Soap operas get high ratings

The television watchdog said soaps were "posing a threat to diversity" during the peak hours.

Soaps often have four or even five episodes a week compared with an average of two episodes a week a few years ago.

But what do you think?

This debate is now closed. Please see below for a selection of your comments.

There are too many soaps on TV. But hey, I have better things to do with my time than watch rubbish like that anyway!
Tony, UK

Yes, I think there are far too many soaps on TV. Why not spend the money on more educational programmes?
Mark Headings, England

The ITC are perfectly correct. There are way too many soaps on TV and they are on too often with both Cornation Street and EastEnders on nearly every night. It has passed saturation point and British TV is now into total dumb down mode.
Kevin Munn, UK

If we all watched every soap it would be too much but we don't. Well, not many anyway. Soaps are in the main all different and they attract different audiences. I watch EastEnders but not Corry. I don't watch any other. It's all down to choice. It's a market place, we need and demand the best available. No one says that supermarkets have too many products to choose from. ITC we note your concern; don't worry, we can take care of ourselves!
Mal Pearson, England

There are far too many soaps on TV. I am amazed that there are people out there who are dedicated viewers of one soap, let alone more than one. To follow many of these soaps requires viewers to tune in four or five times a week - haven't they got a life? Do TV producers and planners think that we have nothing better to do?

Over the last two years, I have also become convinced that we are on the brink of a general backlash against soaps, i.e. people will stop watching them in large numbers. To counter this the producers should reduce the total number of hours transmitted each week and make the individual programmes longer, therefore requiring fewer viewing occasions. What's wrong with a soap being transmitted only once or twice a week after all?
Clare, UK

I've stopped watching regular TV for this very reason - there seems to be nothing other than soap operas or tacky "reality TV" shows. Long live cable!
Hilary, UK

Yes. I do watch the soaps, but only becuase there is nothing else on. Put them on to a digital channel and see how the ratings fare. They are the obvious symptom of dumbed down TV.
Dave, UK

An average of two hours over five channels per night of the week - maybe there is too much. But if that's their thing then they should be allowed their enjoyment. Just wish the soap addicts would stop complaining about the disruption to the programming when the World Cup and European Championships come round. Remember soaps are on six days a week all year. Major football tournaments come once every two years. Soap addicts - it's time to be fair to the footie fan!
Alan Glaister, UK

Yes, there are too many soaps. Maybe the money spent on so many soaps could be spent on getting more top class sport back on the BBC.
Nelson Sa, Oxford

There are far too many tasteless soaps. I'd rather anything other than some "dramatic" story in every soap on every channel. Cut down on number of soaps!
Mark, England

I'm lucky my wife only watches Coronation Street, but it still kills an entire Monday night as well as Wednesday, Friday and Sunday early evenings. It, like other soaps, are certainly on way too much. This is on top of the fact that they are a bad influence, uneducational and down right depressing.
Stewart Graham, UK

Nobody forces people to watch soaps! I watch them selectively - being in possession of free will, a remote control, a VCR and the ability to converse and read books. I know of several elderly widowed folk who are delighted that there are more soaps.
Andie, UK

I think there are far too many soaps that are really quite unrealistic and lack the grit and the humour of everyday life.

Take for instance, the Australian soaps that are coated with sickly sweet sugar and the British soaps like Hollyoaks and Emmadale, which should give up the ghost and Brookside and Crossroads which thankfully are.

Also main stream dramas like The Bill are now permeating into soaps with on-going storylines based more on relationships then arrests.

It's a pity that soaps don't have more writers that write in the same style of Jimmy McGoven and Phil Redmond instead of writing this non-reality pulp that really isn't a reflection of real life at all.
Anon, UK

I think there are far too many soaps that are really quite unrealistic and lack the grit and the humour of everyday life. Take for instance, the Australian soaps that are coated with sickly sweet sugar and the British soaps like Hollyoaks and Emmerdale, which should give up the ghost and Brookside and Crossroads which thankfully have.

