Week Two [Reading Notes]

1. Allen, Robert C. (1985) Speaking of Soap Operas, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Introduction Notes

- Within nine years after the debut of the first network radio soap opera in 1932, the soap opera form consisted of 90% of all sponsored network radio programming broadcast during daylight hours.

- Not only does the soap opera continue to enjoy undiminished constituency, working and middle classes, but new groups have "discovered" soap operas, including millions of teens and young adults.

- Due to technical advancements in television and the demand for more choice with the introduction of cable television there have been a spread of the types of soap operas produced to attract a wider array of viewers. For example, there are now adult-rated soaps, christian soaps, teen soaps, and, in the offing, a soap for deaf viewers.

- Soaps have a narrative form which produce national, cultural products, they're advertising vehicles, and a source of aesthetic pleasure for tens of millions of viewers.

- The "soap" in soap opera derives from the sponsorship of daytime serials by manufacturers of household cleaning products: Procter and Gamble, Palmolive, Colgate. They were a solution to advertising problems that radio couldn't carry out.

- Soap operas are a fictional world constructed by writers, articulated by actors, and governed by principles of dramatic logic and narrative progression. Not only do soap operas lack any resemblance of dramatic unity, but their lack of ultimate closure renders them narratively anomalous.

- There is no denying that many working-class woman enjoy soap operas or to rule out the possibility of "learning' occurring as a result of watching soaps or to regard as aesthetically deficient anyone who does not enjoy watching soap operas. 

2. John Corner (1991) Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History, : BFI Publishing.

- During the early 50-60s, television acted as the chief agency of domestic recreation, and, directly and indirectly, as a key promoter of increased consumption in other spheres - which began to hold a central place. TV Licensing in the UK raised from just under 5 million in 1955 to 16 million in the late 60s.

- Culturally, this period is one in which there occur a number of radical shifts in the class, gender, and generational character both of culture in its broadest sense of the popular arts.

- By 1990 which put forth other academic reasons for coming to terms more fully with the culture of television in Britain, with its often subtly interactive relationship between 'official' and 'popular' discourses, its unparalleled mixing of 'high' and 'low' forms of play-off between its democratising accessibility and its vulnerability to abuse by the powerful.

- The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, the viewing figures for this moment in British television are hugely impressive in their indication of a society united in national public ceremony via the means of live 'secondary participation'. Over 8 million people watched it in their own homes with over 10 million watching it at their friends homes. 

- With the introduction of Commercial Television through the Television Act of 1954, by 1956, TV was on the way to becoming a standard feature of every home, re-structuring domestic patterns and social habits in a way which in some aspects resembled, but in others significantly departed from, the shaping influence which radio had exerted upon everyday life and household activities in an early period.

- The BBC had national cultural responsibilities that with the introduction of ITV, it feared it would lose some sections of it audience to ITV with its new-style entertainment attractions.

BBC Director Gerald Beadle said that television competition "is lowering the proportion of intelligent programmes in main viewing hours below the level of one's competitor." He named it as the 'Hydrogen bomb of television competition'.

- The Pilkington Report can be seen to mark the last serious attempt to bridge the gap between the terms of parliamentary and public debate on national culture and the terms of a more analytically thorough-going cultural critique developing within the arts and social science disciplines of the universities.

- Under Lord Reith, the first Director-General, the BBC was quickly regarded both by itself and members of the politically and artistic establishment, as an 'embassy of the national culture'.

- The combined advantages over radio (vision) and cinema (liveness) gave a uniquely high level of 'co-presence' to television programming, the viewer often being put in the position of a witness, alongside the broadcasters, to the anterior realities depicted on their screens.