Telling it like it is? Social and linguistic realism in Scottish and Catalan soaps

Abstract

Those involved in the production of soap operas frequently make strong claims regarding the particularly close relationship between their products and ‘reality’, simultaneously distancing themselves from any suggestion of ‘construction’. Perhaps the best-known such claim (in the UK at least) was the assertion made by Julia Smith, then producer of the English soap EastEnders, to the effect that ‘we don’t make life, we reflect it’ (Geraghty, 1991: 32), though as we shall see later in this article, such claims are by no means restricted to England. The question of ‘realism’ in both its broad (‘realistic’) and its narrow (‘realist’) meanings is a vexed one, and indeed what counts as realism can be highly culture-specific (O’Donnell, 2007).

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