Watching the English by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2005-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

But this is not sufficient explanation. The Swiss painter Fuseli may have been correct in his observation that our ‘taste and feelings all go to realities’ but the English are quite capable of appreciating much less realistic forms of art and drama; it is only in soap opera that we differ so markedly from the rest of the world, demanding a mirror held up to reflect our own ordinariness. My hunch is that this peculiar taste is somehow closely connected to our obsession with privacy, our tendency to keep ourselves to ourselves, to go home, shut the door and pull up the drawbridge. I have discussed this privacy-fixation in some detail in earlier chapters, and suggested that a corollary of it is our extreme nosiness, which is only partially satisfied by our incessant gossiping. There is a forbidden-fruit effect operating here: the English privacy rules mean that we tend to know very little about the personal lives and doings of people outside our immediate circle of close friends and family. It is not done to ‘wash one’s dirty linen in public’, nor is it acceptable to ask the kind of personal questions that would elicit any such washing.

So we do not know what our neighbours get up to behind their closed doors (unless they are so noisy that we have already complained to the police and the local council about them). When a murder is committed in an average English street, the response from neighbours questioned by the police or journalists is always the same: ‘Well, we didn’t really know them . . .’, ‘They kept themselves to themselves . . .’, ‘They seemed pleasant enough . . .’, ‘We mind our own business, round here . . .’, ‘A bit odd, but one doesn’t like to pry, you know . . .’ Actually, we would dearly love to pry; we are a nation of insatiably curious curtain-twitchers, constantly frustrated by the draconian nature of our unwritten privacy rules. The clue to the popularity of kitchen-sink soap operas is in the observation that soap-opera characters are ‘people who might easily be our next-door neighbours’. Watching soaps such as EastEnders and Coronation Street is like being allowed to peer through a spyhole into the hidden, forbidden, private lives of our neighbours, our social peers – people like us, but about whom we can normally only guess and speculate. The addictive appeal of these soaps lies in their vicarious satisfaction of this prurient curiosity: soaps are a form of voyeurism. And of course they confirm all of our worst suspicions about what goes on behind our neighbours’ firmly closed doors and impenetrable net curtains: adultery, alcoholism, wife-beating, shoplifting, drug-dealing, AIDS, teenage pregnancy, murder . . . The soap-opera families are ‘people like us’, but they are making an even more spectacularly dysfunctional mess of their lives than we are.

So far, I have only mentioned the most popular English soaps – which are the unequivocally working-class ones: EastEnders and Coronation Street. But our

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