Country folk with a nasty plot addiction

THE NATION is reportedly mourning the death of Mark Hebden, but I think it is important to maintain a proper perspective. We are, after all, talking about the death of a fictional rural solicitor.

What can that matter when set alongside the deaths of a 13-year-old boy and a middle-aged man on his wedding day, both murdered by a car driver high on cocaine, while the last local murder victim lies buried under the patio and the daughter of that corpse experiments in lesbianism with the nanny from next door, meanwhile oblivious to the Waco-style religious cult gathering at No 5?

But, in saying this, I am merely revealing a prejudice for Channel 4's Brookside over Radio 4's The Archers. And seeing how Mark's fatal car crash had affected people - in my own house I watched someone weeping at the scene - prompted a consideration of the state of British soap opera. The Archers began, in 1950, as a piece of rural realism; Brookside, in 1982, as politicised neo-documentary. In both, death and scandal were spasmodic major shocks. Now, however, they threaten to become Gothic nightmares, in which as soon as one door closes, another slams.

In contrast to American soap opera - which has always been unashamed entertainment, and frequently featured the impossibly rich - the British form had two distinct roots. ITV's Coronation Street established the concept of a funny/sad serial, more or less mirroring viewers' lives; in this case, on the Salford doorstep of Granada, the company that produced it. BBC Radio's The Archers - for all its original rubric of 'an everyday story of country folk' - planted the idea of the didactic soap opera. Ambridge began as a vehicle for government advice on agriculture. Yet, despite this worthy birthright, The Archers also soon set another generic trend - killing off a character as ratings insurance - by the famous casting of Grace Archer as Joan of Arc on the night that commercial television began.

The successful soap operas born in the Eighties started by trying to marry the narrative ancestries of Coronation Street and The Archers, Brookside and BBC 1's EastEnders were set in intentionally realistic communities; Liverpool and the East End. But the shows consistently doled out advice and information - some governmental, some anti-government - on unemployment, drugs, homosexuality and Aids. There was a snobbishness about the pure twits and twists genre.

Yet, as the form flourished in Britain, and even the BBC purchased low-IQ soaps from Australia, all serials were forced back to the Grace Archer precedent. Death may be the great leveller in the real world, but in soap opera it became the great raiser. If the plot went over the top, so did the ratings. Under pressure to keep or increase audiences, British soap operas began to display an uneasy balance between realism and sensationalism.

The Archers, for example, after decades of relative gentility, demonstrates the new narrative demands on a soap opera since the great landshifts of broadcasting reform. Once, a wedding was judged enough to quicken audience pulses. Now, days before her wedding, not only does Caroline Bone end up in intensive care, thrown from her horse after it was startled by a speeding car, but Mark Hebden, swerving to avoid her prone form in the road, hits a tree and is killed. But even a death and a serious injury are not the only shaker. The possibilities are dangled that the manslaughtering driver was an Ambridge regular and that Shula, Mark's long-infertile wife, will bear him a posthumous child through IVF.

And what had been the last case of Hebden's life? Representing Susan Carter, jailed on Christmas Eve in the series' last but one headline event, and taking on, in the resultant public fuss, the remarkable status of being one of the few Britons the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, doesn't think should be in jail.

The Susan Carter storyline remains a good example of the new ways of the genre, for it seems unlikely that a political point was being made about severe sentencing. She went down in the hope that the audience would go up. In the same way, the death of Mark Hebden contained odd vestiges of didacticism - a lecture on how Caroline's riding hat saved her, the worry that Mark was using a car phone when he crashed - but has otherwise merely provided narrative adrenalin.

The danger for The Archers is that - as Brookside demonstrates - dramatic incident becomes addictive. In this fictional Liverpool, Jimmy Corkhill, the local barman, crazed with cocaine, sent to their graves in a road crash Frank Rogers, on his wedding day and, after several weeks in a coma, young Tony Dixon. Trevor Jordache, carving-knifed by his wife when he assaulted her after sexually abusing a second daughter, is buried in the back garden, the digging and paving done by the window cleaner.

Beth, his older daughter, spurning the boy next door after discovering his past as a rapist, is now sleeping with the girl next door, who shares a house with the widow of an MP who committed suicide after defrauding his company pension fund. Oh, and Simon, the petrol pump attendant, has revealed himself to be the Risen Christ and established a sinister religious and sexual sect in a semi-detached.

It may be worth pointing out here that Brookside began with the promise, fulfilled for some years, to be the most realistic of British soap operas. It has been an academy for star talent, providing, for example, the writer of last year's ITV hit Cracker and the star of the last Ken Loach film Raining Stones. The original scenes last year involving Trevor Jordache's violence to his family featured some of the best acting and writing in television drama for years.

But Brookside is now an awful warning of the dangers of plot addiction; as high on storylines as Jimmy Corkhill is on coke. Serious issues are now avoided. The dilemma of whether the persistently vegetative Tony Dixon should be taken off his life-support machine - a sequence echoing the real Liverpool's real Tony Bland - was avoided by a sudden natural seizure. The tragedy of Mandy Jordache as a victim of domestic violence is now played for grave-digging farce.

I have - here is my own dramatic final scene confession - watched nearly every episode of Brookside in 12 years and many twice. The current overloaded episodes are vivid and riveting viewing, and I want to see if the messianic petrol pump attendant does a David Koresh at No 5 with firelighters from Ron Dixon's shop.

But it must tell us something about the pressures on British broadcasting that the once bleakly realist Brookside Close is now apparently twinned with Twin Peaks, the Middle American Babylon of David Lynch's landmark television drama. (Poor old Emmerdale on ITV has just had a plane landing on it, in apparent homage to Lockerbie.)

This is the way of the world now, even for ordinary folk. Just don't be surprised if Mark Hebden's fatal car crash turns out to have been caused by Lynda Snell, high on cocaine.