Bored Of The Dance wrote:

QUOTE:
Read the thread, Harry.

I have , at least speed-read it, but it doesn't explain how bad art is OK because that means you ignore it or treat it as background noise/visuals while you "meditate".

Oh, and I think you are misrepresting me with "as Harry points out, when Corrie becomes shit, there is a high chance that Eastenders is good". Coronation Street ( I hate the term "Corrie" and that is me being a snob) has been "shit" for decades and Brookside, Emmerdale etc always were.

Eastenders appears to have veins of form which normally mean they have a good writer or writers handling a chunk of episodes/plotlines. When they have good writing on Eastenders it can often offset the frequent poor acting and rushed rehearsal/filming schedule and be absorbing.

QUOTE:
Has been shit ever since it abandoned its original style as a dramatic serial, a point that you conveniently chose to not respond to and pretend that I am speaking from a position of ignorance.

Liquidator, a late-in-the-day edit on your previous post and this post means that you have come up with a criticism that I left the door open for in this quote

QUOTE:
I will give you it, Liquidator, if you mean that the current Corrie storyline is shit compared to others (as Harry pointed out) bit I am pretty sure you didn't mean that

so I was hardly ignoring it. I was obviously wrong in my assumption at the end but your original unedited quote didn't make this clear.

I would disagree with you that it has been shit for 40 years. I haven't seen properly for 10 years so can't comment but certainly, 15 years ago, there were still good patches.

I am not sure where you are going as far as your opinion being invalid because soaps are popular. I am not saying that at all. I am saying that they are not "all shit" because they are popular

QUOTE:
Yes, they've been made already, about how it's not casual mindless TV because of the time you have to devote to them, the format, acting and scripting, but you've chose to ignore them.

No, I bloody haven't. I've addressed them all. Read the thread.

QUOTE:
No I mean Corrie, Eastenders (another programme that started promisingly then became tacky soap bollocks), Hollyoaks, Neightbours, Home and Away and all the rest are toilet. That opinion isn't going to change, even if Todd Carty gives a virtuoso performance after being laid up in Walford General with cancer of the AIDS.

Shit on a stick.

Ah, sorry, I was wrong. OTF is still a forum for openmindedness and considered debate

How can you expect to change someone's mind on something that is a matter of taste? I haven't close-mindedly decided that Corrie is shit on no evidence, it's based on actually watching the programme and having all manner of other soaps forced upon me from the age of about five.

It has nothing to do with being a cultural snob or close minded, it's a matter of taste.

QUOTE:
I have , at least speed-read it, but it doesn't explain how bad art is OK because that means you ignore it or treat it as background noise/visuals while you "meditate".

I was saying at was all "bad art" or all "shit". I was saying that we all know that there is a lot of soap that was shit not that we sit through the shit stuff to meditate or zone out to.

I was saying that, even with soaps that aren't shit, you can tend to use it as escapism, as entertainment but there are parts that are entirely gripping. Similar to how I watched last night's Liverpool-Chelsea match.

The thrusts of my argument are that, one, they are light entertainment and, two, they can also be quite culturally important on occasion.

I have also since argued that they, by no means, are badly acted, scripted or directed across the board.

Apologies for misrepresenting you. I was trying to illustrate that soaps have ebbs & flows. As you point out, you weren't suggesting it was a fairly frequent turnaround. I would disagree with you on when and what soaps were/are shit but that isn't the really the debate.

I suppose you are answering the original premise of the thread if memory serves me correct though

QUOTE:
How can you expect to change someone's mind on something that is a matter of taste?

I'm not particularly. Maybe, in your case, it would have been easier to answer "Who gives a fuck" would have been to answer "Aiden, WoM (possibly) and my wife"

What I am addressing are the sweeping generalisations of people saying all soaps are "shit", "shit on a stick" or variations thereof.

