You put your hero in a tree. You throw stones at him. You get him down from the tree.

This is drama. The classic three act structure.

You’ll find it in most narrative from anywhere in the world, always. This structure is, possibly, a metaphor for the three stages of mortality: birth (growth), living (adulthood), and death (resolution). It owes its morphology, I’d bet my granny, to the form of years that agrarian cultures are bound by: spring, summer; winter. It’s a mortal thing, drama, or rather, a thing about mortality: it emphasises and explores the certainty of death, and thereby suggests we celebrate life. At least to me it does.

But here’s the thing: popular culture has defied that structure in the creation of, amongst much, the soap serial. Not much of a beginning, not much of a middle; no end. No tree, no hero; no stones – just a dialogue heavy ramble or rant through a gossip forest. This is lift music for the right side of the brain. It has existed in the form and volume with which it is now broadcast on populist media (the goggle box) nowhere before in history. The thing where nothing happens is a new thing. Before, people used to like stuff to happen. Now they are content, or numbed, to chew the cud.

Now there’s no reason why cud should be any less efficacious than steak. You just have to do more eating. Ask cows. And contentment’s a fine thing. And there’s no reason why defying the bounds of mortality and seasonality as mirrored by traditional drama shouldn’t be seen and sensed as progressive. Claiming one thing is better than another is usually fallacious because something is only anything to a limited degree. And it’s absurd to state that things are this way or that because, frankly, no one really knows. Stuff I mean, not numbers. They’re absolutes. But that’s another story (but it’s not a narrative).

But technology has clearly redefined culture even as liberal politics has insisted we redefine what culture actually is. Technology has the power to change culture in ways undreamt of in bygone times. The problem with this might be that if broadcasters get it wrong, they get to do lots of damage before they realise they’ve got it wrong, and get it right. Soap may or may not be good for soap viewers. It may or may not be bad for them, either. Like everything else it’s probably partly good and partly bad. It’s just a question of degree.

All I’m saying is that folks used to watch usually Manichean drama unfold in a way that reaffirmed moral verities, or rather, morality vital to the functioning of the collective: tribe, society, country etc. Of course a certain W. Shakespeare changed the Manichean bit. He was considered a maverick. He was someone who ignored The Rules. He did this to such a degree that even half way through last century he was still rejected by some scholars. Rules is rules is rules, they said.

So perhaps we owe soap to Shakespeare. A bit of a stretch? Possibly. But I’d wager he had something to do with it, and that something is quite substantial. Yet in planting the seed we can’t control what happens in the branches. Ask Jesus.

I’d also bet my granny that many of us have accepted drama as a means to explore the circadian babbling of people who aren’t all good or all bad or all heterosexual or all homosexual or all anything at all a bit too far. Or rather that technology has. Television is a vastly powerful thing. Watch the box and life is forgotten. We abandon our living room reality in favour of a world often bizarrely similar to our own that is vicariously experienced – in total safety. Brains do less work when we’re in front of the TV than they do when we’re asleep; then, they’re generating qualia that may or may not manifest our desires and fears – and our boredom. At least they’re generating. Hit the remote and the mind motor turns off. Data perceived is then registered largely by the subconscious. Which if you think about it is basically cultural mainlining.

Might it ergo be of some importance that what gets injected is nourishing?

Back to you in the studio.

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© N Green 2007