Al, UK

I think the category of soap should be extended to include long running dramas such as Casualty and Heartbeat as these programmes get little or no recognition, despite their huge viewing figures.
Emma, England

Yes! As soaps scrabble to find storylines to occupy the many episodes, reality goes to the wall, and every apparently happy soap marriage is destroyed to make more plot opportunities. Do we need this cheap and nasty way of filling the schedules?
Peter, UK

Yes there are far too many soaps on TV. Not only that, but many other dramas have taken on the form of soap operas, i.e. character driven with endlessly running plots. I'm sick to the back teeth of that sort of drama. Why can't we have more programmes with plots that have a beginning, a middle and an end?
Richard, UK

There are too many soap operas on television. It is really depressing to hear people actively discussing these things as if they are real and at the same time being unaware of the real world.
John, UK

I'm not a soap fan and have nothing against them as such, but to me the problem is the number of episodes. 4/5 times a week plus omnibus at weekends means you can never escape them.

It's also lazy programming by the channels as they know they've filled there schedules with guaranteed audiences without having to think of anything new!
Martin Iddon, UK

There are far too many soaps on our television screens. They are all beginning to lose steam and are starting to use the same plot-lines again and again but with different characters and in a different place. The writers need to scrap a majority of the soap operas on TV and focus on just one or two. This would leave space for other programming which is new and upcoming. Soaps are doing nothing anymore other than block new programmes from being given the attention they deserve.
Dave, England

There are far too many depressing, miserable, brain-rotting soaps. They should be replaced with football.
Sheridan Bird, UK

I don't watch soaps and feel that the time allocations that they have on TV could be filled with better programmes. I'm just glad my boyfriend and I have digital satellite so at least we have a wide choice of channels to choose from.

And I agree with Alan Glaister that all the soap addicts should stop moaning about too much sport on telly when there are soaps or similar programmes on every night of the week. I enjoy watching football, rugby and cricket on TV and fail to see why I should have to rely on Sky to show it all. There should be a better balance of programmes on terrestrial TV and not seemingly all of one type.
Dawn, UK

I think that there are too many soaps on evening telly, I think that three nights a week is more than adequate, I don't understand why Coronation Street is on twice on Mondays. That is just ridiculous, Emmerdale is on too often as well. Five nights a week is far too much. You can get easilly board of these and I feel the ITC do have a valid point.
Wilf, England

I'm pleased that the soaps are on more often - there's too much in the way of repeats of programmes that are years old. The soaps give something different every day instead of repeats.
Daniel Farley, UK

People watch these programmes to either compare their life to that of a character, or to make their lives feel better. Even when the characters are skint, they're always in the pub, we're not!
Gareth, UK

Far too many on, most of dubious quality.
Susan O'Neill, UK

There are too many soaps on and they're on too often. EastEnders has definitely dropped in quality since the days when it was on two days a week. If you don't like soaps there's very little else on terrestrial TV to watch. I just watch UK Gold these days.
Martin Burgess, UK

Soaps have deteriorated into dreadfully amateurish pantomimes. There are too many of them. They are on too frequently and certainly dumb-down the expectations of the viewing public. Most of them are youth-orientated, with a few "token" middle-agers. Yawn.....
Karen Sime, UK

I find soaps intolerable, badly acted and unrealistic. However as an avid footie fan I cannot see how they take up any more time on TV than do football matches. It's an issue of supply and demand, if there was no demand for soaps you can be sure there would be no supply. Ultimately it falls to us the viewer to vote with our remote. Otherwise I can see no logic to a TV station reducing the current excess of soaps.
Alan, Ireland

Saturday is the only day without one (if you don't count Casualty, that is). The rot set in when Emmerdale went to a nightly episode and every other soap jumped onboard with more of the same - stretching storylines. With Brookie gone and Crossroads soon to go, perhaps this is a sign of things to come. However, with another episode of Corrie during the week, the situation's going to get worse.
Andrew Jupp, United Kingdom

I have always thought there are too many soaps. And they are so depressing! Most of my viewing consists of high quality US shows (West Wing, ER, 24 etc.) I find this much better quality than anything on British TV. Mainly because they have humour as well as tragedy. I find UK soaps are so unrelentingly grim. Not an ounce of humour or human comfort to be found. If there is one message I would like UK soap writers to hear: cheer up and be more intelligent!
Simon Druce, England

Are people waking up at last to the fact that soaps have reduced the quality of TV drama for years, and created a nation of TV addicts? I assume these people did have a life before soaps.
Roger Haynes, UK

Having the soaps on more often loses the excitment that they sometimes bring, they then seem to drag a story on for a long time. If it were on 2/3 times a week it would give me something to look forward to.
Kalpesh Chauhan, Uk

There are far too many soaps on TV, most of which are long past their best. The endless struggle to come up with dramatic plot lines to grab viewers attention has rendered them preposterous. Most of these tired has-been series should be axed and the viewers provided with a wider range of drama, comedy and culture in place of the pondlife of the soap world.
Bill Tyne, UK

Yes, there are a lot of soaps on TV but equally, how many appalling "reality" shows are there? And what about the seemingly endless parade of shows devoted to houses and gardens? It's not just the prevalence of soaps that limits diversity on TV, it is the lack of imagination on the part of the producers and broadcasters.

