What is Hilary Kingsley?

M: I have with me Hilary Kingsley, a TV columnist and the author of " Soap Box—The Paperback Guide to Soap Opera" and we’re going to discuss that phenomenon of television. Hilary, how would you define a soap?
W: I think it’s a continuing story about a group of characters, either a related family or a group of people who work together, and it’s a story that you know is not going to end, it’s as if those characters are sort of living on some special fictional island somewhere so that even when you don’t listen to them or watch them or when the soap has ended, you know that life there is going on somehow. So it’s a sort of never ending middle, you know, no beginning and no end.
M: How do you think the soap genre has developed since the early days?
W: Well, I don’t think it has changed very much, I mean I don’t think it’s changed since the 30s and 40s when it started on, er American radio—I mean, I think everyone knows now it came into being when radio went national in the US and they needed some running stories to attract housewives , keep them glued to their radios and sell products to them, and the products they were selling first of all were soap powders. They were always stories about families, about relationships, about the thing that the bigger dramas were not about-and still are really, about men escaping from difficult situations, whereas soap operas are basically about women coping with everyday situations—women and men, of course. But one reason I think why I’ve always liked soap operas is that the women are the most important characters, and they’re the moral centre of any story.