ABSTRACT
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. Coronation Street began in 1960 at a time when the British “new wave” in the theater, literature, and cinema was stressing the importance of drawing on different kinds of experience based on the lives of “ordinary” people. While soaps always have a tendency to deal with the everyday and the mundane even in their most extreme moments, in British soaps this emphasis on the quotidian inevitably intertwined with issues of class and region. The working class, as a specific group, not just as ordinary people, was represented in Coronation Street so that the drama of personal relationships so characteristic of a soap was placed within a homogeneous community living in the backstreets of a town in northern England. A sense of place and of class was thus written into British soaps at an early stage with the consequence that Coronation Street’s stories were more likely to be concerned with the tensions and pleasures of the community rather than the elaboration of dramas in the family home.
