The Laws of Soap

by Alex J Allen

aaa

Since the popularisation of the humble soap opera in Britain during the 1970's and 80's, it has embedded itself in to our lives and in to our culture. People plan their evenings around them, they cry, laugh, sympathise, empathise, even grieve over the events that unfold every night. They are a surreal mish mash of reality and fiction that we subconsciously accept. A man can lose his wife to a long illness or a fatal car crash in one episode, and have accepted it and moved on three episodes later. The rules that apply to us in our day to day lives go out the window. A current Hollyoaks storyline recently saw a family held hostage in a church by their mother's estranged son. One of the daughters died in a dramatic explosion after the son quizzed the mother under the condition that for every question she answered incorrectly, she would be forced to choose one of her daughters to be killed. Pretty dramatic, or so you would think. Yet four episodes later, and during a scene where one the surviving daughters is shot crying alone on a park bench, we find ourselves thinking, 'are we still talking about this? That was last week, tell me something new!' In other words, we want to see our own lives, but better. We want to see pieces of ourselves in these characters, but without the filler that preoccupies our own existance. We don't want to see people mowing the lawn, doing the ironing, doing the washing up or putting the bins out. We want action, action, action. And when the action has subsided, we want our characters to bounce back with little more than a moment's reflection on the events that have just unfolded, and get back up again for more. We want to view our own lives, but just the highlights. Our lives with all the material goods we wish we owned, all the risks we wish we had the audacity to take, getting involved in relationships which know could never occur. It is life, without any of the stodge. Characters trade flatmates weekly, regardless of leases and contracts. A smoothie bar which would have been totally financially unviable and should have gone bust long ago, sells cold drinks with only outdoor seating to offer throughout the autumn and in to the winter months. There is only one restaurant which is the chosen eatery for anniversaries, morning coffees, family dinners, dates and literally any other event that justifies a celebratory meal. There seems to be only one clothing store, a giant Topshop / Topman, and all the characters buy their clothes from there and nowhere else. The students appear to live in only one student flat, which is situated in the middle of the campus in the midst of a corridor. There are no other student flats to be seen nearby, and new characters seem to just enrol for the Hollyoaks University instantly, regardless of the time of year, and whether they've completed any A Levels. Despite all these glaring irregularities that we see nightly and subconsciously conclude aren't quite right, we ignore them. They don't matter. Soaps simplify life, they make the impossible seem possible. If you want to join the police, three weeks, and you're on the beat. If you want to start a band, you can buy a guitar, regardless of cost, and teach yourself. For the idle dreamer, lounging on the sofa after another day at a job they swore they would leave, just seeing the prospect of being able to alter their predicament with such ease gives them hope. It makes them feel that it's OK that they don't own the latest iPod, the most expensive suit, drive the newest car and have the highest paying job, because when they want those things, they're there for the taking.