Hollyoaks

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 129^th 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.