Soap operaA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWinteraction). Th e gap between one episode of
a soap and the next may be used by members of
the audience to mull over latest developments,
talk about these to members of the family, fellow
workers, friends, thus heightening anticipation
and enjoyment and making the viewer a more
active ‘reader’ of the text.
Because most soaps distribute interest among
numerous characters, no single character is
indispensable. Of key importance is the commu-
nity of characters in their situation. As Robert C.
Allen writes in ‘Reader-orientated criticism’ in
Channels of Discourse: Television and Contem-
porary Criticism (Methuen, 1987; Routledge,
1990), edited by Allen, ‘anything might happen
to an individual character, but, in the long run,
it will not aff ect the community of characters as
a whole’.
In a European Journal of Communication
article, June 1998, entitled ‘European soap
operas: the diversifi cation of the genre’, Tamar
Liebes and Sonia Livingstone identify three
types, or models, of soap opera – the Dynastic,
the Community and the Dyadic. Th e fi rst focuses
on one powerful family with a number of satellite
outsiders. Th e American soap Dynasty was an
example of this model, while the UK soaps Coro-
nation Street and EastEnders typify the commu-
nity model. Th ese are characterized by a number
of interconnecting and interrelating families ‘all
living within one geographical neighbourhood
and belonging to one community’.
The dyadic model concerns a ‘destabilized
network of a number of young people, densely
interconnected, mostly unigenerational,
interchanging couples, with past, present and
future romantic ties, continually absorbed in
the process of reinventing kinship relations’. Th e
authors cite the American soap Th e Young and
the Restless as a prime example of the dyadic
model; to this we might add This Life, which
won something of a cult status in the UK until in
1998 the BBC decided not to commission further
episodes.
Community soaps, Liebes and Livingstone
say, ‘have been produced in the spirit of public
broadcasting, indicating certain pedagogic aims’
and ‘constitute a type of public for debating
social issues’. A notable example of a soap which
has proved both pedagogic and a source of public
debate is the highly popular Spanish drama,
Cuentame Como (Tell Me How It Happened),
fi rst produced in 2002.
Th e soap revisits – and retrieves – Spanish
history, its characters and situations being cast
in the period of Fascist rule under GeneralTV in particular. John Hartley in Th e Politics of
Pictures: Th e Creation of the Public in the Age
of Popular Media (Routledge, 1992) writes that
smiling ‘has become one of the most public
virtues of our times, a uniform that must be
worn on the lips of those whose social function
is to create, sustain, tutor, represent and make
images of the public’. Hartley asserts that ‘smil-
ing, in fact, is now the “dominant ideology” of
the “public domain”, the mouthpiece of the
politics of pictures’.
Snap-shot Term invented by astronomer Sir
John Herschel (1792–1871), writing in 1860 of
‘the possibility of taking a photograph as it were
a snap shot’. He may well have been referring
to Thomas Skaife’s Pistolgraph of 1858. See
camera; photography, origins.
Soap opera radio or TV domestic drama series;
the term emanates from the US, where such
programmes were initially sponsored by big soap
companies who had the housewife viewer in
mind. Of the long-running soap opera in the UK,
Coronation Street, poet laureate John Betjeman
once announced, ‘At half-past seven tonight I
shall be in paradise.’
Traditionally soaps have been characterized
by an immediately identifi able set-up, a stereo-
typical cast of characters and a distancing from
contemporary reality and anxieties. However,
the end of the 1980s saw the arrival of soaps
exploiting social problems for all they were
worth. From the BBC, EastEnders, featuring
abortion, rape, illegitimacy, murder, robbery,
incest and unemployment; from Channel 4,
Brookside, demonstrating that Merseyside can
vie problem for problem with London’s East
End, featuring rape, stabbings, euthanasia,
homosexuality and, of course, unemployment.
Th e BBC’s import from Australia, Neighbours,
proved it could do more than hold its own, with
beatings-up, meningitis, divorce et al.
In a sense, soaps have become a paradigm
for television itself. In terms of texts they take
up a staggeringly large amount of viewing time
and occupy centre-stage in the minds of vast
and international audiences. Critical theory has
located in soaps rich seams for investigation,
especially in an age when the way meaning is
read into texts by audience and the ways audi-
ences use media have come to dominate critical
thinking and much media research.
Generally soaps are less concerned with action
than with interaction, primarily between
the characters on the broad socio-cultural
canvas but also, in a proactive way, between the
characters and the viewers (see parasocial