Soap Opera
...of the lives of their audience? By MAMOON AHMED
Throughout the history of public service and commercial television the mainstay of its success and a massive ratings winner, none more so than in the latter 25-30 years of its existence, has been the immense popularity of soap operas. Soap operas have become a fundamental and now traditional part of British life. Every channel has at least one or more soaps which are pivotal to there existence. BBC 1 for example continually justify their license fee charge through the popularity of prime time soap opera Eastenders, concerning the working class people of London's east end. ITV 1 and Channel 4 gain massive amounts of revenue through their primetime soaps of Coronation Street and Hollyoaks respectively. Coronation Street is also sponsored by Cadburys, and so along with Hollyoaks and other Commercial channels, must gain a continual and loyal audience in order to justify advertisers' placement of their commercials around the program and the vast sums of money that is spent on that particular time slot. It has been continually argued that the soap opera in general is a "woman's genre" and that and its appeal is only really understood and appreciated by the female gender. I have chosen to outline the certain dramatic devices soap operas employ to keep its target audience content.
The Family A central argument that stems from the initial question of whether or not soap operas can be defined or judged to be fundamentally a woman's genre of television is the associations of the family and the intrinsically links of parenting and maternal ties. In all of the contemporary soap operas of today the focus is consistently about families and their troubled lives behind closed doors. Eastenders for example uses the family as a...
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