Television and Everyday Life

EastEnders
and 
Coronation Street,
as well as those of 
Brookside,
no less than those of 
Dallas
and 
Dynasty,
and
especially those of 
Home and Away
and 
Neighbours
are involved in a
cultural exploration of the nature of the suburban—both of its heartland and
its margins, its content and its forms. The suburban is worked through not
just in each example of the genre but in the genre as a whole. This, I want to
suggest, is its major significance.
Yet the argument can be pushed a little further. The soap opera is, principally,
a female genre. Historically created for women at home who were perceived
to be the principal audience of the radio programmes and the principal
consumers of the soap powders that were advertised within them, they were
scheduled at times when the housewife could listen without being too distracted
from the chores of her daily routine—chores that were themselves expressions
of the distracted and fragmented labour of housework. Tania Modleski (1983)
has made this perception a central part of her understanding of the gendering
of the genre and of its central place in the daytime television schedules. Both
programme and schedule are fragmented. Narrative lines are both endless and
endlessly completed; story lines fragment and converge. The programmes
themselves are interrupted by advertisements:
The formal properties of daytime television…accord closely with the

---

74
Television and Everyday Life
rhythms of women’s work in the home. Individual programs like soap operas
as well as the flow of programs and commercials tend to make repetition,
interruption and distraction pleasurable… Since the housewife’s “leisure”
time is not so strongly demarcated, her entertainment must often be
consumed on the job.
(Modleski, 1983, 73)
The programmes and the schedules are, in this argument, of a piece. The
domestic life of the housewife, but especially the suburban housewife, is a
product of the mobile privatisation that is the suburb: a domestic world that is
constructed through the particular relations of public and private spheres as
they are worked out in the constantly shifting balance of work and leisure both
within the home and outside it. The television schedule, and the soap opera
which expresses, in its fragmented flow, its own narrative structure, together
provide one of the coordinates of the temporal structuring of the everyday.
The soap operas themselves, in their constant mastication of domestic and
family relations, of neighbourhood and work, crisis and routine, drama and
tragedy, provide a backloth to, but also an expression of, the gendered iteration
of life in the suburb.
But what of that iteration? Does the relationship of soap opera to it stop
with the screen? Of course it does not. Perhaps one of the most important
dimensions of Dorothy Hobson’s study of the British soap opera 
Crossroads
was her willingness to trace its significance for the lives of its viewers and
particularly in terms of its status as an object of talk, of gossip, both within the
home and outside it. As Geraghty (1990) argues, there is much more in the
relationship of the soap opera audience to its characters than can usefully be
described in terms of identification, yet in the ‘tragic structure of feeling’ (Ang,
1986) or in the constant oscillation of identification and comparision (Radway,
1984), but above all in talk, the life of the soap opera pervades life in the
home, life over the garden wall, on the street, in the pub, in the canteen and in
the factory (Hobson, 1989). This is true particularly, though not exclusively,
for women.
9
And it is, perhaps increasingly, the life-blood of the fragmented
sociability of the suburb.
Finally it is worth pointing out that the television text, the soap opera text in
this case, is only one aspect of the proliferation of meanings surrounding television
that circulate within everyday life. The gossip and the talk is informed as much
by the discussions about the actors and their roles, the characters and their private
lives, which are offered on a daily basis in the newspapers and periodicals, as
about the television programme itself. As Hodge and Tripp (1986, 143) observe:
Discourse about television is itself a social force. It is a major site of the
mediation of television meanings, a site where television meanings fuse
with other meanings into a new text to form a major interface with the
world of action and belief.

---

The suburbanisation of the public sphere
75
This discourse is prompted both by television and by other parasitical, public
discussions of television. I shall discuss the implications of this observation
more fully in Chapter 6. Suffice it to say now, however, that daily life—suburban
life in all its typicality—is multiply structured, in part, by the meanings that
television generates and fosters. The soap opera, perhaps exceptionally, provides
much of the fodder for that daily discourse, the discourse of suburban
neighbourliness and peer-group interaction.