One concept becomes a success and suddenly it spawns a million spin-offs until the public are utterly sick of the idea. For example - Pop Idol, Big Brother, the numerous different versions of Survivor, and so on and on and on and on. Given this, it's ridiculous to say that there are only too many soaps. Or that it's only soaps that are dumbing down TV. Think of Temptation Island, Ricki Lake, and endless re-runs of the same 10-year-old Hollywood movies? Honestly - how much dumber can you get?!
Jane, Ireland

Well said Hilary! I too watch none of the soaps. I have in the past sat through a couple of episodes of EastEnders, and found it so violent and depressing that it is the last thing on earth I would voluntarily sit and endure. I have a life, and it doesn't start and end with the fictitious people in the haunted fish tank in the corner of my living room
Elaine, UK

All soaps are the same, marriage, death, baby, arrests, murder etc. AND THEY ARE ALL BAD. Casualty and Holby are way way better and should never be classed as a soap because as I have already said soaps are bad and there are far too many on TV. Programmes should be more educational.
Kate, UK

The soaps go on for years and years, and are really boring. They should run for six months with a definite ending to the plot lines. Also there should be whole teams of writers. Soaps in this country are very poor.
Simon, UK

What's most frustrating is when the soaps take priority over live sporting events. A perfect example was the Formula 1 coverage on ITV on Sunday evening, towards the end of the race messages were constantly flashed up to inform the public that their beloved dose of drama was going to follow the broadcast. The coverage was subsequently cut severely short as they hastily left the Grand Prix as early as possible.
Darryl Murphy, England

The amount of soaps on at the moment is definitely not too much. I do watch Corrie and EastEnders because I choose to. There are plenty of digital channels out there to fit everyone's needs.
Lorraine, UK

Yes, there are. Far too many. Soaps are full of actors who can't act and storylines so lame that, in an attempt to be serious, they end up becoming farcical. The truly awful thing about soaps is that people, the actors included, take them so seriously, as if they're important. The idea of fictional writing should be to help people escape from the grim reality of their daily lives; soaps merely remind people just how depressing their lives are and, in many cases, add to this misery. It is time to clean up television and get rid of the "soap".
Richard Williams, UK

I love watching soaps but I do feel that they are on far too often. I watch EastEnders, Corrie and River City, but often miss episodes as I don't have the time to sit and watch them all.
E, Scotland

The only soap I watch is Corrie and I really enjoy it, but heartily wish it was on fewer nights a week. I think much of the suspense of the storylines is lost when we have to wait no time at all for the next instalment - I remember when Corrie was on just two nights a week and the thrill of having to wait with baited breath for the next episode several days later. I find it harder to stick with the programme now because it's inevitable I miss one or two shows each week.
Suzanne, UK

I think that there is a large variety of soap operas available to the viewer, and at the end of the day it's down to each individual to decide if they have the time to watch all the soaps at once.

It would be a sorry state if we all were such "fickle mush heads" that we can't turn off the telly and go out and do something interesting instead??
Chris, UK

At the BBC continuing dramas such as EastEnders, Casualty and Holby have all seen rising episode counts. This has to have an effect on diversity because the same shows are taking up more and more of the drama budget. Beyond these, BBC drama tends to be big budget and often a co-production. So if it's not EastEnders or doctors and nurses, it's English Literature or film-level drama.

There is no longer an inbetween as there once was, with returning serials or other taped single-character based shows. And in genre terms the BBC now ignores science fiction, horror, the plays of Shakespeare (or indeed the plays of anyone).
Gary Marlowe, UK

What are the peak hours then? From what I can see, only EastEnders and Corrie are on "peak time". I wouldn't count pre-6pm programming as peak as many people are hardly home from work.

