Looking back, I have wasted a disproportionate amount of my life watching television soap operas. This was only reaffirmed to me last night, when I was watching Eastenders and Emmerdale. God, when did those programmes get so rubbish?
If you have not watched Eastenders for a while (as I hadn’t), you can be sure of three things when you do tune back in one evening. One, Phil Mitchell will either be in prison or under arrest. Two, Sharon be overacting. And three, there will be a fight in the Queen Vic. Makes you wonder why they go to the trouble and expense of redecorating and reupholstering the place when it’s just going to get trashed with a baseball bat or smothered in blood…
Not that the others are much better. Emmerdale? It’s one of those soaps that’s long made for relatively relaxed viewing, owing perhaps to two things: the (admittedly very picturesque) Yorkshire countryside, and the fact that nothing interesting or eventful ever seems to happen. There was a plane crash about thirty years ago, and there’s seemingly always someone shagging about, but all of the recent ‘Emmerdale at 50’ celebrations and the replaying of ‘classic’ episodes have served as reminders that country life is rather boring.
There was a time when Coronation Street was genuinely funny, thanks to legendary characters and ridiculous-but-memorable storylines. Cleverly, it managed to combine this with actual drama. Who could forget when serial killer Richard Hillman drove the Platt family into a Manchester canal in a Ford Galaxy people carrier? I must say, that whole saga did little to enhance the car’s reputation for water leaks…
If ever I am sufficiently bored of an evening that I will succumb to watching an episode of Coronation Street these days, though, I am left totally underwhelmed and bereft of laughter by boring characters and equally dull storylines. What happened to Les Battersby? A hopeless actor, admittedly, but the sort of scruffy, gobby, football hooligan character that made you feel so much better about yourself as a person…
Maybe I’m yearning for the old days, or perhaps we’re all guilty of being spoilt by the sheer proliferation of televisual entertainment on offer in 2022. We often hear of terrestrial television trying to play catch-up with the likes of Prime and Netflix streaming services. There’s just so much available to watch these days, across a broad range of outputs and spanning a bewildering array of genres. I can even get YouTube on my telly, so I can watch really old episodes of Top Gear anytime I want. Now, that’s got to be preferable to looking at Pat Butcher’s earrings?
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