Soaps might have seen their day as YouTube provides new reality

Back in the days when most of us had as much chance of travelling to England as holidaying on the moon, the only insight into the day-to-day lives of the ordinary Brits was beamed into our homes via the world of soaps.

It wasn’t until much later we realised these weren’t ordinary lives at all, because people don’t fight and kill each other half as much in reality as they do in Eastenders – and they don’t marry all of their neighbours in the course of a lifetime as they do in Coronation Street.

But whether your preference was for the Mitchells and the Beales down south or Bet Lynch and Jack and Vera up north, many of us viewers built our evening around the starting time of their favourite soap.

And we took this so seriously that there was once a man who successfully stood for election in Donegal on a double-edged platform – ‘Brits Out and Free BBC’.

We no more knew the Duckworths or the Barlows than we knew Nelson Mandela and yet we spent half an hour a couple of times a week in their living rooms – in the case of Hilda Ogden, a room which had three ceramic ducks nailed in flight to the flock-wallpapered wall.

Closer to home, those who remember the early days of RTÉ will recall Tolka Row; those of an older but more recent vintage lived with The Riordans or Bracken or Glenroe – and still Fair City ploughs its soapy furrow with Jim Bartley making it all the way from Tolka Row to now.

TG4 has enjoyed phenomenal success with Ros na Rún, having cottoned onto the fact that the Irish language somehow accords you greater latitude to tackle the sort of issues that wouldn’t even make it onto Hollyoaks.

We were suckers for soaps no matter where they came from – Home and Away, Dallas, Knot’s Landing, Dynasty, Emmerdale, the lot – but it seems not so much anymore.

Back when Dirty Den – the now departed Leslie Grantham – handed Angie her divorce papers on Christmas Day, thirty million Brits tuned in to witness the drama.

When Hilda Ogden waved bye-bye to Coronation Street a year later, an audience of 27 million tuned in.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and  county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.