Hollyoaks nearly DEAD (1 Viewer)

Kala said:
I think they are trying to get a younger audience but forgetting that the only ones that watch the show these days are those that have been watching long term and love the older characters they’re axing.
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This is exactly the issue.

Neighbours tried the same thing around the late '00s by switching the focus to teen characters and rendering anyone older who'd been with the show longer term as supporting characters. Harcore fans stuck with it, but in general, it backfired because the intention was to shift the average audience age down. It's been much better for the last decade at telling stories across a more diverse - but ultimately older - demographic. I think all the UK soaps have gone through that transition to some extent. Look at EastEnders and the whole E20 spin-off. They managed to pull across a few characters into the main show, but even the more popular ones, like Fatboy, still had to be toned down a bit.

I can readily believe Hollyoaks skews a little younger than every other soap, but if it still is, that suggests its viewership is largely built on a transient audience. And I'm not sure that's sustainable for any TV show now.
 
Shoat said:
They had it fine up until the early 00s when they could set fire to a couple of sets, and it would be the closest thing to BIG EVENT that most terrestrial TV viewers would get, unless you stayed up until 11pm for ER.

Now it all seems rather TAME
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That's true. I wish ITV would stop doing "stunt week" because it becomes meaningless when something that's supposed to be a freak event is pencilled into the schedule every single year.

I think pacing is just way off these days, and that's primarily down to the volume of output. When ITV dropped the number of episodes of Coronation Street per week at the start of the pandemic, it conveniently coincided with the Geoff/Yasmeen plot reaching a peak. Suddenly, things that would have happened across 1½ episodes were spread across an entire week. It slowed the pace right down - but not to the point of being languid - and I think probably made that storyline feel more impactful as a result.
 
Finn said:
I think the reason the EE flash forward made so much noise was because it was something a mainstream soap hadn’t done, so it had a novelty to it. Even though aside from that element it was just the standard non pre-meditated murder that bonds a few characters together when they panic and don’t just CALL THE POLICE
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Hollyoaks already did a murder flash forward episode in 2009 and another one in 2019. :D
 
I love how Hollyoaks clearly does not give a shit any longer and is culling long serving cast members in order to bring back Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" love interest Jeremy Sheffield (demonic headmaster currently buried inside a remembrance wall) as his never before mentioned identical twin brother "Jez" with Sherrie Hewson, playing their mother.

 
Demonic headmaster is LOOKING GOOD

But Sherrie Hewson? :D

They really do just raid the Loose Women corridors these days. Janet Street Porter will show up next as Mercedes' next conquest.
 
I've watched the last couple of weeks out of curiosity of how this is all getting managed, and it's all very sorry.

The writing is very very rushed and panicked. I'm not sure how much notice they were given of the budget cuts, but it seems they'd been spending most of the time focusing solely on Warren, and now they're caught out and having to shoehorn everybody else's exits into a small handful of 30-second scenes. Cindy and Tom's departures were hugely underwhelming for such long-standing cast members.
 
Wait, is everyone just DECIDING TO LEAVE? I assumed the pub would blow up and 10-15 blondes and hunks would perish in the blast
 
Finn said:
Wait, is everyone just DECIDING TO LEAVE? I assumed the pub would blow up and 10-15 blondes and hunks would perish in the blast
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Mercedes, Bernadette, Porsche, Magdalena, Innocentius, McCartney, Christingle, Chardonnay, Chardonnay Jr and John-Paul McQueen have dramatically upped and moved to Ellesmere Port.
 
Finn said:
Wait, is everyone just DECIDING TO LEAVE? I assumed the pub would blow up and 10-15 blondes and hunks would perish in the blast
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Sadly, they have no money, so whilst they could afford to set fire to the actors, the sets are a different matter :(
 
Ellie said:
So is it ending officially? Or will it just be Tony and a run of soliloquies?
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There'll be three episodes a week from tomorrow followed by a year's time jump where axed characters who didn't receive a proper exit storyline will have their absence explained.
 
I like their slowing down the theme being appropriately representative of their gradual DEATH

Also love the use of Chester despite the show not having filmed a scene there since the 1990s
 
Shoat said:
I like their slowing down the theme being appropriately representative of their gradual DEATH

Also love the use of Chester despite the show not having filmed a scene there since the 1990s
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The Chester setting has always been window dressing at best. Of the seven original characters (and their families) all but one had southern accents, despite having been born and raised in Cheshire. The one northerner was very clearly Manc.
 
