Word: soaping
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...alcoholic could stay sober at a crucial moment in his career. He intuited that every woman in the audience would ask herself if she would suffer and support such a husband or accept an offer of love from a younger man with pile-driving ambition. In every soap opera there is a sudsy whiff of humanity...
...ENGLAND old-age pensioners--OAPs-- get all kinds of benefits in addition to their rather meager pensions. During non-rush hours they can ride public transport at half-fare, every day of the week they can take free baths (with soap and one towel provided) at public bathhouses, and before four o'clock they get reduced prices at cinemas. Each pensioner gets a little card to use when he buys fuel in the winter, paying a special cut price to the government which owns all utilities...
...main thing is trouble," says Ruth Warwick, who plays Phoebe Tyler on All My Children. "Right here in River City. They say you get happy roles on a soap opera-forget it. If you're really a happy character, you're going to be fired or killed or something's going to happen." Escapism? Hardly. Unless, of course, escapism takes in such topics as murder, rape, insanity, adultery and terminal illness, which are the soaps' daily fare (among the remaining unmentionables are incest and homosexuality...
Feminism may come and go, but vast and devoted bands of TV viewers believe that woman's role has not changed in 35 years-or 3,500 years. These are the 35 to 40 million people-mostly women, and especially housewives-who watch the soap operas each week. To them, woman's lot is as deliciously full of predicament, villainy and suffering as when Our Gal Sunday and Helen Trent endured a crisis a day on the radio a generation...
...Some soap writers-many of them women-proudly trace their craft back to the 19th century serials of writers like Charles Dickens. The analogy, though flattering to the soaps, is apt enough. The trials of Amy and Sandy or Nick and Martha are just as important to many TV viewers as the sorrows of Little Nell were to readers a century ago-and just as gratifyingly hopeless. Says Kitty Barsky, a writer on both One Life to Live and All My Children: "This is the big payoff-to end up with everyone watching in tears...