On a Christmas night in 1986, half of the United Kingdom gathered in a pub to witness a man deliver divorce papers to his wife. Not in a metaphorical sense. In fact, 32.5 million viewers of EastEnders watched as “Dirty” Den Watts handed those documents to Angie across the Queen Vic bar. The nation essentially came to a standstill. Given how fragmented viewing has become and how drastically the cultural significance of British soap operas has changed, it seems nearly impossible to imagine that kind of television moment today.
On a good week, those figures are currently close to 10 million. Special anniversary episodes occasionally nudge higher, but not by much. Coronation Street, which debuted in 1960 and spent decades as the nation’s most-watched programme, tells a similar story. It is difficult to imagine how the audiences would ever reunite because they have not simply drifted.
It’s important to keep in mind what these shows were like when they were at their best. Soaps were perhaps the most effective form of advertising ever created when they first appeared on American radio in the early 1930s. They were intimate, daily, and habit-forming in a way that other content just wasn’t. James Thurber, writing in The New Yorker in 1948, described them with dry amusement as a kind of sandwich: advertising on both sides, filled with predicament, villainy, female suffering, nobility, organ music, and a generous pour of announcer sauce. That description is accurate and humorous at the same time. Soaps were designed to make people dependent.
British television adopted the format somewhat later. In 1954, the BBC debuted The Grove Family, in part as a preemptive measure against the arrival of ITV. It’s strange to watch those early episodes now because the working-class family speaks with rounded, clipped vowels that seem to have been taught by the Queen’s own elocutionist. It took Coronation Street to establish the template that actually stuck: regional accents, terrace houses, corner shops, and characters who felt like people you might actually know rather than people someone thought you should aspire to know.
The soap had become popular throughout continental Europe by the middle of the 1990s. Many of the more than fifty domestic productions that were operating in different countries were at the top of their respective national rankings. The door was opened by Germany’s Lindenstraße, which debuted in 1985 and was openly based on Coronation Street. At one point, it appeared as though the format could be used anywhere. For a while, it most likely could.
The unravelling has been steady and, in some ways, surprisingly quick. Germany reduced the number of daily soap operas from six to two. Each of the Netherlands and Italy was reduced from three to one. Sweden dropped the format from its schedules entirely. In America, Guiding Light — which across radio and television had been telling essentially the same story for over 70 years, accumulating around 19,000 episodes — came to an end in 2009. In 2010, As the World Turns came next. These weren’t small cancellations. These were no longer institutions.
Even though streaming has obviously caused harm, there’s a feeling that it’s not the only issue. The problem is a little more difficult to identify. Because they relied on scarcity—one channel, one time slot, and an audience with few options—soap operas have historically been successful. The appointment was important. The weekly routine of a soap opera now feels more like a scheduling imposition than a dependable comfort because everything is always available. Longtime viewers have always recognized the slow accumulation of storylines as part of the appeal, but younger viewers appear to be particularly impatient.
Both EastEnders and Coronation Street continue to exist, continue to produce episodes, and continue to attract devoted viewers who have been watching for decades. But it’s hard not to notice that those audiences are aging without a clear cohort coming in behind them. When the viewers who recall Den and Angie stop watching, what happens? Perhaps the most significant question that British broadcasters aren’t quite prepared to publicly address is that one.
