ABSTRACT
Soap operas, such as Crossroads, Coronation Street and Brookside, do not just exist in the hour or so of broadcast television a week that each is allotted. The central fiction of the genre, that the communities represented exist outside the box, as well as on it-the idea that the Grants, or Ken and Deidre, or Jill and Adam could watch the news, just like us-is supported and sustained across a range of media material. Newspaper articles, novels, souvenir programmes, TV Times promotions, even cookery books, function to support the simultaneous coexistence of them and us.1 It is possible to wear the same clothes, use the same decor, follow the same recipes and even pore over the same holiday snaps as the people in the Street, the Close and the Motel. It is even possible to buy Ambridge, An English Village through the Ages, the book that Jennifer Aldridge and John Tregorran researched and wrote together while listeners nationwide followed their growing pleasure in each other’s company.
