How the mighty have fallen.
This blog was going
to be all about the high-brow boxsets I had uncovered. Well, let’s be honest, that and a whole load
of trash TV that I only watch ironically and as part of my job in media and just
out of cultural curiosity and not because numbing my mind with garbage is the
only way to cope with the traumatising experience of living in a country that’s
repeatedly voting itself into oblivion.
Throughout, I’ve been scathing about the world of the soap opera. Even though soaps give us a lot as a
nation. They provide the contestants for
Strictly Come Dancing. I think that’s it, actually. I suppose they also reflect us as a nation
and our slowly liberalising attitudes. My
nineties childhood teatimes featured witnessing a lesbian kiss in Brookside, swiftly followed by
the discovery of a body under the patio (in Brookside, not at home in
Surrey). The British press railed at
this travesty in a way not out of place in The
Handmaid’s Tale, but, as we enter a new decade, nobody would bat an eyelid
at this now. People on TV (and in real
life) are free to snog whomever they choose and, in this new apparently
Tory4life Britain, we can hide whatever bodies we like under the patio. So, with that in mind, let’s tear Hollyoaks
apart.
While I don’t currently watch this soap, there was a period
when I did. Specifically, this was the
early summer of 2007. I was a finalist
at Oxford,
an institution that still asks me for money (I don’t have that much and they
certainly aren’t top of the list for getting it), and every waking minute was
spent preparing for our final exams, safe in the knowledge that roughly 100% of
my final grade would be generated by the eight three-hour papers I would be
sitting (in academic clothing known as subfusc). Ever since I began the degree back in 2003, I’d
noticed a guilt around our approach to studying: if you weren’t working, then
you were aching with the bad conscience that you should be. Pals at other academic institutions talk
fondly now about memories of watching Neighbours twice
a day and whiling away hours between a weekly lecture. My average week involved 3,000 words of
essay-writing (for which 40 hours of reading were expected – lol!) and
translations in four different directions.
Therefore, as things inevitably ramped up under increasing pressure
while finals approached, more and more time was spent studying and fewer and fewer
moments remained for leisure. However,
this was and still is a recipe for burnout.
After a day buried in books, we would meet for dinner in
hall, desperate for social contact and the support it brought. Naturally, this was informal hall, rather
than formal hall. Informal hall involved
a more canteen-like service, whereas for formal hall you had to don your gown
over your normal clothes and be served a three-course meal that began with
grace in Latin (which was sung by the choir on Sundays). Just imagine Harry Potter and you’re
pretty much there. Both types of hall
needed to be booked on a computer in the porters’ lodge (the main entrance to
college) before lunchtime. No, you couldn’t
access this through the internet as that would be Oxonian heresy. And yes, they really did need that many hours’
notice to broil an unidentifiable meat and mash some swede in time for that
evening’s meal. What a tangent! The point is, after wolfing down this subsidised
sustenance, we would still crave a further moment of unwinding. Being 6.30, we would end up in front of
someone’s TV. And thus, Hollyoaks would
end up in front of our eyes.
What began as ironic activity became something more
important. We began to look forward to
our scheduled viewing, anticipating the storyline developments and speculating
on the fallouts, anything to distract us from the 7pm drudge back to the library
or our rooms for more fusty book-learning.
To this day, the first few notes of the Hollyoaks theme tune set my
teeth on edge, but for that one summer, they were solace. Our main problem, though, when it came to
identifying with the characters in the production, was that they didn’t seem to
be afflicted as we were with a constant need to be doing work. They would walk about, talk to each other, do
things, all without the omnipresent commentary of “Well, I really better be
getting back to it.” The reality didn’t match
ours and their lack of work ethic didn’t compute.
But that didn’t stop us.
We were lost in the scripted tension that finally built up to John-Paul kissing his best friend
Craig, all while Nancy and the other evergreen characters got smashed on half a
sniff of Smirnoff
Ice while “going out” at a venue that was, as with all local amenities, on
the one street that they ever went along.
That was a terrible sentence, but it really brings to life the
production quality of your average episode.
Let’s say my standards must have been lower, as, at no other time, have
I been able to stomach multiple weeks of soap watching. The plot developed at an agonisingly glacial
pace, trapped within its own limited reality, chunked into daily cliff-hangers
that got stretched so thinly you could see the next few weeks’ episodes through
them. It was still better than revising.
Exams completed, university a distant and overpriced
recollection, I never returned to Hollyoaks.
To this day, it remains billed as the teen soap. Yes, it’s still being made. Occasionally I’ll catch a marketing trail on Channel 4 and be like: “Oh wow, this looks
good,” but then I have to check myself and remember that this is one of those
programmes whose marketing is better than the actual product. Given the huge community of characters that
make up the cast, unwieldy storytelling has to be avoided: only a handful of
characters feature in any particular week.
It’s acting shift work. And that’s
always the complaint with soaps: the sheer quantity of entertainment they are required
to produce harms its very quality.
Brookside may have long-since perished to cul-de-sac heaven, but Emmerdale seems to be on 43
times a week. Either way, the 6.30pm
broadcast was often well before home time once I became an office worker. In fact, my favourite joke when on calls late
in the day was to tell people planning to leave at 5.30 that it was good news
they would be home in time for Hollyoaks.
So yeah, I’m not opposed to Hollyoaks being the 129th
programme on Just One More Episode. As this
week’s post demonstrates, this is mostly about me anyway, and Hollyoaks was in
my life for a brief period in a former decade, despite there being nearly 4,000
episodes to catch up on, not to mention late night specials with extra sex and a
whole array of scantily clad calendars nobody asked for. Its approach to issues, too, should be
commended, serving a national purpose to the country’s youth (who still watch
TV and not just inane YouTubers) when it comes to coming to terms with and
coming of age in a political entity that hates them. With cuts to public mental health funding,
Hollyoaks will soon be the sole method through which our young people are cared
for, so I better get used to the jangly guitar notes of its opening sequence. It’s only a moment of discomfort when compared
to a future lifetime of being locked out of Europe.
