Real Media Texts - Comparison of soap opera episodes

Scenes. Coronation Street – 15 Emmerdale – 15 Holyoaks – 22 Eastenders – 24	Settings. Coronation Street – Pubs, houses, streets and shops. Emmerdale – Pubs, houses, farms and café. Holyoaks – Houses, streets and the beach. Eastenders – Streets, house and café.
Characters. Coronation Street – 20 Emmerdale – 22 Holyoaks – 22 Eastenders – 24



Types of Characters.

Hollyoaks = within Hollyoaks there are a variety of different types of teenagers. The majority of the girls within the programme are very stereotypical. They are mostly worrying about there weight and what they look like. You find that there are a lot of relationships and a lot of paranoia within the different friendships groups and relationships.

Eastenders = a stereotypical house wife is shown who has slight paranoia about the whereabouts of her husband. There are a lot of families in the soap that are all very opinionated as well as what’s seen to be angry teenagers.

Coronation street = the majority of the characters are middle aged or older. All the characters love to gossip and spread information about what’s going on in each others lives. The soap also has a lot of families as well.

Emmerdale = Emmerdale has a mixture of different classes within the soap. For example Ella, Mia and Declan are the very upper class and the lower class is families like the Dingle family. The upper class characters are seen to be going to hotels, business meetings, running their own businesses and owning large houses. The lower class characters spend most of the time in the local pub and working in the businesses that the upper class characters own.

All four soaps have a range of age groups within the characters and all have a lot of families as well. Out of the four soaps that were watched to do this only one tackles and shows disability in its characters and two soaps show homosexuality.

Storylines.

Hollyoaks = Hidden secrets between best friends and boyfriends. Love triangles, love affairs between best friend and boyfriend, and a cheating boyfriend.

Eastenders = It is evident that the mother of one of the characters in the first scene is not happy with homosexual relations and does not accept homosexuals. This is a paranoid wife on one of the scene doing some washing which looks to be men’s clothing, she seems suspicious, and her paranoia could foreshadow an affair later on in the series. The character ‘Billy’ talks about crime therefore we know that in previous episodes something along the lines has happened. It is also evident that there has been some sort of social service adoption involved, with putting up a child for adoption and as this episode is a ‘fathers day’ special we see that the father wants to

‘find’ his child.

Coronation street = A male character’s family finds out that he has fathered a child in an affair. A couple of homosexual girls struggle to deal with the emotions with their relationship. A couple face problems in their marriage when they face getting there child taken away, all they want is to make a family. A woman my have to pay the price for her husbands murderous crimes.

Emmerdale = An affair between a woman and her daughters boyfriend. A helped suicide of a disable man by his boyfriend and mother. The planning of a funeral and a new born disabled baby.

From watching an episode from four different soaps we have seen that there are usually a lot of characters to be seen to create a neighbour hood, they are also used because as it is a soap there is not only one narrative, we see everything from different perspectives, otherwise it wouldn’t meet the specifications of a soap. There are certain locations and settings that are used in all soaps which include houses on the streets of the neighbourhood and inside shops and cafes, we will be taking this into consideration when making our soap opera. There is usually a lot of conflict and confrontation, this makes the soap interesting and keeps the viewers interested. A good plot would bring a bigger audience otherwise people would not want to watch as it would be boring. In most soap opera’s there is some sort of ‘affair’ or ‘betrayal’ happening perhaps to reflect on the viewers lives, this could relate to some of the viewer to make them watch or just catch a viewer as it is not something that is expected in everyday life. There also seems to be a lot of secrecy in soaps which could make the audience more involved as one of the characters on the show will not know what is happening but the viewers will. Overall from seeing all of these comparisons in four different soaps we know the type of things will we want and what we should include in our own soap.