ABSTRACT
The terms ‘quality’ and ‘soaps’ are seldom linked in discussions of television. In a British context, whether set against single plays of the 1960s, classic serials of the 1980s or US HBO series in the 1990s, soaps generally represent the worst tendencies of formulaic, repetitive and aesthetically predictable television. For many, quality television fiction now comes in the shape of US series and sit-coms (see Jancovich and Lyons 2003) and Lez Cooke in a recent history of British television drama found no soaps to add to his list of contemporary British programmes that could challenge the best of US television. In media and cultural studies, soaps tend to be studied in terms of their audiences, their social significance and their narrative organisation. Arguments about quality involve attention to textual detail that is hard to maintain as yet another episode sweeps by.
