If there's too much soap, it won't wash

The desperate search for ratings has provoked soap fever. ITV is in a state bordering on panic

On Tuesday lunchtime, Fisher tried to justify telling everyone about Chloe's drug problem and Mal confronted Sonny about his love life. That evening, Scott was dismayed by Kelly's infatuation with Marcus and Bianca learnt some unappealing facts about Simon. Rumours about Mark were spreading like wildfire. It was just another day in soapland.

Television is foaming with soaps as never before. Home and Away, Neighbours, Emmerdale and EastEnders - from which the above plot lines are taken - plus Brookside, Coronation Street and Heartbreak High dominate rather than punctuate the schedules. ITV is launching a fourth weekly episode of Coronation Street and Emmerdale is being promoted to three times a week, Meanwhile, the BBC is to run a fourth episode of EastEnders during the Olympic Games - a fine demonstration of cultural awareness, for soaps are the exact opposite of sport.

In terms of the state of the television industry, what we have here is desperation. ITV is in a state bordering on panic. Ratings are poor, Channel 5 is looming, as is Rupert Murdoch's mega-channel black box. Nothing seems to work. Movies no longer pull in the audiences; neither do the endless supply of American mini-series. New ideas are non-existent and the BBC is competing more commercially than ever.

Soaps are, for the moment, the only solution. So, furiously milking audience loyalties, the ITV network increases episodes, strains plot lines and exhausts stars. An excessively ratings-conscious BBC responds, and the soaps flood the schedules.

Canute-like before this tide, the Broadcasting Standards Council has complained about the excess of adolescent sex, primarily in the Australian soaps. Accepting that the dramatisation of sexual relationships "can be helpful" to adolescents, the BSC then says that recent portrayals have been "taken beyond acceptable limits".

Note that "can be helpful" line. It represents a shrewd acknowledgment of the most high-minded justification of soaps - that they help people by dramatising the conflicts and traumas of ordinary life. Like great art, they objectify the subjective; and, thanks to television, they do so for the masses.

Soaps at their best distil and externalise simple emotional truths of life and death, love and loss. And, in the case of Coronation Street, this is done without condescension and with extraordinarily consistent wit and style.

Nobody who has found themselves following the love life of that epically wide-eyed sex bomb Raquel can doubt the capacity of soaps to be both funny and true. Raquel is larger than life, but she is not alien to it.

Coronation Street achieves the synthesis to which all soaps aspire: the convincing union of realism and stylised exaggeration. Soaps almost all use banal settings, "ordinary" people and familiar crises. But they cannot take their realism any further or they would be unwatchable. In real life, nothing much happens most of the time; and when it does, it seldom forms itself into satisfyingly rounded story lines. So soaps impose various forms of exaggeration.

In Coronation Street, this is primarily done with language and character - the average northerner does not really speak as literately, as rhythmically as they do on The Street and, though northern women are admittedly a breed apart, few actually attain the mythic greatness of Ena Sharples, Bet Lynch or Raquel.

But the cheaper, easier way to exaggerate is through incident. And here, the ghastly Brookside is the worst offender. I know this Close is in Liverpool, but even so ... are we really expected to believe its appalling catalogue of ill-fortune? Crime, incest, terrorists, drugs, cults, they all sweep before the glazed, shell-shocked eyes of its wretched, dull, characterless, illiterate inhabitants. Amityville, Elm Street and the Bermuda Triangle combined cannot compete with this estate agent's nightmare.

There is a pattern to these catastrophes, a pattern repeated by all soaps whose writers confuse relevance and realism. The pattern is that the deluge of incident is taken from the headlines. Lesbianism is talked about in the newspapers and suddenly there are lesbians in Brookside. Religious cults are in the air, and almost at once they are on the air. These things happen, reason the writers with the non-logic of desperation, therefore they must happen in Brookside.

American soaps in particular have always indulged in this kind of madness, and in the process they have become modish cults. But at a deeper level, it is a betrayal. For this kind of supposedly relevant fantasy is an abuse of the highest justification of the soaps. Instead of telling recognisable stories that dramatise and objectify ordinary experience, this is a way of exploiting concern, of stirring the pot of contemporary anxieties. It is a corrupt and easy way of heightening reality.

It is also a way of abandoning reality. Soaps work when their stylisation joins them directly to everyday life. They work by becoming myths that intensify the ordinary. They fail when the ordinary is exploited merely as an excuse for fantasy. They become closed worlds, feeding off every passing sensation. Sadly, they still get the ratings - a sign, perhaps, that they have managed to implicate their audience in their betrayal of the quotidian.

The problem now is that the new soap fever, driven by the desperation of ITV, will push all the shows in this direction. Coronation Street is threatened. The new Sunday episode will require story lines devised to provide a cliffhanger to get people through to Monday. Even the writing resources allocated to that show can scarcely be expected to fulfil that brief without resorting to the pornography of incident.

If British television wants to go on being taken seriously, it should devote more craft, energy and creativity to soaps than to anything else. Unfortunately, the present fever suggests that it only intends to devote more money.