For academic research I have read 3 books that focus on the subject of Soap Opera's in order to develop my understanding of their conventions, history ad audience.
Soap Opera By Dorothy Hobson
Soap Opera By Dorothy Hobson
In this book she talks about how “love, relationships, families, women, men, babies, children, marriage, divorce, death, heartache, heartbreak, tears happiness, laughter, violence, not a little sex” are all covered by British soap operas. She talks about how the soap opera “dominates” television, which is true to an extent. Here in England soap operas are given primetime slots.
She talks about how soap operas history “spans and reflects social change, artistic as they often have to change to keep up with modern stereotypes and situations. Taboo subjects and cultural development and national and international broadcast history”. This shows the flexible nature of soaps 50 years ago are now everyday situations.
She suggests soap operas could be the perfect broadcasting form as it “achieves and retains audiences, gains press coverage, creates controversy, brings in advertising revenue, supports a public ethos and generates discussion” and she explains a soap’s “dominant theme” is “realism” as it strives to create a world similar to our own, just slightly more exciting. She then goes on to talk about how soap operas are global things that are played on many channels in many countries. She goes on to talk about how soap operas follow older literary forms.
According to her statistics, every week in Britain around 32 million soap opera fans will watch a total of forty-five hours of soap and almost three-quarters of the adult population will watch a soap opera in any given month. There are/ were 5 main soap operas in the UK. Coronation Street, Crossroads (now finished), Emmerdale, EastEnders and Brookside (also finished).
She then tries to tackle the question “what is soap opera?” “Is there a definition which can capture the essence of the genre?” She wonders if it’s the frequency, or the forms ability to evolve with the times.
She then goes on to talk about American soap operas such as Dallas and Dynasty and explains the connection between soap and the day time TV drama that adapted the name for its genre is because they were originally sponsored by soap companies, and so that name was adopted for them.
She writes about soap operas on the radio “the link between the American radio and television soap operas came to the UK through British radio soap opera”. She goes on to talk about Mrs Dale’s Diary, a radio soap about a strong female character called Mrs Dale. This strong female character is often portrayed more than one time in soaps as soaps were originally directed towards women and therefore had to empower women and appeal to them.
Why viewers watch: a reappraisal of television’s effects By Jib Fowles
This is another text about Television that I have studied to get a better understanding of television and its viewers.
In chapter 3, What Viewers Truly Want (and Get) from television, Fowles talks about how a transaction goes on when a viewer sits down in front of the TV. He describes the unknown action of agreeing to watch commercials so that they can watch “phantasms of a very special sort,” essentially meaning that people agree to watch adverts in order to get entertainment from a TV show that is interesting. If a program is not interesting the audience will not watch it.
He goes on to ask what humans want from the medium of television. He describes tevelvision viewing as a personal activity. Although it once was a family activity back when families were bigger and television sets were expensive, but now TV’s are cheap and families are smaller it means almost every family member has one and it has now become a private engagement with the viewers mind by the program they are watching. This means in our soap we will have to include token, stereotypical characters that people across the board can recognise and connect to easily, if they cannot then they will watch something else that they find more enjoyable and easier to connect to.
He talks about how television is an enjoyable activity. He backs this up by saying that in surveys people describe getting pleasure from programs they watch. He says that in a survey for the Surgeon General (1972) 82% of programs watched created feeling of pleasure in the viewer. Some Americans even claim to receive more pleasure from TV than from sex, food, hobbies, religion, marriage, money or sports. Suggesting that watching other people’s pleasure, pain, possessions or just general lives is perhaps more pleasurable to people than their own lives.
Describing television as a “needed activity” he goes on to describe gruesome murders that have resulted from viewers being made to stop watching, suggesting a dependency on television once viewers integrate themselves into the lives of characters or are given constant access to the things they love. He says that the only way to measure how important a television set to a household is to remove them from households and study the level of deprivation a family feels, however he says that a testament to the need for a TV is the fact that not many people are even willing to surrender their TV. When one man, Charles Winick, studied households without television sets that had previously owned them found that the average time families went with out TV, while theirs were broke or had been stolen and were waiting to be replaced, was 6 weeks. During that time period people experienced morning and anxiety. Only 8% of people studied reported little distress without their TV.
