Serial killers, soaps and sound bytes

Serial killers, soaps and sound bytes


Daniel Carey

IN late 2001, I was studying political science at a university in the Netherlands when one of my lecturers conducted an in-class experiment.
The Christian Democratic party had, he explained, replaced their leader because they felt they needed a new image. What better way, he thought, than to test the success of the decision than by asking a bunch of people who were unfamiliar with the candidates, and for whom image was therefore everything?
Having exempted the handful of students who knew the identity of the new leader, he put up pictures of four people involved in the party and asked the class to say who we would vote for just by looking at the photographs. We each raised our hands in turn, and trailing in last place in poll was a man with dark hair and glasses, who – according to one American undergraduate – looked ‘like the serial killer-type’. As if to prove how little we knew, not alone was the bespectacled man, Jan Pieter Balkenende, elected leader of the Christian Democrats, but he became Prime Minister the following year and has held the job ever since.
Of course, in any proper ‘whodunnit’, the identity of the serial killer is always a surprise. Such was the case on ‘Harper’s Island’, the American drama which recently finished its run on RTÉ.
I enjoyed what snatches of the show I caught, although one line had me laughing out loud. “So on his last day on earth, he finds out that his wife is cheating on him ... with his daughter’s husband?” one woman asked after being told about the final moments of a loved one. Stop sniggering at the back.
If, as a member of the TV audience, you don’t know the characters or their stories, it can be more fun to hear brief clips of dialogue than to follow a series. I never got into ‘Eastenders’, the London soap opera with more previous than Jack The Ripper, but seven years on, I can still remember the immortal words: “If she still loves you, Jamie, what are you doing living in a shed?”
Soaps remain hugely popular – in the last month alone, I’ve met three people in their late 20s who record every episode of ‘Home and Away’. The beauty of soaps is that you only need to tune in once in a blue moon to understand the plot.
I know friends living abroad who, on their rare trips home, needed to see just two minutes of the fantastically terrible ‘Sunset Beach’ to figure out what was going on. It helps when characters regularly talk to themselves, but leave the door open behind them so that curious eavesdroppers can hear their inner-most thoughts.
Any piece of back-story must come in the form of dialogue. So like politicians, soap scriptwriters have become experts at the sound byte and the accusing question. As one ‘Fair City’ character said to another earlier this year: “Will Rory be in your book? Will you write about the fact that you slept with the man who shot your son?”