If there is a time jump of a year, will it be coming to us from the FUTURE? :o
 
If it's in the future, I expect we'll see a crazed Ste being elected Reform's first prime minister, with right-wing hi-jinks ensuing.
 
ButterTart said:
The Chester setting has always been window dressing at best. Of the seven original characters (and their families) all but one had southern accents, despite having been born and raised in Cheshire. The one northerner was very clearly Manc.
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I loved when they'd introduce a family with siblings, one of whom had a Bradford accent, one clearly went to RADA and one of whom was South African.
 
Let's be real, Hollyoaks often struggle to get actual ACTORS into the cast, so they can't afford to let pesky things like the wrong accent or ethnicity get in the way.

Of course sometimes they hit the triple jackpot of wrong accent / wrong ethnicity / AND can't act, but hey.

We shouldn't crave too much realism anyway, because really most of the current characters aren't affording properties on the Chester Wall, and we'd be watching a show set in ELLESMERE PORT instead :zombie:
 
GNL said:
I loved when they'd introduce a family with siblings, one of whom had a Bradford accent, one clearly went to RADA and one of whom was South African.
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For at least the first fifteen years they didn’t have a family unit with a consistent accent. Even now, Mercedes is clearly from Yorkshire and John Paul has barely ever bothered concealing his West Midlands accent. How the fuck was Steph the only one of the Deans who was northern? She’s a middle child, unless they packed her off to the Skelmersdale drama academy as a toddler it makes no fucking sense.
 
I quite like how people who haven't watched Hollyoaks in 20 years still think the majority of storylines involve smoking behind bike sheds and teenage pregnancy scares.

Would EastEnders have Dame Rita Simons terrorised by a marauding maniacal motorbike? Most likely NOT.

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I’m still thankful to Hollyoaks for providing the level of CAMP missing in other soaps.
 
I concede I've not watched it since 2008 (I was probably too old by then), and did assume it was still a teenage soap aimed at teenagers. Is it not anymore? I was aware it had gone quite SENSATIONALIST, but don't most soaps go through that phase? The Neighbours plane crash, the Eastenders helter skelter etc.

The Steps comparison is odd, as they're clearly not remotely aimed at modern teens, the way I assumed Hollyoaks was.
 
Well I was being facetious more than anything, but there are parallels

Steps were originally aimed at a very young audience, but as they aged, have largely tried to maintain their existing audience rather than chasing the new young'uns.

Hollyoaks have done the same. Where once they treated anyone over the age of 30 as a living fossil, they ditched that approach as the likes of Tony and Mercedes aged. Most of their key cast are now in the 35 - 50 bracket, and the uni set became a hospital.

I'd say it's less a teen soap, and more a CAMP Brookside now.
 
Apparently Ste got blown up by a car bomb last night. Bump Grace off as well and I might start watching again without their monstrous visages as a perennial jump-scare threat with every scene transition.
 
I don't believe for a second Ste is dead. That guy has infinite plot armour.

Same with Warren. OF COURSE they gave him an open exit so that Jamie Lomas can decide on his 27th return next year.
 
ButterTart said:
Apparently Ste got blown up by a car bomb last night. Bump Grace off as well and I might start watching again without their monstrous visages as a perennial jump-scare threat with every scene transition.
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Ste had just celebrated the news that his husband James did not have a brain tumour by dancing to Girls Aloud’s “The Promise” before getting in a car that exploded. If that’s not a Moopy-targeted plot, I don’t know what is.

Sadly, James doesn’t survive but the explosion causes a temporal disruption in the time continuum causing Ste to be replaced with a younger version of himself from a parallel Hollyoaks dimension where it’s still 2001.

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Someone dying immediately after being given the all clear is peak Hollyoaks.

Ste being replaced by his fiercely heterosexual, bullying chav younger self would be quite welcome.
 
I'm on youtube bits here so forgive me, the new CHESTER BRIDGE opening is fabulous. Finally going back to its roots. Mercedes having cancer is a good change from all the affairs and shit

Diane and Tony must stay forever x
 
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