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Why British Soaps are in Terminal Decline
Tillymint82
Posts: 946 Forum Member
✭✭
I think its finally happened
The nation on a whole has fallen out of love with the soaps.
The explanation.
Theres only so many times an affair, an explosion, a car crash, a shock death, a wedding, a baby etc can be shocking an interesting.
Lets take Max Branning
A character that is going around and around in circles.
Marriage, Affair, Reveal, beg for forgiveness, renewed relationship, shock baby, marriage, affair....etc
I havent watched EastEnders properly for months.
I think the frequency of the episodes is Killing British Soap.
The inital demand for 4, 5 6 episodes a week was handled well to begin with. But the constant struggle for ratings has meant that writers are constantly going around in circles trying to manufacture Drama and in some cases recreate the golden years,
In coronation since Ricard Hillman weve had a further 2 High Profile multi Murder cases.
Tony
John Stape
All who started out as accidental killers. But as the storylines progressed Murdered to Cover their tracks.
Lets not forget Katy who went on to Kill herself and Tracy whoi Murdered Charlie. Karl who murdered Sunita,
There comes a point when the viewer becomes desensitised to the shock, and awe.
I used to love a good cracking stunt. Car Crash, explosion, tumble off a cliff etc.
But they happen that often now i find myself shrugging them off.
There was a time i would have been so excited about the big stunt in Emmerdale tonight. But its literally only 18 months since the last car went flying off a cliff.
The last amazing storyline was Danielle and Ronnie.
But even then impatient viewers are determined to wrap every major storyline up within a month (otherwise it gets accused of dragging.
Then they moan that Storylines are becoming repetitive. They don't give the stories a chance to breath and play out Naturally.
We've become a nation of rabid devouring, impatient soap watchers who love to complain.
I think the British soaps are in Terminal decline. I think its inevitable that at least one of the big 4 will end in the next 5-10 years
The nation on a whole has fallen out of love with the soaps.
The explanation.
Theres only so many times an affair, an explosion, a car crash, a shock death, a wedding, a baby etc can be shocking an interesting.
Lets take Max Branning
A character that is going around and around in circles.
Marriage, Affair, Reveal, beg for forgiveness, renewed relationship, shock baby, marriage, affair....etc
I havent watched EastEnders properly for months.
I think the frequency of the episodes is Killing British Soap.
The inital demand for 4, 5 6 episodes a week was handled well to begin with. But the constant struggle for ratings has meant that writers are constantly going around in circles trying to manufacture Drama and in some cases recreate the golden years,
In coronation since Ricard Hillman weve had a further 2 High Profile multi Murder cases.
Tony
John Stape
All who started out as accidental killers. But as the storylines progressed Murdered to Cover their tracks.
Lets not forget Katy who went on to Kill herself and Tracy whoi Murdered Charlie. Karl who murdered Sunita,
There comes a point when the viewer becomes desensitised to the shock, and awe.
I used to love a good cracking stunt. Car Crash, explosion, tumble off a cliff etc.
But they happen that often now i find myself shrugging them off.
There was a time i would have been so excited about the big stunt in Emmerdale tonight. But its literally only 18 months since the last car went flying off a cliff.
The last amazing storyline was Danielle and Ronnie.
But even then impatient viewers are determined to wrap every major storyline up within a month (otherwise it gets accused of dragging.
Then they moan that Storylines are becoming repetitive. They don't give the stories a chance to breath and play out Naturally.
We've become a nation of rabid devouring, impatient soap watchers who love to complain.
I think the British soaps are in Terminal decline. I think its inevitable that at least one of the big 4 will end in the next 5-10 years
0
Comments
Unlike Elsie Tanner, it's not time for the knacker's yard just yet...
John Stape was exceptional as he killed Charlotte in the heat of passion and Joy was manslaughter. He never set out to kill anyone. Richard Hillman era was also good though Richard was a cold blooded murderer who killed for money. The current Karl storyline is also good with Karl somewhere between John Stape and Hillman.
I never truly become bored of the soaps but I guess I'm exceptional.
Have you checked out the Ratings Thread lately, and compared soap ratings with just about any other tv programme?
Apparently not.
The two soaps you named there are the two soaps whose ratings, on the whole, are not falling.
Eastenders might not be at the level it was a few years ago, but a show that's survived as long as it has is always going to have ups and downs: it'll bounce back and viewers will return.
A lot of people have said they've stopped watching it until that story line has finished because it's so upsetting so the ratings might in fact fall.
I don't just mean people on this forum but people I chat to on Facebook, other forums, real life LOL It's an unpopular story line.
Soaps are on too often and the storylines do suffer, get repetitive. However for TV to cu them back from 5 eps per week to say 3 would be serious loss of revenue for TV companies, so it aint gonna happen any time soon
EastEnders and Emmerdale also pull in 30% - 40%. No other show touches them, considering they're on air every night.
The quality has certainly declined, but the demand for them is definitely still there. Less episodes can only be a good thing for them, but I doubt they'll cut the episodes when they're still holding up in their slots. Even so, if they do start to suffer due to the quality, they'll most likely axe the producer than axe an episode, unfortunately.
