ABSTRACT
A s Sky satellite television began to take off in Britain in the mid-1990s and thenChannel 5 arrived in 1997, British broadcasters had to start seriously facing thechallenges of fragmenting and diminishing audiences. The traditional warhorses of drama, sitcom and light entertainment were becoming ever more expensive while proving less attractive to many of the audience. Soap opera was the one entertainment form that seemed impervious to the ravages of time and changing tastes, as ITV’s Coronation Street and BBC1’s Eastenders continued to battle for the top spot in the viewers’ affections. This long-running fascination with the fictional everyday life of ordinary people was what stimulated a new interest in factual versions, and observational documentary metamorphosed into the so-called ‘docu-soap’. There is no hard and fast definition of this form, what Bruzzi dubbed the ‘New British observational documentary’,2 but what was new was its knowing construction of cast and character for that ongoing human interest. It borrowed the conventions and sensibilities of drama to invest the unruliness of ordinary life with a narrative arc and, most importantly, the spur of interest to return an audience week after week.
