Magnificent Corrosive

For a while it appeared that TV might escape the sudsy flood of soap operas. Almost all the original woebegone TV serials faded away in a matter of months. But Sponsor Procter & Gamble, which pays the way for eight radio soap operas, has learned how to lick the TV jinx. Explains Adman Roy Winsor of the Biow Co. advertising agency: "At first, we made the mistake of taking a single soap opera and sticking it into a 15-minute strip surrounded by other kinds of shows. It just got lost. Now we do it by block programming. You've got to have at least two strips in a row, and it's better to have four. Then they have a magnificent corrosive effect on the audience."

All soap operas deal with people in trouble. But, according to Winsor, TV's really profitable soap-opera woes must be based more on emotional collisions than physical ailments: "There's not so much amnesia and creeping diseases of the foot as on radio." TV soap operas are also tied to the set, and cannot jump around the world from Manhattan to Hawaii to London with the ease of their radio rivals. Veteran Irna Phillips, who writes radio's Guiding Light, has to be restrained on the TV screen from a tendency toward writing in big courtroom scenes. Says Procter & Gamble's TV Director William Craig: "We hold her down to one or two a year. They're just too darn expensive."

The producers of TV soap operas take a much tougher view of their audience. They have almost abandoned the radio technique of giving a synopsis of previous action before the episode begins. When an actor dies or gets another job, his disappearance is seldom explained. Says Winsor: "He's just replaced, and that's all there is to it. In a few weeks everyone accepts the new man as Martha's husband, Peter, or whoever he was." Radio strips are well known for their pregnant pauses Between sentences. On TV the long, thoughtful pause has been translated into the profound, reflective look. TV actors have to work much harder, since they must memorize their lines. But writers have developed a share-the-work technique: if Actor A has to learn a lot of ines on Monday, he is given only a few ines on Tuesday, when the bulk of the wordage is handed to Actor B.

Winsor thinks the hardest problem about soap operas is finding a good, all-inclusive title (An example of a good one, cited by Winsor: CBS-TV's Love of Life, featuring Peggy McCay and Dennis Parnell). He had a very bad time with a new show that was originally called Bright Star, then Inner Conflict, then simply Harry (which has become at Biow the working title for all new scripts). Finally, Winsor thought up The Storm Within, a title that seemed to have everything until the sponsor pointed out that it was just a thought too appropriate for the product it would plug: Bisodol. The show is now running five days a week on CBS Radio and CBS-TV as The Secret Storm.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.