Lee's storyline prompted the thought that generally soaps don't feature characters furthering their education or being ambitious and wanting to improve their job to one with a career structure.

Denise is the only one I can think of to try to improve her own education - and she has been told several times how it is selfish and might mean neglects her family duties.

Mick has never considered his son might need encouragement to gain academic qualifications or a profession, as clearly he hasn't gained any skills from his army career. The fact that they believed that he could be employed by a city firm with a high salary without a degree or substantial experience in the industry, proves their lack of understanding how the world of employment actually works.

Let's rejoice in educational achievement rather than ridicule anyone wanting to better themselves.

Hollyoaks does 😀

You don't need exam success to live and work in the one street without, in some cases, ever leaving it for years and years.

Home and Away does - they make a big thing of passing their Higher School Certificate (commonly known as the HSC) and going to university, college etc. There's a family called the Morgans in it and the youngest of them, a chap called Mason, is a medical student - he studies at the local university and works at the hospital .

EastEnders doesn't do it enough admittedly. By right now we have the original character with ambition back...Michelle, who is now a teacher. Stacey is qualified, as is Whitney. Johnny is at uni and Libby went to Oxford and is still there. Denise is the first one I can recall that's gone into adult education. Oh and Ben and Jay are both qualified mechanics.

But characters only ever get jobs of any note when they are absent. When they return, doctors, teachers, financiers etc all completely give up their profession and start working in the pub or the cafe or the car lot.

Where have you been.? I havent seen posts by you in a long time.

Well at least one of the Carters is going to uni (Johnnie)

Michelle did - she went back into education long after she had left school to have Vicky - she then went on to have an affair with one of her tutors but that's michelle for you

Afternoon bf. I've been incapacitated for a while but I have managed to find my way back. Nice to see you again.

Sorry Hollyoaks - I only watch CS and EE, and they don't show education in a positive light. Libby is an Oxford post-graduate student but is shown as nerdy and, the unthinkable, a Vegan.
In Corrie, even though she has failed all her exams, first time around, Bethany continues to miss school and none of her family seem concerned.

The worst example was Bradley Branning. He wanted to work in the city as he loved finance and economics and was really passionate about it.
By the end of his tenure Stacey had dragged him down to working at the car lot, as he was clearly getting ideas above his station.

Ambition has always been seen as a bad thing in Eastenders, look at the way it's always been acceptable to mock Ian for having some.

I liked the doctor in Emmerdale (Belle's boyfriend) who ended up working behind the bar in The Woolpack !!!

Denise from EastEnders uses her education to walk around with a smug superiority to those she feels are beneath them. She acts like she is so much better than everyone else yet she is the one that is heavily pregnant in her late forties with a married man's baby.

The most detestable character in that show by a country mile.

I disagree completely. Denise was embarrassed, not smug about her education.

Ambition is a dirty word in Corrie. I can't think of anyone who's studied for qualifications or whatever and then used them to get a job with prospects. People in responsible jobs they're qualified to do end up waiting on tables or serving in a shop - like Jenna the physiotherapist who ended up working at Roy's rolls.

When Tina was going out with some doctor, he tried to encourage her to study and think about starting a proper career; you'd have thought he was trying to persuade her to become a stripper or something from her reaction. She was quite happy as Liz's best barmaid thankyou.

EE is particularly unrealistic as all those lovely Victorian East End squares are middle class havens full of professional people. Sure, there will be people like Dot and Patrick who bought their houses when property was cheap but most of the working class families will have been forced out by property prices soaring into the millions.

It's expensive even to rent a room in those areas and those that do tend to be clever hispter types with tech, media or city jobs. They should introduce at least one middle class family - they've featured them in the past.

Bradley bought the car lot for him and Max.

Then you have characters not qualified at all acting like big shot business people, examples going to the likes of Sophie Webster and Michelle Connor. Sophie got kicked out of college and was content with just sitting behind Dev's counter reading a newspaper for a few years until suddenly her dad gave her a job at the garage and she began going around with a clipboard in hand and dealing with the day to day running of the business.

Same with Michelle. Spent most of the time being a barmaid and part-time singer, but now is an "expert" wedding planner (which she is crap at, not that the show would acknowledge this).

And seeing as you mention Tina, she was horrified at the doctor suggesting she tries to better herself to the point she poured a pint over him in the pub and humiliated him. But then about a year later she became Owen Armstrong's clerk at the Builder's Yard, where we were lead to believe Owen wouldn't have coped without her.

I think it was more the suggestion that her job wasn't good enough for him that irked her

Dot lives in a council house? A few years ago, there was a storyline where she was facing eviction because of arrears.

You sound like someone from Walford Web.

As always, I completely disagree with you.

Denise is not using her education in a smug way at all.

I think that is Denise is one of the least detestable characters on the show. Saying that about Phil or Ian or even Lee would be understandable, but not Denise.

That's the thing. The producers think the demographic that watches EE would rather see what they perceive as a gritty working class drama as people running a car lot or serving pints instead of having someone reading Russian Literature and Economics at York University or a PhD in Oncology at Imperial. Surely with a larger proportion of youngsters going to University in real life, there would be some more representation of this yet people on Albert Square are deemed to be in dead end jobs, stealing and extorting and strutting around like Sharon. Just so unrealistic but it's probably the liberal elite at the Beeb looking down on an laughing at the plebs.

University degrees are not everything, nor do they necessarily represent ambition. Lots of people work their way up and many with degrees do have periods where they do shop and cafe work.

ED has a lot of skilled workers - in the pub kitchen, garage, beauticians and on the farm, business people ( taxi firm, publican, shop keeper, millionaire tractor salesman, b&b landlord, cafe proprietor, factory owners, hauliers, scrap merchants, beautician, owner of chain of hairdressers,wedding planners, Belle ' s cordial enterprise).

As to university and college, Chas Dingle has a business degree, Moira took a business studies course, I think Megan is highly educated. Ashley and Harriet are qualified vicars and there are three vets! Belle Dingle is at sixth form college and running a business part time in spite of her illness. Finn also has a degree and is now running a taxi firm.

But do you need qualifications to be a mouse?