The addictive appeal of these soaps lies in their vicarious satisfaction of this prurient curiosity: soaps are a form of voyeurism. And, of course, they confirm all of our worst suspicions about what goes on behind our neighbours’ firmly closed doors and impenetrable net curtains: adultery, alcoholism, wife-beating, shoplifting, drug-dealing, AIDS, teenage pregnancy, murder … The soap-opera families are ‘people like us’, but they are making an even more spectacularly dysfunctional mess of their lives than we are.
