Soap Opera Audiences

Read the following and take some time to read the original, then can you:

• categorise the target audience for your soap opera as; Fanatics, Ironics, the Non-committed or Dismissives
• Apply Uses and Gratification Theory (Blumler and Katz) 

The following has been taken from an Ofcom document entitled  Soap box or soft soap? Audience attitudes to the British soap opera. Click logo for the whole report.

• The importance of the soap opera to the British audience as a popular form of entertainment has been well-documented. The genre stands out from other television programme types as one in which the audience invests both time and involvement, building relationships with characters over time. This means that expectations about the genre are based on experience, and the individual nature of each soap opera is created through an established long-term familiarity. It is when these expectations are challenged, with little warning or in a way considered inappropriate to that particular soap opera, that the Broadcasting Standards Commission receives complaints. 
• soap operas are generally scheduled before the 9.00 p.m. Watershed and are viewed frequently as a family 
• ‘There is ... a ... subtle sense in which soaps can be considered instructive. Since they concentrate on inter-personal relations ... set in a social and political milieu intended to parallel the surrounding society, they can hardly fail to send messages about appropriate or expected behaviour.’ (Other Worlds: Society Seen through Soap Opera, D. Anger, Bradview Press, 1999.)
• In soaps ... problems are attached to or worked through with particular characters and the handling of a specific issue depends very much on the way in which that character has already been established.’ (Social Issues and realist soaps: A study of British soaps in the 1980/1990s, C. Geraghty in R. C. Allen (ed) To Be Continued ... Soap operas around the world, Routledge, 1995.)
• [the] genre [is seen] as a vehicle for discussion, especially of social issues. 

• Entertainment is the driving interest, mentioned by nearly two in five respondents (38%), underlining the importance of the soap opera as a way of ‘switching off’ for a period of time.
• ‘It’s only when you sit here and talk about how you think the storylines went and what you think about them. Without this I would just be watching it, absorb it and it would go out the other ear. I don’t really sit there and think about it too much. I know that it’s not going to offend me or shock me in any way. I can deal with whatever they’re going to throw up.’(Mixed Surbiton group, aged 20-35, Ironic) Despite this participant’s view of the importance of the soap opera in his or her consciousness, it is clear that there is generally a socially cohesive element to soap opera viewing. 
• A quarter of the general public lives in households where most members watch soap operas together and soap operas are discussed in one form or another by two in five households, especially if the children are of secondary school age. 
• ‘One of the characteristics of British television is the way in which the home-produced soaps have undertaken a realist function in their representation of British society ... Realism is a key concept for these ... British soaps and is called on as a justification or a rationale for the world they depict.’ (They Killed off Marlena, but She’s on Another Show Now: Fantasy, Reality and Pleasure in Watching Daytime Soap Opera, L. Spence in R. C. Allen (ed) To be continued ... Soap operas around the world, Routledge, 1995.)