Soap and spectacular nostalgia

At Oxford, there used to be a graduate discussion group, OEL, devoted to cultural theory. On a couple of occasions they invited some of the producers and writers of Eastenders in to talk about the raison d’etre of the program. As you might expect, they talked about 'social relevance', about addressing issues like abortion and domestic violence. They were, they claimed, trying to portray contemporary society. Not naturalistically, but realistically nonetheless.

Now however people might appeal to 'relevance' etc as the alibi for their enjoyment (I doubt if many do), the appeal of British TV soaps lies elsewhere. For what we eavesdrop on in these programs is not the representation of a segment of contemporary capitalist society, but a kind of quasi-feudalism. If you take the three big TV soaps, Emmerdale, Eastenders and Coronation St., we see the same thing. It is a closed community. It has no outside. Okay, occasionally there are necessary visits from the police or ambulance service. But in general, these are communities which are concentrated inward. What unifies the community is not the media spectacle - news of distant catastrophes, fictions, the snuff theatre of reality TV. Soap people have no words for these distant things over which they have no control. They are preoccupied only with their own affairs, their own relations with each other. They are their own centre, and this centre has a binding force.

There is a local ‘landlord’ or benevolent property owner who seems to employ everyone and own all the cafes and businesses. One's needs, whether for employment or for consumption, can always be met by the immediate community. The local Patriarchs always seems to have vacancies for the strangers who intermittently arrive in the community. These strangers are of course not strangers for long. Whatever comes from outside the circumference of the hermetic village is effortlessly incorporated. The stranger is soon made familiar and divested of any ties to the outside world. Time is telescoped so that within months you are an old familiar face; your secrets and intimacies have been folded inside out and made the object of communal curiosity and solicitation. Bourgeois privacy has been abolished. Relations between people are relatively transparent.

Occasionally, there is a meaningless intrusion - a car crash, a murder, a freak fire. But these little bits of blind chance or Fate take out individuals rather than eroding the ties of the hermetic village. It is ultimately robust and inperturbable. It demands only that you sever all links to external family and friends.

Now, in a nostalgia for this quasi-feudal village, the spectacle of community, is to be found the appeal of the soap. It is precisely because these qualities are not to be found in the 'real life' of the audience, because they have long ago left the fabric of the everyday, that there is enjoyment in consuming in them as image. The serial anonymity of the millions of soap viewers is a 'community' exactly opposite to the one flickering before it on the screen. If there is canned laughter to laugh on our behalf, there is here canned 'community'. Both are a weak simulacrum of the real thing, but just as canned laughter appears to have an effect like that of real laughter - people feel perceptibly more relaxed etc afterwards, so canned community deposits within the spectator the weak facsimile of affects no longer possible within their own lives.

In this nostalgia for community some would discover utopian impulses, others would decry imaginary fulfilments as ideological. Indeed, the utopian and ideological dimension of these soaps are like two sides of a sheet of paper.

Now you’ll reply that all the features that I’ve mentioned are simply necessary to plot organisation, structural necessities rather than thematic considerations. Well, of course they are – this is the point. What the audience identify with are the apparently adventitious features imposed by the logic of the form itself. Which is why the earnest and ponderous talk about 'social relevance' etc from the producers is so much bluff.