We hebben het in diverse topics wel eens over hoe we ons kunnen opwinden over karakters en verhaallijnen, over wat klopt en niet klopt. Dat kan soms best ver gaan en dan is er altijd wel iemand die roept "het is maar een soap". Uiteraard! En het is goed om je dat weer eens te beseffen, maar daarna ga je je toch weer ergeren of diskussieren.
En dan is er altijd weer een slimmerik die laconiek zegt " je hoeft niet te kijken" .... en dan weet je "sh*t, ik ben verslaafd".
Het is best een groot probleem en waarom we er zo in op kunnen gaan en hoezeer het uit de hand is gelopen werd al beschreven in 2002:
Constant crises make for addictive soap opera but a grim life
The National Family and Parenting Institute, a Home Office policy unit, concluded last week that watching the grim realities of soap life - now heavily greased with bitter feuds, alcoholism and infidelities - could encourage gloomy children "to believe that family breakdown is inevitable".
The institute observed that there was a much higher number of separated and divorced people on soaps than is the national average, combined with a great deal of violence. This is thought to be leading young people to view the future with unrelenting pessimism.
I have stopped watching soaps myself, because when I switched on EastEnders after a wearisome day it was like slipping into a bath of angst: interchangeable whey-faced Cockneys, fresh from punch-ups or prostitution, glared at each other and snarled: "You didn't think I'd give up that easy, didja?" or "You lied to me and you ripped off your own mum. Now sling yer 'ook."
I'm not saying that I would have preferred perpetual reruns of It's a Wonderful Life, but that immortal Peter Cook quote would often spring to mind: "I don't want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction. I can get all that at home."
Yet soaps, for all their grimness - or perhaps because of it - are the dramatic life-blood of Britain. Women make up the greater part of their audiences, seemingly transfixed by the way that the characters lurch from crisis to crisis, with barely a tea-break for a spot of contentment in between. We can be sure, watching a soap, that a happy marriage will end in the discovery of the husband in bed with the new barmaid from the corner pub, or the wife in the brawny arms of her personal fitness trainer.
The influence of soaps has overflowed their half-hour limits: they have cultivated, in their vast audiences, a national addiction to crisis. The British public now demands of famous people not that they are particularly talented but that they are spectacularly troubled. A string of female celebrities have stepped forward to feed the public maw, obligingly marketing themselves as one-woman soap operas. They court popularity with ever more lurid stories about mystery illnesses, serial disappointments and badly-behaved lovers.
Once, information about the unhappy private lives of the rich and famous leaked out in gossip columns and unauthorised biographies. Now, they are knocking each other over to fling open their cupboards, and rattle the skeletons within.
Soap operas put their characters through the wringer, and then - once the fickle public loses interest - promptly write them out of the script. But soap characters are designed to be disposable: it's not so easy when you're real.
(Bron: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/pers ... -life.html)
Er bestaat zelfs een website met tips om af te kicken
http://www.wikihow.com/Go-Cold-Turkey-from-Soaps
Als je wilt nagaan of je zelf hulp nodig hebt, check dan deze lijst:
http://voices.yahoo.com/the-7-warning-s ... tml?cat=39
En dan is er altijd nog deze optie
:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -week.html
. Het is niet om interessant te doen met een engels artikel, het is dat veel leuke en ook interessante dingen in die taal op het internet verschijnen en in dit geval is het typisch engels om een kritiek op de eigen subcultuur te geven - engelsen zijn goed in zelfspot!
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