British Soap Opera

British Soap Opera, we studied existing Soap Operas such as Hollyoaks, Eastenders, Emmerdale, the Archers and Corronation Street, analysing the codes and conventions of the genre and aiming to use them in our own work. An important aspect of this is the social realism used first within the genre in Coronation Street, this was influenced by films such as A Taste of Honey (1961) that showed life in a gritty realistic way.

 I went about creating a timeline documenting the history of the British Soap Opera, starting from the 1930's radio soap operas such as Guiding light on the NBC network in America transcending to modern day, controversial soaps such as Hollyoaks, that document life with a more youth based orientation, still using the social realist style. 

 We were given the task of creating a seven minute section for a television programme called "British TV for Beginners" entitled: "Defining British Soap". We started out by planning our ideas and included production necessities such as writing a script, story boarding shooting and editing.