Suds and lather
Peter Black
All For Love: A Study in Soap Opera Peter Buckman (Secker & Warburg £9.95) It is to Peter Buckman's credit that he has -I-written a study of soap opera which contains so many elements of the ridicu- lous, without letting his sense of humour run away with him. The complications of the job can be judged from the first page of his introduction. He defines soap opera as `a continuous serial of contemporary life, where traditional moral values are asserted. Each episode in a soap advances the plots and subplots but does not resolve them.' This definition allows him to include Coronation Street, whose producers reject the label, quite rightly, because they insist on the quality control imposed by limiting the serial to an hour a week; and Dallas, an enthusiastically vulgar dramatisation of fantasies about power, money and sex. (The women actually look slippery, as if a light squeeze would pop them right out of their clothes.) Yet at the very end of his book he declares that these lavish peak- time soaps are essentially imitation, a passing fad compared to the daytime soaps that run for ever.
True soaps began on American radio in the early 1930s as a cheap filler of daytime hours. Their creator was Frank Hummert, advertising man. He asked himself why the housebound audience should not lap up from radio the kind of serial story they followed in their magazines? As whatever succeeded was endlessly imitated, the soaps proliferated to general satisfaction until advancing television ate into their audiences. In 1960, the few survivors were ended in a single day, though the truly durable ones had already transferred to television. Once a malleable format, such as the loose but substantial one devised for Coronation Street, becomes popular, there is no reason why the title should not run for ever. Guiding Light, originally sponsored by Proctor and Gamble, has run for 47 years.
No television service can do without soaps, though national characteristics dis- tinguish styles. In America, the demand has created big organisations capable of pumping out soaps in one-hour segments, five days a week, 52 weeks of the year, occupying screen time from midmorning until the school lets out. There is none of this outside America. There are fewer vacant hours to be filled.
The lure of the continuing narrative creates addiction. Wedgie Benn might claim that the creation of addicts to stories that uphold the status quo is an artful capitalist conspiracy. But Peter Buckman easily flattens this line. The soaps ignore politics and heavy social problems that cannot be resolved in human terms. Their morality is based on 'the trinity of love, family and property'. There are no leftwing soaps because the part of human nature that watches soaps is deeply conservative. It sees drama as individual conflict. The object is to hold up a mirror to ordinary life, where the talk is more entertaining, the quarrels more dramatic, the confronta- tions less inhibited, than in the lives that gaze dreamily into the glass.
It would have been a poor look-out for the book's sales had Peter Buckman left out Dallas. It certainly serves to illustrate extremely vividly the power of soaps to endow their stars with a kind of reality. Larry Hagman's JR is as famous as Prince Charles. I once saw a German magazine cover which gave equal prominence to pictures of Grace Kelly and Charlene Tilton, who plays the short-necked young blonde in Dallas. Consider the triumphant- ly lucrative tours of Australia and New Zealand of Patricia Phoenix, who plays the tempestuous voluptuary Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street.
Yet, as much as the characters they play, the actors are vulnerable to the whips and scorns of time. They are the creatures of the producer, whose word means life or death. It is a hard condition that the story matters more than the characters. When Noele Gordon was written out of Cross- roads, thousands of indignant fans wrote to ATV to swear they would never watch again. But they were defeated by their need to know what happened next. The arrival of a new producer, perhaps some keen young party who lets fall strong ideas for shaking up the soap, puts the cast into a lather. (A story about Coronation Street, not included by Buckman because it is apocryphal, tells how Annie and Jack Walker of the Rover's Return were marked for writing out. The means chosen was to introduce a new character, a brew- er's representative who offered them promotion to a bigger pub. So as charac- ters they had to rejoice while as actors their hearts were breaking. In the event, a higher power thwarted the producer's in- tent. He was dropped.) Buckman finds it hard to come to terms with the intrinsic silliness of much of his subject. 'All soaps are written to be forgot- ten,' he says, quoting Gilbert Seldes. He admits that the form does not change because the audience likes it as it is, and it is impossible to prove that changing it will increase audiences. Later on, he says that the form 'is important enough and flexible enough to accommodate the serious ambi- tions of its most creative critics."— If critics can galvanise writers to make it work to their advantage and, more impor- tant, get the audience to demand more from it, its future can only be more exciting.'
That's quite a pair of ifs. He goes on to assert that the existence of critics who are not afraid to call for these efforts acknow- ledges the importance of soap. No, it doesn't. It only confirms that they have not studied the form as deeply as he has.
He worries a bit about the fans who confuse illusion with reality, asking him- self, are they nuts? Perhaps `barmy' is a better word for the gentle, dreamlike, harmless condition that enfolds them, as they summon up these enormously expen- sive versions of what they used to read for twopence.
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