Soap Operas
The first episode of the BBC’s longest running TV soap, EastEnders, aired on February 19, 1985 and it still commands an audience for its four half-hourly episodes a week. The genre began on the radio, the first daytime serial considered to be a soap opera being Painted Dreams which was first aired on WGN radio Chicago on October 20, 1930. It was broadcast during the day and, as its audience was made up predominantly of housewives, the storylines were aimed at them.
It prompted other Chicago-based radio stations to launch their own dramas, usually fifteen minutes long, providing “background Noise” for women as they went about their household tasks. To hook the audience in, each episode would end on a cliffhanger that would be picked up in the next episode.
The first network radio serial was Clara, Lu, ‘n Em which first on NBC Blue Network at 10.30pm on January 27, 1931. Created by three women, Isabel Carothers, Louise Starkey, and Helen King, it was light and comedic, focusing on the daily lives and gossiping of three Midwestern housewives. On February 15, 1932 it moved to a weekday time slot, broadcasting five times a week and garnering large audiences of women.
The reason they became known as “soap operas” is twofold. Firstly, like operas their modus operandi was to develop intricate and highly dramatic plots. As for the soap part, US radio stations were commercial animals ands relied on advertising revenue for their existence. They began to look for sponsors who had products to sell that were aimed at their target audience.
As the audience for these dramas were predominantly women and their principal occupation was running the home, among the first major sponsors were companied who sold cleaning products, such as Procter & Gamble, Lever Brothers, and Colgate-Palmolive. So many of the sponsors were soap manufacturers that these dramas became associated with their sponsors and became known as soaps.
As more families began to own television sets, soaps made the move to the new medium. The first soap opera to be broadcast on television was These Are My Children, which first appeared on NBC on January 31, 1949. Broadcast live from WNBQ in Chicago it went out five days a week in fifteen minute episodes but it suffered from a small budget and the show ended on March 4th that year.
Short as its lifespan was, These Are My Children was ground-breaking, although it was not well received by critics. The magazine Pathfinder bemoaned the fact that “last week television caught the dread disease of radio – soapoperitis”, while Variety considered it to have “no visual interest”. Nevertheless, the genie was out of the bottle and soap operas largely created by women with women in mind were soon commanding large audiences and attracting considerable advertising revenues.
Forget the critics, this was the language that commercial broadcasters understood.