He continues with the fact that, even though television viewing is a necessity, it is a casual activity. He describe studies that all prove that for a big part of the time someone is viewing TV they are actually doing something else and the television is more like background noise than anything. Even people who describe them selves as constant viewers of a program show little loyalty to it when it is on, often missing episodes or possibly not paying attention to it fully when it is on. This suggests that even though people feel they are loyal to a specific TV show they really need constant interesting storylines in order to watch every episode with complete dedication. This is something perhaps that needs to be thought about when creating a soap. It means that storylines have to be constantly interesting and drawing viewers in from episode to episode. When thinking about future storylines for our soap if it was ever put into production this would be a large thing to consider as ratings would drop dramatically, considering this study, if the story line became a little dull.
The Soap Opera Paradigm By James H. Wittebols
This book talks about the change in advertising and audience of American soaps, but it also fits in well with British soaps.
In this book the author, James H. Wittebols, describes the creation of radio soaps and how “armed” with knowledge of their consumer fields product companies “sought programming” that would reach housewives and women at home. He describes the creation of soap operas as “ingenious” due to the fact that they combined normal purchasing decisions, which housewives make on a regular basis, with serial storytelling where the characters used the same products that were being advertised on a daily basis. I would imagine that this gave the women listening to the radio soaps a sense of being part of the action, if only in a small way, like nowadays when people by the same things as celebrities to be like them.
He goes on to say that a woman named Irna Phillips played a big part in changing the theme of American Soap Opera’s into that of the ‘American Dream’ or ‘The American Way of Life’. These two terms were coined in the 1930’s, when the soon loyal female viewers would tune in and watch the Soaps which would provide role models that would overcome the adversity of The Great Depression, when everyone was struggling.
The next important soap creators are, according to the author, Frank and Anne Hummet. Instead of incorporating the sponsor’s adverts into the soap operas they sandwiched the adverts on either side of the Soap. This advertising technique is still often used in British Soap Operas today. However when this technique was first used the adverts related much more with the storylines at the time than they do today. This newly developed technique was a better way of advertising as it did not interrupt with the narrative of the Soap. Both types of advertising were found to be useful and studies showed that listener’s preference to a certain product increased with the hours they spent listening to the Soap.
The author goes on to describe how the move to Television, and the change in America’s social climate, created changes within soaps themselves. The storylines became more complex, the casts got bigger and the storylines delved deeper into the issues of relationships and intimacy. However their production costs rose greatly due to the need to have sets built and the fact that the running time of soaps increased too.
In American soaps storylines continued with their moral advice theme throughout the 1950’s but by the mid 60’s the plots became more psychological and more about the motives of the people in the storylines. In the Late 60’s and 70’s they changed again to reflect the social issues of the time and by the 80’s they reached their apex. However by the 90’s, with many women working, soaps started to decline. By 2000 TV channels in America began to realise their problem and, like Britain, they started to bring in more modern and hard hitting storylines to existing soap operas and also new shows entirely that centred on younger women, from 16 to 24, in an attempt to draw in the younger viewers and increase the viewing figures over all.
However the author makes the point that even though Soaps are now also aimed at a younger audience the average Soap watcher’s age is still increasing each year. This could be down to two things. Firstly, the fact that although Soaps tackle issues for younger people they are also still relevant to older people. Secondly, it could also be that most Soap viewers develop a relationship with Soaps which requires them to watch every episode almost religiously. Once viewers get hooked into plot lines and characters they find it hard to let go and as new plot lines and characters are always being introduced it is hard to see one story line through without one or two new ones starting that viewers must also see complete. This end up being a never ending spiral and it keeps viewers hooked in.
