There’s an old South Park episode called Simpsons Already Did It, an arch piece of meta-commentary documenting the writers’ frustration about finding original storylines. It was hard not to be reminded of Simpsons Already Did It during last night’s big Emmerdale disaster.
All soaps need disasters. When you’re essentially telling a single story over the course of several decades, you need to hit the reset button now and again. Maybe you’ve got tangled up in too many dreary plots. Maybe you need to clear the deck of exhausted characters and backstage divas. Maybe you just want to remind viewers that you still exist. The answer to all of these problems is to burn something down or blow something up.
The trouble is that there is only a finite number of disasters in the world, and most have already happened in soaps. Pub fire? It’s been done. The Queen Vic in EastEnders burned down in 1992 and 2010, Coronation Street’s Rovers Return burned down in 1986 and 2013, and Emmerdale’s Woolpack burned down in 1998.
Factory fire? Coronation Street, 1975, 1997 and 2004. Armed Robbery? Coronation Street, 1978 and Emmerdale, 1994. Train crash? Coronation Street, 1967. Plane crash? Emmerdale, 1993. Bus crash? Emmerdale, 2000. Coach crash? Coronation Street, 1969. Tram crash? Coronation Street, 2010. Lorry crash? Coronation Street, 1979 and EastEnders, 1986, 1991 and 1993. Collapsing fairground? EastEnders, 2004. Minibus falling off a cliff? Coronation Street, 2015. Fatal lightning strike? Emmerdale, 2003.
So it is no wonder that Tuesday night’s Emmerdale was so bewilderingly convoluted. If you missed it, here’s what happened. A character set fire to her estranged husband’s car, in part because he’d just been holding his ex-boyfriend hostage at gunpoint. The fire spread out of control and engulfed some gas canisters, one of which exploded and took out a passing helicopter that was on its way to escort a new bride and groom to their honeymoon. The helicopter then crashed through the roof of the reception venue. That interrupted an argument between the happy couple that had been started by the accidental broadcast of a recording of a conversation between the bride and her brother-in-law about their secret affair. Phew!
There’s video of the disaster online, but I don’t recommend watching it. Seen out of context, it’s basically just a berserk piece of abstract performance art, like one of those music videos that’s had the music replaced by ambient sound effects. Also, the clip includes what looks like a weird tribute to Atonement and footage of a man lying face-down in a river, then looking up at a van that’s teetering on the edge of a cliff, and I genuinely have no idea what either of these scenes have to do with the helicopter crash; just thinking about it has given me a nosebleed.
This is the extent to which soaps now have to contort themselves in order to pull off a vaguely original disaster. This is how overstuffed with spectacle the genre has become. To my mind, the soap world only has three choices left.
First: it can do away with these attention-grabbing stunts altogether, and take the genre back to its core, which is miserable people complaining about how rubbish their lives are until they quietly die of old age. Second: it can just start copying old stunts, explicitly crediting its sources like hip-hop artists do with samples. So last night’s Emmerdale would have begun with a caption reading; “Contains elements of the Emmerdale plane crash and the EastEnders Sharongate storyline from 1994.”
Or – and this is my favourite option – soaps could just completely sever all ties with reality as we know it. If Emmerdale is reduced to staging one-in-a-trillion chance helicopter accidents, then why not go the whole hog? Next time, why not make a tree come to life and embark on a vengeful murderous rampage through the village? Why not grant one of the Dingles the power to make human skulls explode with their mind? Why not, to mark the show’s next big anniversary, fold the entire sky into an origami hand-blender and make it tornado while all the other characters shiver into the unknowably awesome vortex the event has brought about? At least then I’d watch.
