Welcome to a village that’s populated almost entirely by unfeasibly photogenic twenty-somethings. A place where everyone is tanned, with immaculately styled hair, despite the north west’s soggy, blustery weather. Where relationships move fast, but tend to end in disaster. And where the local pub, The Dog in the Pond, seems to blow up with concerning frequency. I’m talking, of course, about Hollyoaks, the unassuming (and, well, entirely made-up) Chester suburb that gives its name to Channel 4’s larger-than-life soap opera.
Soaps have never been famed for their low-key, kitchen sink-style realism. But Hollyoaks, which reaches the venerable age of 30 this week (probably making it a fair few years older than the majority of its regular viewers), has always pushed its “more is more” ethos to the very limit, then thrown in a few grisly accidents, ill-advised snogs and improbable resurrections for good measure.
You only have to look at the statistics to get an idea of just how relentless Hollyoaks can be. In the three decades that it has graced our screens, the soap has featured 57 births and 88 marriages, as well as 51 engagements that didn’t go the distance. There have been 294 deaths, many of them the result of the countless explosions, disasters and other deus ex machinas that seem to strike with alarming frequency (usually coinciding with the show’s annual “stunt week”). Others were the work of the 13 serial killers who have terrorised the residents over the years: if you thought Midsomer was the riskiest spot on the British TV map, Hollyoaks can certainly give it a run for its money. Speaking at the show’s 30th anniversary screening earlier this week, Channel 4’s chief content officer Ian Katz revealed that someone once worked out that the village was about 10 times more dangerous than Tijuana in Mexico, the world’s so-called “murder capital”.
It’s an odd recipe: cast a load of young, attractive actors, and put their characters through the wringer (and then some). And yet. A Hollyoaks obsession, however brief, has long been something of a rite of passage for British teenagers and students. Perhaps they’re drawn in by the strange combination of fantasy and realism. Yes, everyone’s uncannily good-looking, but they’re all wearing high street clothes. They’re being targeted by gang members and violent criminals, but they’re also doing mundane things like going to college and hanging out in crap local nightclubs. (The Loft, owned by a series of absolute wrong’uns, tends to be the location of choice.)
Life on Hollyoaks, then, is the perfect mixture of boring and bizarre. Perhaps that fever-dream quality accounts for why it makes such good hangover viewing. Or maybe that’s just conditioning: back in the day, the omnibus was a fixture on the Sunday morning T4 schedule, coinciding with the exact moment you might stumble downstairs, clutching your duvet, to set up residence on the sofa while regretting the previous night’s decisions. Still, you’d think, at least you weren’t being held captive in the basement of the pub by a psychopath (like Jennifer Metcalfe’s Mercedes McQueen, who’s appeared on the show on and off since 2006).
Growing up in Merseyside in the Noughties, I always found Hollyoaks inescapable. Although it’s set in Chester, it is filmed in Childwall, a suburb of Liverpool; spotting cast members shopping in the newly opened Met Quarter was a common weekend distraction. You could quite easily brush shoulders with a British Soap Award winner at the bar on a Saturday night and then watch said actor get embroiled in a paternity scandal the next day in the omnibus.
If you thought Midsomer was the riskiest spot on the British TV map, Hollyoaks can certainly give it a run for its money
By the time my generation came to it, the show’s formula was well established. But it took a while for Hollyoaks to find its groove. In the mid-Nineties, Channel 4 were looking for a show that might become a home-grown alternative to youth-focused soaps like Home and Away or the glossy teen drama of Beverly Hills 90210. The TV producer Phil Redmond had been wanting to launch a series that fell somewhere in between his two other famous creations, Scouse soap Brookside and school drama Grange Hill, and was brought on board to mastermind the project.
It started off pretty lighthearted in tone, following the low-key dramas and love lives of a group of 15 model-like teens and twenty-somethings. Among them was Nick Pickard’s Tony Hutchinson, who has since become Hollyoaks’ answer to Ken Barlow: the show’s longest-standing cast member has gone from aspiring chef to thrice-married father of an indeterminate number of children (he is, at this point, presumably a Hollyoaks lifer).
In its early days, the show was criticised for failing to grapple with bigger issues, but that all changed when the writers decided to kill off original cast member Natasha (Shebah Ronay) with an ecstasy overdose, when her drink was spiked in a club. The storyline was inspired by the mid-Nineties panic over dancefloor deaths, and marked the first of many ripped-from-the-headlines narratives designed to reflect the sort of problems that British youngsters might face (albeit with the volume and colour saturation turned up to the max). Late night episodes, airing after the 9pm watershed, allowed the show to explore particularly taboo issues; in 2000, Hollyoaks became the first British soap to feature a storyline about male rape, focusing on Gary Lucy’s Luke Morgan.
The show’s tendency to bombard its characters with social issues requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and it’s definitely ripe for parody. And yet it also fulfils an important role, playing out scenarios that younger viewers might be experiencing, and perhaps helping them to feel less alone, or just galvanising them to be a bit more compassionate. Plenty of its storylines have been genuinely groundbreaking: at the show’s 30th anniversary celebrations, actor Kieron Richardson, who has appeared on the show as Ste since 2006, spoke of his pride at playing the first British soap character living with HIV. In recent years it has tackled everything from county lines grooming to far-right radicalisation to conversion therapy.
Although it’s easy to make jibes about wooden soap acting, you can’t deny the fact that Hollyoaks has provided a launchpad for plenty of performers. Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel, American Gods’ Ricky Whittle and even James Corden got their start on the series long before making it in America. Ex-Oaks actors such as Will Mellor and Warren Brown went on to become staples of British telly drama. And in 2018, Rachel Shenton and Chris Overton became the first former Hollyoaks stars to win an Oscar, for their short film The Silent Child.
Right now, despite a few splashy exceptions, British TV isn’t exactly in the flushes of health. Budget cuts have hit soaps and continuing dramas hard: the likes of Holby City and Doctors have been culled outright, while Hollyoaks is one of several shows to have its number of weekly episodes reduced (from five to three). In 2024, a “time jump” moving the action forward by a year saw around 20 cast members axed, reportedly to reduce costs; the drop in episodes has brought cuts to behind-the-scenes jobs too.
At a time when there are fewer accessible training grounds for performers, screenwriters and other creatives trying to get a foot in the door, we need to celebrate the shows that provide these opportunities. Whatever the snobs say, Hollyoaks and its ilk are a vital part of our TV ecosystem. So here’s to another 30 years of ill-advised affairs, returns from the dead and dramatic explosions. Although for the love of God, won't someone run a health and safety check on that pub?
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