I only watch two soaps and although they are on every day, I am grateful for it because it is reliable, it's something that is on whilst I make dinner, and it gives me something to do when I don't want to read a book, or write poetry, or socialise with people, or whatever else patronising people who don't watch soaps think of people who do watch them.

I suppose these people don't have a TV, or if they do, they only watch the news or documentaries? Well, other people will sneer at them for satisfying their factual appetites in such a lazy, passive way.

If you think terrestrial TV produces poor quality programming, then try using only Cable channels and come back to me! Apart from the tiny amount of UK produced dramas on cable channels, the rest of it is far far worse than four weekly EastEnders!
Gy�rgy, UK

With all the TV channels available in the UK today, I am surprised that this debate is even happening. Like I say to all the sad people who write to Points of View ..... If you don't like it, don't watch it!! We have the choice and the remote control ....... use them!!
Robbie, UK

I think soaps are great. They are entertaining and funny. So what if they don't depict real life? I get real life all day at work. I like to dumb down in the evening and relax. I get enough brain activity during the day. In the evening I just want to relax, chill out and not challenge my brain too much. Soaps are perfect for this.
Judy, Birmingham

I have to agree with the ITC, we are fed a diet of bland soaps with the same or similar story lines across the channels. More variety is required over the terrestrial airwaves!
Fraser Richardson, UK

I think it's all about choice. My mum watches the big three soaps religiously. It's her way of unwinding each night as it's hardly taxing on the brain. She's not addicted and isn't distraught if she misses an episode but I think she would be disappointed if her soaps were cancelled or moved to digital TV. I don't like the soaps as I find them dull and depressing so I choose not to watch them. My point is this..if you don't like the soaps don't watch them but plenty of people must do as the daily ratings prove that!
Gemma, England, Herts

We have too many soaps and too many reality programmes, and too many repeats on television nowadays. I find myself turning off the box and doing something else - a good thing perhaps?
Martha, UK

It seems we all agree that there are too many soaps. OK, you can tape them, switch off, switch over .... but wouldn't it be nice to have a little more choice instead of hour after hour, night after night of soaps? I think we should have an annual "no soap" day, rather like "no smoking day" and let all those soap addicts have 24 hours of withdrawal ... who knows, they may find something more fulfulling to do with that time !!
Kim, UK

When they increased the number of episodes per week, I stopped watching. It became such a chore to keep up with them.
KP, UK

There are far too many soaps these days, but this seems to be a symptom of a larger problem. If any station has a show that is considered successful, all the channels go into overdrive producing clones of that show. Why do TV editors always try to pander to the same demographic, rather than spreading the shows around?

Soaps dominate the TV schedules from 5pm until 9pm, a huge chunk out of most people's evenings. The other channels tend to put something a bit second rate on, as they know they will lose out to the other side. If you live with a person who likes soaps, then you will end up watching at least some of these, or end up living totally separate lives.
Nick, UK

I do agree that there are too many soaps on TV, but a large number of these programmes consistantly top the ratings, so there must be plenty of people who don't think that we have too much. If you don't like them, vote with your remotes - that would soon cause the TV companies to change their priorites and give us something more worthwhile, orginal and stimulating.
Faye Kemp, UK

Soaps are idiot food and a sign of lazy broadcasters. All TV channels should take this opportunity to reduce their output of soaps and the BBC should take the lead by dropping the appalling EastEnders, saving the licence fee payers the cost of producing this rubbish and the excessive wages of the talentless cast.
Simon, UK

There are too many and they all are subjectivly teaching their audiences how they should behave. There's many a time I've seen people overdramatising a situation - right down to the bad overacting... I can't help but whistle the EastEnders tune as I walk on by
Callum W, UK

The number of soaps really isn't a problem, it's the programming. Why have programmes that compete for the same audience on at the same time? Surely a bit of common sense would have the likes of Coronation street, EastEnders, Brookside, Neighbours etc complementing the news, current affairs, documentaries. Basically let the soap fans watch all their soaps while the grown-ups have something to watch on the other channel.
Simon Mallett, UK

Hallelujah, has someone at the ITC seen the light? There's far too much of this depressing nonsense on our screens. Where's the originality and creativity?
Simon, England

I like the soaps. If people did not like them why are they so popular with the highest viewing figures?
Amanda, UK

It's bad enough that there are this many soaps on almost every night of the week, but must we suffer the omnibus editions of this rubbish at the weekends as well?
Kerry King, London, England