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American soaps or 'daytime dramas' are aimed at the same lower-class audience as our EastEnders and Coronation Street (you can tell the market from the kind of products advertised in the breaks), but the characters and their settings and lifestyles are all middle class, glamorous, attractive, affluent and youthful. They are all lawyers and doctors and succesful entrepeneurs, beautifully groomed and coiffed, leading their dysfunctional family lives in immaculate, expensive houses, and having secret meetings with their lovers in smart restaurans and luxurious hotels. Virtually all soaps throughout the rest of the world are based on this 'aspirational' American model.
Only the English go in for gritty, kitchen-sink, working-class realism. Even the Australian soaps, which come closest, are glamorous by comparison with the grim and grubby English ones. Why is this? Why do millions of ordinary English people want to watch soaps about ordinary English people just like themselves, people who might easily be their next-door neighbours?
// Watching the English: the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour , by Kate Fox. |