As I say, they are banal and as useless comments as saying that all Chinese food is "shit"

Somone wanted posts that were above the level of "I love soaps" forums and I am attempting that

CORRIE RULES! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I think the acting in Corrie is fine. It's certainly through the Mohorovicic discontinuity and out in to the wide open spaces compared to the subterranean efforts of Hollyoaks (eh?). Yer man Roy Cropper is a fine actor. Sort of troubled like De Niro in Taxi Driver, but with a deeper, more significant social conscience. I see him very much as a figurehead for a new, better society. When the cockroaches take over, and there's a small cabal of us humans left, we'll turn to Cropper for leadership. And he will broker a deal to let us live peacefully alongside each other, until such a time as David is released from juvey. Then we will CRUSH THEM ALL, by pushing them down the stairs and pretending it wasn't us.

Corrie isn't shit, I don't think. It's better when it is doing stupid shit about serial killers and what have you. It's miles better than Eastenders with its 'every third person is a gangster' bullshit. And you can't compare it to Hollyoaks as that's a kids' programme.

It's daft, amusing, well scripted (it is, actually, you Doubting Thomas bastards) and well acted. There's nowt wrong with it. And if anyone says there is, I'll lock them in a small room with Blanche and Audrey for a couple of hours. That'll learn 'em.

When thinking of incidents when there have been fine acting in soap, one of the times was when Jack and Vera Duckworth were discussing their failure to buy the Rovers and Jack went into a speech about how it wasn't the
place of people like them to succeed in such a way only to fail.

I am not relating it very well but it was a fantastic scene and one I somewhat pinched for my own script.

It wasn't dissimilar to the finest last lines in a film of all time

QUOTE:
The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose

As far as Eastenders goes, some of the two hander episodes have been excellent especially with the actress that plays Dot Cotton although I understand they have been overdone in recent years.

Also, I defy anyone to say that Karl and Susan Kennedy in Neighbours are excellent actors

It's daft, amusing, well scripted (it is, actually, you Doubting Thomas bastards) and well acted.

Word.

The acting and scripts are the best you'll find in soapland. Not saying much I know. The writers do still acknowledge the value of character-driven storylines, rather than plot-driven ones. However, I concede that the fanciful plots have taken over more and more since the switch to multi-episodes per week. But you can still find some good stuff in there most weeks. At the moment I'm loving all the Becky-related storylines.

My litmus test for both Corrie and Eastenders is this: watch the first five minutes of an episode and you can normally tell whether it's going to be a good one or not. I don't stick around if it looks like it's going to be a shit one.

I think you can generally tell within about 30 seconds if a telly programme's going to be any good. I've occasionally been wrong, but so rarely it hardly counts.

Broadly, I agree although the story arcs are so massive in terms of time on soaps and the knowledge the scriptwriters have that the viewers are so loyal means that this isn't neccesarily true of soaps.

I tend to find that, if you watch an omnibus, the story arcs over that rather than in the half-hour although they work hard, obviously, to have the daily cliff-hanger. Where this doesn't work is when the cliff-hanger jars as a contractual obligation, both in the daily episode and the omnibus.

To be fair, this doesn't happen that often

If I am reading Harry right, this is where Eastenders is different from other soaps in that you have a writer that carries over 4 or 5 episodes (probably an omnibus-worth I would have thought) whereas, in other soaps, you have different writers on different storylines on each episode. Coronation Street may be similar to Eastenders, I am not sure.

I was trying to explain similar to my son about the Secret Seven books the other night. As we read a chapter a night, he is just getting the idea that, although one chapter in itself isn't exciting, it is leading up onto the next chapter which might be and adding to the book's plot as a whole.

He's fallen asleep by this point

Actually, going back to Dickens, I haven't read him since I found out that so many of the novels were serialisations. Has anyone read them and noticed where the days started or ended or was it as simple as a chapter a day? Does it distract somewhat from the book as a whole when you realise it was written as a serial?

I wish I had your skill with crap films, WE, I have wasted many a half an hour before I have realised a film is crap.

I'm really not sure about this 'BotD lauds the soaps' plotline. The writing is rushed and the central character is unconvincing and wooden. He's really not the same since he switched to 5 posts an hour.

The irony indeed.

Luckily, the Harry and Bored plotline has a large story arc and a significant backstory so we don't have to pack it into one thread's episode.