The hype is gone
In the 90s, if you didn’t watch TV soaps, there was no way that you could have a conversation with your mates. Every household in the UK watched soaps, and people even bought magazines regularly to see what was coming up in the coming weeks. The TV guide magazine made watching soaps fun as the little blurb gave viewers insight into what was coming next.
Most people scheduled time for soaps; it was watching your favourite soap and having dinner at the same time. Soaps became a religion for most people. People would sacrifice the gym and other social events because they didn’t want to miss an episode of EastEnders or Hollyoaks. The regime was unreal as people thought that they were the characters within the soaps. Kids wanted to emulate the bad-boy image like the Mitchell brothers in EastEnders.
Soaps became part of the culture in the 90s and even in the 2000s. The success of soaps heightened in the early parts of the 2000s, when ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC increased production budgets so that it matches the US TV productions like Breaking Bad and other TV series that were coming from the States.
The soap culture did change the way of life in the UK because for festive periods, soaps were prioritised, and no one would go and see their families on Easter and Christmas if they couldn’t watch EastEnders on Christmas Day. All the big storylines happened during the festive period, and that made soaps really fun to watch.
Maybe what made soaps so good to watch was that we weren’t exposed to streaming services and the internet, and since then the likes of Netflix and Prime have become widely available on our smart devices, and we don’t have to wait until 7 pm to watch soaps – people just ain’t got time for this anymore. No one is talking about soaps anymore because they have become boring, and the same cast reappears even if they were written out of the soaps a long time ago.
Although viewership has gone down, BBC and ITV continue to keep them going, and the reason why soaps will never disappear from our TVs is that they are part of British culture.
