Kenny's Media Blog

In the UK, soap operas are one of the most popular genres, and are often broadcast during television and radio prime time. Generally British soaps are focused on the working-class, as most derived as a result of the British New Wave. Currently the most popular soaps shown in the United Kingdom are the British found soaps: Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdae, Hollyoaks, Doctors but in addition to these locally found soaps there are some internationally shown shows (mainly from Australia) such as Neighbours and Home and Away.

Coronation Street, EastEnders and Emmerdale are consistently among the highest-rated shows on British television week-on-week as shown by BARB ratings. Other dramas such as Doctor Who and Spooks rarely achieve the average rating reached by these British Soap Opera's. Especially so round the holiday period which prove the most successful time of year. EastEnders currently holds the highest rated television broadcast, of a produced show rather than a broadcast of interests such as Diana's funeral, when in 1986 the Christmas episode of EastEnders was watched by over 30.15 million viewers.

Throughout the years there have also been many attempts to launch Soap Opera's which have failed, such as in 2000s ITV attempted to launch Echo Beach (Starring Jason Donovan and Martine McClutchen) which ran along side it's parody sister series about writing the show Moving Wallpaper (staring Ben Miller) however when ITV came to review and re-commission these shows only the latter survived leaving Echo Beach another failed soap opera attempt. ITV also tried to launch The Royal Today which was a daily spin-off of a very popular sixties series The Royal.

The term "Soap Opera" derives from the story behind the soap opera's being simple and squeaky clean, even though the soaps themselves have complicated narratives than can involve romance, betrayal and dark family secrets. In the 1920s, radio was booming, just as television is today, the broadcasters wanted to get advertisers in on radio so as to increase their profits. Radio stations began by convincing businesses that sold household goods to sponsor radio shows which attracted their target audiences. To appeal to their main consumers of the items - female homemakers - the radio stations created the daytime serial format which is where soaps derived from originally and the first soap ran in Chicago and was sponsored by a margarine company.

In the United Kingdom the BBC still broadcast the longest running soap which is The Archers. It’s currently running on BBC Radio 4 but first started it’s stint as on the BBC in 1951. It constantly attracts around 5 million listeners each episode or roughly around 25% of all those tuned in to the radio. The show is so popular in the popular culture of Britain that there was uproar when BBC decided to change it’s scheduling in the 90s and remove it from the prime time slot. The Archers has now run for almost 16 thousand 15 minute long episodes. Meaning over 166 non-stop days have been produced and broadcast.