The "foreign soaps" topic

[heatherwebber]

Af of 5 weeks ago the internet scheme was still going on. I heard them post something in last week's about one of the supposed Russian women being deported. Maybe more on tonight's shows.

[Sylph]

[JamesF]

The article must have come from early Friday as Five picked it up a couple of hours after the BBC dropped it. To be fair, the BBC have essentially paid a price for the show over the past few years that doesn't reflect the number of viewers it brings to BBC daytime. The problem comes from the BBC's public service remit and the difficulty in justifying paying for such a populist show. EastEnders at least has pretensions of being socially relevant whereas Neighbours is honest to God soap opera.

Five will treat it well. When they poached H&A from ITV 6 or 7 years ago, they gave it a publicity campaign never before seen in the UK for an individual show. The extra money will also go towards a higher quality product as far as production values are concerned with the High Definition change.

Anyway EastEnders...I think the May/Dawn story is going to twist a little. The show's having a bit of a publicity blitz at the moment (though they've humorously changed the tagline from "everybody's talking about it" to "there's more to EastEnders") and a print ad in one of the tabloids showed May offering Dawn cash.

Also a friend of mine told me that Rob has actually hit May this past week -- I assumed it was a lie on her part.

[heatherwebber]

The ones I'm getting tonight are also heavy on Dot. A brilliantly written trip where Dot's faith was confronted landed her with an abandoned baby. Then Gary's mother Hazel showed up.

Then Jim Branning went to some kind of prostitution club with Russian girl hookers looking for the mother who later turned up at their house.

So again they seem to be stacking up more new characters.

There was also a lot of fun with Mo trying to prove Dot had a baby. Some of this material was hilarious.

It was actually a welcome relief from all that May-Dawn-Rob stuff. That is getting tiresome even though Rob is very good looking.

[Sylph]

I wish I could watch Corrie instead of EE...

[Sylph]

[JamesF]

Oh I'd take Corrie over EastEnders every time. Obviously it has its dull patches like any soap but the writing is so so strong that it's never been absolutely decimated and revamped like EE. I don't know how well it would translate but the humour and well observed characters make it head and shoulders above the rest. Not to mention the number of characters that have been in it since the 60s and 70s and still have front burner stories.

Sunday's episode in particular was one of the best soap episodes I've seen this year. Claire woke to find her house on fire and fell down the stairs getting knocked unconscious. She was eventually rescued but her baby is presumed dead (though it won't prove to be the case as we'll find out the fire was started deliberately to kidnap the baby). What is essentially a very OTT story is grounded in community and characterisation.

I particularly loved Gail running into the pub in nothing but a robe to try and find Claire's husband. No vanity, no pretension. And Eileen breaking down in the hospital later as she'd had dinner at Claire's earlier in the evening and put the baby to bed. "I sang him to sleep and I was terrible! The last thing he ever heard was this awful woman singing to him. It should have been Claire."

If you can get the episodes anywhere like UKNova or whatever or even YouTube, it's well worth the time.

[Sylph]

James, what do you know about the people who wrote Corrie and who are now writing it?

I'm not sure what you meant by this.

[Sylph]

[Sylph]

[heatherwebber]

I wish I could get Corrie as well (I used to back in the mid-90s) but I always preferred Eastenders.

For that matter I wish I could get Neighbours & Home & Away too.

[Sylph]

Me too.

[dannigold]

Eastenders peaked at nearly 10 million viewer's the following evening. This was slightly higher than Corrie on Friday night.

[JamesF]

A lot of the character based stuff in Corrie comes from kind of...cultural absurdities and I think people might need some kind of knowledge of that. The self-reflexive kind of humour borne out of for example, "chav culture" in this country. It's not all like that and I guess I'm being a tad condescending. If someone watches a foreign show, they do after all usually have some knowledge of that country.

The writers of Corrie. I know that there was a certain staleness behind the scenes up until the mid 90s. Some great great scriptwriters but not so great producers and during that period EE was totally on top of its game in comparison. In 1997, they combatted this by drafting in a new producer Brian Park who went axe crazy and this drove a lot of the seasoned scripters away. It kind of continued in to the early 00s with producer Jane Macnaught who was attempting essentially to copy the darkness of EastEnders and it was dreadful. There was one story in particular with teenager Toyah Battersby being raped in a dingey alleyway that was just so far removed from what the show was about. By this point all those scriptwriters had left so there was no humour to anything. It was all fairly generic.

By around 2001, a former producer came back on board and managed to lure back a considerable number of the old scriptwriters who really turned the show around. I should note that it never had the kind of decline EE has battled but it was substandard. The quality has arguably pretty much stayed up since then with a former Emmerdale head honcho taking over the producer reigns. Jonathan Harvey is a particularly good scriptwriter. He's also done a fair bit of sitcom work. Daran Little also used to be tremendous. He was the Corrie archivist in the 90s who wormed a writing role but a couple of years ago he was either burned out/on an ego trip and jumped ship to do some terrible Hollyoaks spin-off that got canned after one season. I think it was on BBC America recently. Whether he'll crawl back remains to be seen.

I know torrents are readily available online for both should you ever have the time or inclination.

[Sylph]