by Ashley Smith

Created on: January 16, 2010   Last Updated: January 17, 2010

All countries that have television channels have soap opera, both their own and those they import. The programmes tend to focus on a group of people in a certain street or in a smallish area. The storyline will try and weave together the lives and businesses to form a story line where everyone gets involved with everyone else. The problem for the casual observer is that in order to maintain an audience the episodes always end with a cliffhanger moment based on peril, surprise or shock. This makes many stories convoluted so they fit the time scale needed. They also tend to involve affairs and love action between a limited amount of people in order to keep within the restrictive grouping of the main actors.

This restriction means that often families share components with others, certain families ended up with interlinked parentages and interlinked children. This is just one of the things that soap opera fans allow and expect in their story lines. Suspension of disbelief is the adage that applies here, accept that what you see is for real. This is used most often for science fiction and other improbable story lines, soap operas though are expected to reflect real life. 

The banality of ordinary life doesn't make big stories so these things tend to either get forgotten or adapted to fit. For example, there seems to be a washing machine shortage in Eastenders as everyone has to use the launderette. Also they are incredibly lazy in the area, as although there is a tube station at the end of the street, there is a need for two different taxi companies as well. Also everyone seems to want to conduct their lives in the pub, again an exaggeration of most people's lives.

The biggest fantasy is the amount of people dying in soap operas, often in bizarre circumstances. There tends to be the archetypal hard nut/gangster family in every soap who seem to be involved in a fair few deaths. People get shot, beaten up or run over with a great regularity. This is of course a good way for actors to be written out or to leave with a bang but does stretch credulity a bit far. There are even more extreme deaths thrown in for good measure now and again. One British soap threw in a plane crash on the village while an American one a few years back used a machine gun cull at a wedding to rid some characters.Suspend your disbelief from a great height and indulge if you wish, but don't expect to see your life shown or represented.

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