplistic to say that soaps are merely victims of streaming; they have also been beneficiaries of catchup services. Last summer, for instance, ITV bosses decided to add weeks’ worth of episodes of Coronation Street and Emmerdale to ITV Hub during the World Cup so that football fans could binge-watch between their favourite matches.
It’s unwise to go too far with this argument, though. Take viewing figures for 14-20 March. The most-watched TV show was the penultimate episode of The Apprentice on BBC One, which had 6.7 million viewers, 2.1 million of whom watched not live, but on catchup services, notably iPlayer. By contrast, Coronation Street, that week’s top-rated soap, was watched by 5.5 million viewers, only 716,000 of whom saw it on catchup, notably ITV Hub, suggesting that soaps are more dependent on appointment-to-view main channel telly than any other TV format.
Redmond argues that soaps’ main problem is not streaming, multichannel TV or the multiplication from a TV set in the living room to phones, tablets and other mobile devices. Rather, soap operas have sold their souls and thereby hastened their demise. “They have spread themselves too thinly, so they are disconnected from reality. They should spend more time on scripts and developing characters. For some reason, humans just want dramatic stories; the problem is that soaps aren’t providing them. It’s a temptation to sensationalise – I know, I’ve done it myself – but it’s a short-term fix. Quality control is what’s important,” he says.
Traditionally, British soap operas postured as slice-of-life telly, tackling issues such as racism, sexism, violence against women, suicide and cot death in a serious manner that you would never see in US soaps such as Dallas or Dynasty. They also helped to develop ordinary Britons’ political and emotional literacy, argues Jordan. When the heterosexual Mark Fowler was diagnosed as HIV-positive in EastEnders in 1991, Britons brought up by the tabloids to believe it was a “gay plague” were dramatically disabused. Similarly, says Jordan, “When someone got cancer and struggled with it, that may have helped some people who thought they were weak, but realised they were just struggling, as was the character on the soap.” Jordan hails soap writers such as Sarah Phelps (EastEnders) and Sally Wainwright (Coronation Street), whose angry passion for such issue-based dramas made them essential viewing.
When Coronation Street began in December 1960, its terraced Victorian street looked just like the one lived in by millions of Britons and caught the wave of kitchen-sink realism generated by John Osborne in the theatre and Lindsay Anderson at the cinema.
Jordan argues that soaps came into their own as Britain became socially fragmented. We needed good neighbours on TV, perhaps, because they were less likely to exist in real life. “One thing that made EastEnders popular is that you wanted to live there,” says Jordan. “It was a community, when communities were disappearing. It was a rule on the show that nobody ever said: ‘This place is shit – I’m off to Watford or Barbados.’ Viewers had to want to live at No 3 Coronation Street or Albert Square … they’d fit in to the community and Den Watts could be their landlord.”
Soaps’ social integrity was undone in the quest for ratings. A pivotal moment came when an aeroplane crashed into Beckindale during Emmerdale’s ratings-grabbing 1993 Christmas special.
But sensational storylines need not show that a soap has lost its soul. Jordan recalls being deeply moved as a teenager as he watched a 1967 episode of Coronation Street in which a train derailed crossing the viaduct, crashing into the cobbles, trapping Ena Sharples and killing Sonia Peters. “It had integrity because the community came together,” he says. He contrasts that with the notorious EastEnders storyline from 2011 in which Ronnie Branning switched her dead baby with Kat Slater’s newborn child, which prompted more than 9,000 complaints, many from bereaved parents objecting to its seemingly cynical sensationalism.
Nine years ago, I wrote an article for the Guardian headlined: “Soap operas: has the bubble burst?” In it, I argued: “Soaps are like printed newspapers or the British monarchy – the only question is when they will do the equivalent of stopping the presses or making the last royal hanger-on live without taxpayer subsidy in a council flat.” You will have noticed that there are still printed newspapers and that no royal, not even Prince Andrew, lives in a council flat. Perhaps, like the death of Mark Twain, their demise has been exaggerated.
“There’s no reason why soaps can’t survive,” argues Jordan. “But I’m not an idiot. I know that in the days when there were 30 million viewers for EastEnders there were only four channels and now choice is virtually unlimited. I can do the maths. But there is a place for them, and a substantial audience, too, as long as they are written by – and seen by – people who care about the characters and their stories.”
