Writing about Soap Opera- Charlotte Brunsdon-1984
Newspaper articles, novels, souvenir programmes, TV Times promotions, even cookery books, function to support the simultaneous co-existence of them and us.
Often, these stories of ‘real life’ run as a kind of sub-text, or parallel soap to the one we watch on television. This sub-text is not kept separate when watching. The knowledge you have about particular characters
‘in real life’ feeds into and inflects the pleasure of soap watchin

However, in the main, soap opera functions, within writing about other programmes, as a symbol of the truly awful. Thus, in a discussion of American television, Rod Allen, writing in The Listener (8/7/76), observes that these programmes ‘would make Crossroads look like Oscar Wilde by comparison.’ There is an uneasy relationship between institutionalized television criticism and popular taste and audience. What is the role of television criticism which can neither explain the popularity of a programme like Crossroads nor, indeed, even take this popularity seriously? 4 Hobson upbraids television critics for employing critical criteria derived from high art in the evaluation of a popular form such as soap opera, and appears to argue that popularity itself should be a central evaluative criterion. Most usefully, she shows that the audience for Crossroads is mainly female and often elderly. Here we begin to see that it is not only issues of class, but also gender and age status of the audience which may inflect critical judgement.

Soap opera is seen as the opium of the masses, particularly the female masses – soothing, deluding, product and producer of false consciousness. – the credits of Brookside,
Coronation Street and Crossroads all work primarily to establish a sense of place. It is not character, in the sense of heroes and heroines, or the promise of action, and enigmas resolved, that is central, but the