A slightly unorthodox blog today – random word comes not from my
beloved “Watch out for Snakes”, but from a simple Facebook comment:
“Now it’s your turn to write about soap”.
Far be it from me to shirk a challenge (unless said
challenge involves any kind of physical risk or requirement to hard work) ,
here I am, writing about soap.
I don’t watch soaps anymore. I’m not sure when this
happened. They were as big a part of my life at one point as they were of any
fiendish telly addict’s. For several years I didn’t miss a single episode of
EastEnders (with the notable exception of, weirdly, the very first one* and two
that were broadcast while I was staying in a Paris tower block as part of our
school’s French exchange). My addiction even survived University, where I
didn’t watch any other telly other than the cricket and Quantum Leap. Years
before that, at junior school, I would watch “The Sullivans” at lunchtime , if
only to update the lollypop lady as to the latest plot developments (such as
they were). What I still don’t understand is how she came to be so interested
in a show that, because of her job, she could clearly *never watch*. Odd.
And then it stopped. This, I suspect, is because soap
watching requires momentum. Soap isn’t about the grand plots, it’s about the
details, the tiny things the characters do or say to each other. They are shows
very much about people – poorly written and insufficiently motivated, and even
more dreadfully acted as they may be at times – and as such you require an
investment, a real desire to know what they will do next (even if it has no
impact on a wider storyline). Miss it for a few weeks, and you no longer have
any compass to tell you why people are behaving in a certain way, and you
quickly stop caring.
The same applies, oddly, to snooker. Stop watching for a year and the procession of
spotty automatons that replace the ‘characters’ you so enjoyed watching will
make you imagine you are watching some sort of humourless mash up with I Robot,
and you’ll find greater satisfaction in watching your shower drip.
Of course, the very fact that I’ve just wittered on about
“soaps” and not “soap” just shows that except for frequenters of “Lush” and
other purveyors of high-end smellies, soap is just a word that jostles for
attention alongside shampoo, shower gel and hand wash. I don’t think I own a bar of soap, and if I do
I probably stole it from a hotel in Kuala Lumpur. My cleanliness routine relies entirely on
various forms of liquid, which is probably terrible for the environment since
said liquids require an ever more advanced concoction of plastic packaging to
keep them in place. On the other hand, Nizorel shampoo aside, I don’t have to
worry about animal fat in gels and liquids, and shower gel just looks less like
it’s up to something than soap. Bars of soap look like they’re planning a
takeover of the world. Nothing that slippery is ever up to anything good – just
look at George Osborne. I remember being slightly disturbed by the contents of
the built-into-the-tiles soap dish in my bath back home (I nearly wrote “in my
bath where I grew up”, but people might think I was a bonsai human). As a child
it was on my eye level, and never contained bars of soap as much a strange,
bubbly blobs of green matter floating in a few millimetres of disgusting
looking cloudy water. I assume my mum
thought that the overall mass of the soap was what mattered, not whether each
molecule was actually joined to the next. She did grow up under rationing.
I, on the other hand, felt like Zach Galligan’s mum having
to clear up the bits of Gremlin after she microwaves one. No-one ever thinks of
things of that. Cif lemon just isn’t
going to fix it.
* I boycotted after the intensely irritating previews
featuring characters from the square saying their names. Mee-shell? Really? And
I still can’t stop myself thinking, if I hear the name “Debs”, of “and Andy” in
a Scottish accent.
