Never has anything dominated the lives of OAPS, housewives and students alike as much as that of television soap operas. Here in England our most popular soap operas receive a large proportion of viewing figures, transform a lot of disparate people into immobile coach potatoes and wreak havoc on our perceptions of society. The blur between reality and fiction is sometimes an all too confusing juxtaposition for certain innocents in our society. These are the people that spit and shout abuse at actors playing particular villains when they go about the everyday, the people that fail to realize that it’s all just an act.

Eastenders; set in the (obvious) East End of London along with Coronation Street (Manchester) and Emmerdale (Yorkshire) command the weekly prime time slots (between 7-9pm). Then there are those shows heavily indebted to the student armies; Hollyoaks (Cheshire) and Neighbours (Melbourne!). Neighbours aside, what these shows all give us is a particular sense of ‘Englishness’ wrapped up into thirty minute decompressions.  Coronation Street takes us on a swooping tour of suburban Manchester life, full of industrialized factories, cobbled streets, terraced houses and the occasional scene of domestic violence or two. Eastenders being its racier counterpart shows all the grime of inner city life in our nation’s capital in a rather bleak or nihilistic way. Nothing good or any prolonged period of happiness really seems to befall the characters in this show, the seeming continual onslaught of calamities and life crisis seem enough to drive even the most hardened individual to the pits of utter despair.

Then there is Emmerdale which for some strange reason has a massive Finnish following. Obviously rural small village life has seeming familiarity with the Scandinavian audience, but are they well prepared enough for some of the more crazy storylines this show has had to endure in the past: plane crashes, fires, suprising demolitions?  Studying the English soap opera is a fascinating way of analyzing the ways we choose to portray these parts of England; unfortunately for us reality falls away in the need to attract large viewing figures.