Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 24, 2004
Fiona Davern

Yet Nobel Prize for Literature winner VS Naipaul has said that he imagined novelists such as George Bernard Shaw would most likely be TV scriptwriters if they were alive today. And if they wanted to reach large audiences, what better genre than soaps?

With short, titillating doses served up daily, soaps allow us to live day to day with characters who we soon feel we know intimately. They are formulaic yet "alive" because we see them develop and their situations played out every day.

I used to rush home from university to watch Loving, my compulsion a shameful secret. It was an inexplicable addiction, but the spell was broken when, in a puff of smoke, one of the evil characters turned into a snake and slithered away, like the devil himself. Now there's funny, and then there's plain asinine.

And speaking of ridiculous, who can forget Dallas and the infamous "the entire eighth season was a dream" shower scene? Either the writers were the laziest people in TV, or they thought their audience had the intelligence of pond scum. Perhaps both.

I was 15 at the time and I thought it was the most embarrassingly lame resurrection of a character ever. It would have been better if Pammy had turned into a knife-wielding psycho and slashed any chances of the insipid Bobby's return.

However, it's good to know that if you do succumb to soaps, you're not by necessity a sad dullard who devours boxes of chocolates waiting for the spin cycle to end while watching the la-la-land that is soapdom.

South African soaps have found their own niche within the genre. They have the usual blend of betrayal, heartache, love, cruelty, loyalty, passion, deceit and domestic drama; but they also deal with hard-hitting issues that are an uncomfortable part of our society - such as HIV/Aids and rape. In fact, once a week Isidingo features a scene that is written, shot and aired on the same day to ensure that it is up-to-date with current affairs.

Have you ever seen anything that touches on current affairs, like an upcoming election, in Days or The Bold? No, these characters live in their own incestuous little bubbles; in love one minute, pregnant with their daughter's husband's baby the next.

If you were to track Brooke's relationships you'd see she's essentially glammed-up trailer trash - a perfect candidate for Jerry Springer's sad show. And that's about as controversial as The Bold gets.

South Africans are not afraid to confront difficult issues, even in our soaps. It's quite a relief that as a society we are adventurous about the ways in which we express ourselves dramatically.

Give me the complexities of Lee and Rajesh's relationship any day over the inane comings and goings of Brooke and Ridge.

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