Interesting item brought back by my spiders from a piece in the National marking the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street … inter alia:
In that sense, it doesn’t matter that the soap is set in a version of northern England where life can be slightly grim and unglamorous. Because once you’ve got past the accents (not, in truth, that difficult), Coronation Street isn’t about living in a fictional part of Greater Manchester, just as EastEnders isn’t a commentary on London life. These places are just the settings for stories that are as old as the hills.
This was the thrust of a recent BBC documentary on the links between Greek tragedy and soaps. The similarities were revealing; the presenter Natalie Haynes spoke to a writer who had based EastEnders storylines on Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Apparently, Haynes wrote on her blog, the BBC Writers’ Academy trains future generations of soap writers by giving them Aristotle’s Poetics to encourage them to think about time and place.
It’s not over-intellectualising soaps to make these comparisons; infanticide, patricide, dysfunctional families, suffering women … they’re all tropes of Greek tragedy and soap opera.
It’s a theme Corrie’s Jonathan Harvey has been keen to discuss recently, too. “There’s something inherently theatrical in soaps and they are like Greek tragedies,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “They have archetypes that are created again and again through different generations, and they have a chorus in other characters commenting on what happens.” […]
via: Fifty years of Coronation Street in two hours
If you’re very fast, you can listen to Natalie Haynes on the BBC on ‘OedipusEnders’ via Listen Again (but even if you don’t make it, the text summary is interesting) … I think Haynes’ blog post was this one from the Guardian …
rogueclassicism 