I know EastEnders is very unrealistic but I have often wondered if Coronation Street is realistic in many ways - of course in its very early days Tony Warren wanted to create a realistic drama, but how much of this realism remains now? I know that at one point Tony Warren was unhappy with the direction Coronation Street was going in.
I often wonder if the side streets of Salford still have pubs like The Rover's Return. But I doubt whether everyone who lives in the same street where the pub is located all go there and are in the same pub most nights.
Soaps are generally designed to be microcosms that represent realistic situations that happen across the country on a regular basis. Soaps aren't designed to be an accurate representation of a community of that size, and the number of problems and situations an average group that size would encounter.
The fact that characters in soaps often stay in certain locations is more of a convenience factor - for obvious reasons, they can't produce 12 different pub sets for characters to go to on different nights.
Soaps are generally designed to be microcosms that represent realistic situations that happen across the country on a regular basis. Soaps aren't designed to be an accurate representation of a community of that size, and the number of problems and situations an average group that size would encounter.
The fact that characters in soaps often stay in certain locations is more of a convenience factor - for obvious reasons, they can't produce 12 different pub sets for characters to go to on different nights.
That's right. If you consider what "Brookside" went through in it's time. Plus the early residents had very different backgrounds which would not fit in either - hardened Union leaders and professionals for example would hardly socialise with one another. They popped a post box on the close because they had no pub to draw characters together.
Most people don't have very dramatic lives.
An episode of family have their tea, watch telly for a bit, look at the internet, have a bath and pop the electric blanket on 20 minutes before they go to bed would be a bit dull.
But that's what I'm doing tonight. Realistic, but boring.
I think EastEnders and Coronation Street will eventually have to face up to the waning credibility of having a pub as a regular drop-in for all the characters.
In the last 5-10 years the British pub culture has changed dramatically, due to factors like the recession, the smoking ban and the huge gulf that has opened up between supermarket and pub drinks prices. Old fashioned boozers like the Rovers and Queen Vic are closing down in droves, and the ones that survive are certainly not packed most evenings with the residents of the nearby houses; they are being propped up by a small demographic of working class (and mainly old) men.
And it is no longer a social norm for groups of co-workers at factories or offices to descend on the local pub at lunchtime, as still seems to happen in the soaps.
Viewers are surely going to get increasingly aware of this reality gap.