CBC [see comments below] has just announced its plans to cancel the soap opera As the World Turns, which began its incredibly long run in 1956 (my birthyear). I generally have a strong feeling of disdain for soap operas, or novelas as they are called on Spanish-language television. Even from early childhood, I could see no point in watching programs where grownups stood around arguing with each other all the time. (Correction: sometimes they sat around arguing with each other.) Frankly, when I was a kid, soap operas painted for me an image of adults as just being a foolish, contentious bunch of dumbasses. Hmm--come to think of it, they may have had something there after all!
My beloved mother, alas, was a big fan of the genre, though. And As the World Turns, with its evil lead character Lisa running around messing up everyone's lives, was by far her favorite in the late 1950s and early 1960s. When I was three or four, I lived in an apartment in Opa-Locka, Florida. Our TV set worked O.K. ... except, that is, for the slight problem that it couldn't pick up channel four (which was CBS for the Miami area). So on weekday afternoons, my mother and I would walk down to the other end of the apartment complex to visit her friend Betty and watch the show. And I would hang around, drink "cossee" (coffee), and play with the kids around there. So As the World Turns occupies a special place in my memory, although it's a pretty ancient, dilapidated place!
I'm trying to think of any soap operas that I actually watched and enjoyed. The only one I could come up with was the gothic series Dark Shadows around 1969. And that was only for a stretch of a few weeks. Many years ago I would sit in on episodes of Days of Our Lives and General Hospital, but that was when my wife enjoyed those shows and I watched them with her as part of sharing her company. But as a personal choice, I guess I just don't dig this genre, pure and simple.
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Hm. I didn't know the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had anything to do with As the World Turns.
ReplyDeleteThese were the original "reality shows", you might say.
I, too, never had any interest in them, but in recent years I've taken to watching a British one, Eastenders. Really bad, but addictive, and fun for the accents. Only, the TV station I watch it on, a public station out of Long Island, is more than five years behind. Some of the actors I'm seeing have since died, and I occasionally find out something that happened a few years ago on the show, but which I haven't seen yet.
The typical dialogue that you know is going to end people up in trouble?:
"Wait! It wasn't like that. Let me explain!"
"Shut it! I'm not listening to anything from you."
I think Carol Burnett on "CBC" had an ongoing parody on her show titled "As the Stomach Turns" during the seventies. And that pretty well sums up how I feel about the genre.
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