Soap Operas - Johann Hari defends the nation's real National Theatre
We all know the cliche that Britain is an increasingly fragmented country. We can't unite behind the monarchy, the Union Jack, the government, yadda yadda yadda. But we have one bond that defies class, ethnicity, gender: soap operas. The true national anthem for 21st-century Britain should be the EastEnders theme tune.
Soaps matter. Melvyn Bragg has rightly described them as our real National Theatre. Last year, more people discussed who shot Phil Mitchell than who would win the general election. Soaps provide a forum through which we learn about issues such as domestic violence, breast cancer and euthanasia. And, most significantly, British soaps are fundamentally egalitarian, one of the few places on TV where the poor, the fat, the old and the ugly are shown to be important.
So it matters that our soaps are becoming tired and worn, and that they are being overexploited by the companies which own them. Our four big home-grown soaps - EastEnders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale and Brookside - were, a decade ago, each broadcast twice a week. It is hard, but possible, to make an hour of plausible, high-quality drama a week. Repeats of the shows on cable channels remind you that, in particular, early episodes of Brookside and EastEnders were startlingly good television. But as TV companies have become ever more reliant on their soaps because they are habit-forming (something that is increasingly important in a multichannel environment), they have grotesquely overstretched their best products. Coronation Street now goes out four times a week, and Emmerdale five times. The BBC is spending a fortune on stretching EastEnders to four a week.
So what is the result? The soaps have become increasingly dependent on plot at the expense of character. EastEnders in particular has become desperately unimaginative. In how many love triangles can Pat and Roy Evans become improbably involved in? How many shootings can occur in one square? (It would surely be impossible for any of its residents ever to get an insurance policy.) How many times can Frank Butcher or Nick Cotton shockingly reappear after a long absence? It is stupid plots such as these that fuel the cultural snobs who argue that soaps are just crap.
In the mid-1980s, Brookside and EastEnders established a whole new way of doing soaps which challenged the monolith of Coronation Street. Today, a new young pretender is similarly exposing how dull the big four have become. The ITV soap Night and Day is a cult hit among Britain's teenagers. Admittedly, this is in large part because the unbearably attractive Sam Armstrong (played by Stuart Manning) seems to have it written into his contract that he must get his kit off at least once a week. But it is also because this soap opera is breaking all the conventions of the genre.
The big four have a visual and narrative grammar that we all know. There is no incidental music; we very, very rarely see the residents leave the street where they live (and almost always work); everything is told chronologically; and so on. By being filmed on a "real street", where the interiors really were inside the exteriors, Brookside moved the genre forward. Now Night and Day is doing the same thing.
Clearly influenced by David Lynch's Twin Peaks, the show currently focuses on the disappearance of a 15-year-old girl and the fallout that this causes for her family, friends and numerous secret lovers. The story is unwinding through the clever use of flashbacks, alternating between Jane's past and the present. There is an obvious question mark over how long this can be maintained - a soap that runs for 20 years cannot keep flashing back without bumping into its former self, like the Michael J Fox character in Back to the Future. The real crunch point will be whether the show can maintain its impetus once this storyline has been resolved. Soaps, after all, are meant to be stories without end.
What the big soaps can learn from Night and Day, however, is clear. Narrative techniques and creative twists normally associated with films are shamelessly pillaged. One character, who had not had sex for several years, found that his penis began speaking to him (in his head, you understand - forgive the pun). Fantasy sequences, too, have been used to good effect, as has the device of characters talking to camera.
When a traditional soap device is used, such as the love triangle, an original spin is put on it: Fiona and Mike, a husband and wife who go to a marriage counsellor, find that the counsellor has become obsessed with Fiona after a few visits. Most shockingly, the characters actually leave their street and walk around real, public places such as parks and supermarkets. These techniques make you realise how drab the fixed rules of normal soaps have become.
Night and Day has also become notorious for its decision to broadcast a raunchy, late-night omnibus (the other shows go out at teatime). At times, this doesn't work, with the omnibus edition just looking sordid. But even when it aspires only to titillate, it does so creatively: one weird sex scene adopted a computer-porn aesthetic by pixellating out the genitals.
It is not hard to see why the programme seems to be this year's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The perfectly judged performance of Adam Paul Harvey, who plays Tom Brake, beautifully captures the endless embarrassments and squirmishes of being a teenager, and deserves singling out - but the whole show is an irresistibly original, trashy package. Somebody should send tapes to the producers of the big soaps, and fast.
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