Maybe you should have done a bit more homework on a wider tv scale eh?
TV in general is in decline - at least as far as overnight ratings go.
The 3 main soaps are still generally the biggest rating shows on a nightly basis.
2/3 times a week is enough, that way they don't need to come up with filler stories as often.
UK TV on a whole has become completely unimaginative in recent years. American TV and even Australian TV setting the bar now for quality which UK TV desperately needs to learn from.
The UK soaps for the past 15 years have become desperately focused on sensationalism to deliver ratings, at the expense of truthful psychological character development. As the audience have got wise to this they've started switching off.
The demise of Brookside was caused by this. Once the most intelligent and boundary pushing soap on TV, it ended up becoming a shadow of its former glorious self, the plots and characters becoming stupid and absurd, and was axed years after it passed its sell by date.
IMO Neighbours is the best soap on the box at the mo, showing a maturity and relevance in its plots while putting character development at the heart of the drama.
I watch EastEnders but I can't say I enjoy it these days. Most of the actors are fantastic and always deliver, but the writing and storylining is mediocre, saying nothing illuminating about contemporary life. It's become a stocking filler of a TV show, very rarely setting the schedules alight these days.
What the soaps need to do is to go back to basics and return to being an intelligent, insightful and entertaining commentary on contemporary life. Only then will they regain their relevance and ultimately their ratings. As the author of this thread stated, while yet another sensational murder may get them on the cover of the TV mags, it is these plots what are ultimately killing their long term relevance and life span.
If I had to cut down on two then Emmerdale would be one too.
Indeed. To make matters worse, once the producers decide which storyline to feature, they feature it for a run of successive episodes eg Rhona's drug addiction, Nikhil handling the aftermath of Gennie's death and now Alex's body on Declan's land.
Indeed, I think the incest storyline on Brookside involving Nat and Georgia may have been the beginning of the end of Brookside. I think many people just found it too distasteful and unrealistic.
No two characters are exactly the same. Life is repetitive with babies being born, people dying, etc, so why would it be any different in a serial drama that's supposed to reflect reality?
Obviously Corrie was the first, starting in 1960, but even by the end of the 60s it was seen as an outdated nostalgic view of working class Northern English life.
By the end of the 70s, producer Bill Podmore had entered the fray and introduced more humour and light-heartedness to the show, stretching credibility a bit further. (the mid 70s to the mid 80s is still considered by some to be Corrie's "Golden Age")
By 1982, Corrie and Crossroads were the two main soaps and both seen as unrealistic and out-dated.
Channel Four was launching and Brookside was launched. Producer Phil Redmond wanted a realistic portrayal of ordinary life in the early 80s and was inspired by early Coronation Street.
By 1985, the BBC saw the success Corrie and Brookie was getting and wanting a piece of the action. So EastEnders was created, in a similar vein to Brookside, created a realistic view of 80s life, in the setting of the East End of London.
Coronation Street for the most part was still in it's nostalgic, light-hearted bubble and carried on in this vein.
Also through the 80s, popular US Soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty brought the idea of sensationalist/ stories to the UK audience (who shot JR? the Dynasty massacre etc etc etc)
The early 90s was when sensationalism really started in the UK. ITV's other soap Emmerdale's (people could argue this show was also in a bit of a nostalgic, idealistic bubble) ratings was in terminal decline. They turned to Brookside producer Phil Redmond in a last ditch attempt to save the show and get the show up the ratings table.
His solution? A plane crash. Nothing on this scale had ever been done before on a British soap before and it gripped the nation. It also attracted a lot of publicity for it's similarity to the Lockerbie plane crash only a few years previous. Nither reason did the ratings any harm whatsoever.
At the sametime over in Brookside, we had wife beater and child abuser Trevor Jordache killed by his wife and daughter and then buried under the patio. This controversial, sensational plot also drew in the viewers.
Around 96/97, Corrie was in decline. It was looking so outdated and twee compared to it's contemporaries (it was at the time compared to Last Of The Summer Wine), with far fetched mundane plots revolving around things like Derek's gnomes going missing and sending him postcards and the ghost of recently deceased character Ivy Brennan making her "presence" felt to certain Corrie residents.
In comparision to EastEnders, Brookside and the new and popular new youth-orientated soap Hollyoaks, Corrie was looking like a dinosaur.
Enter Brian Park, whose job it was to kick Corrie up the a?£e with sensationalist, headline grabbing stories. Many of the "old" characters like Percy Sugden and Derek Wilton axed to be replaced by the "family from hell" the Battersbys, a new, hunkier Nick Tilsley and a transsexual called Hayley
As people mentioned above, Brookside carried on getting more and more "out there" until it's cancellation in 2003.
With the increasing number of episodes per week also between the 90s and 00s (Emmerdale's trebled from two a week to six a week on average, the other soaps smilar) the quality has generally gone down and the producers still rely on sensationalism to bring the viewers in. The problem is viewers have seen everything sensational now and have tired/are tiring of it.