Does H&A need an overhaul at the moment?

[nenehcherry2]

17 minutes ago, stevester55 said:

A shark storyline would be good .it was done in the early days when Rory got killed...it may be a repeat storyline but done over thirty years ago lol

Oh God, no! I hated that storyline on so many levels! Just a personal view. 

1. It's hard to watch in 2024. Why are the audience expected to support the culling of a wild animal (especially belonging to a species, the Great White Shark, which has existed for over 450 million years) in any circumstances? Oh yes, just because some dimwit GUESTIE went too far into the surf! Forgot that justification. Let's have a cameo of David Attenborough this time around...

2. The writing is shoddy. Why is Rory mourned like a long-term resident of the Bay? Oh yes, because it was a low point of the show in terms of writing great storylines. Forgot that detail...

3. The storyline goes nowhere whatsoever once Rory gets spat out. Unless you count Zac's sexual harassment of Pippa along with Tom's oh so macho response to that (yes, more shoddy writing).

Let's at least have some despised, dead wood, major characters chewed up (quite literally) this time around please! 

The story belongs firmly in the Jaws era, when folks were obsessed with turning Great White Sharks into one dimensional, blood-crazy man-eaters. When, in fact, they're more three dimensional in nature than Morag, Ailsa and Don thrown together! Let's reserve one dimensional characterisation for current characters in soap operas (including H&A). 

Edited August 10 by nenehcherry2

[Homeandawayfan.]

5 hours ago, nenehcherry2 said:

That was exactly my point RE being rural and set over entire settlements ("villages" by UK definition). This also allowed some fluidity with locations / characters' homes and, to your very point, some ambiguity with the distances between locations; the characters in both ED and H&A were not neighbours but were co-residents in the same communities. Whilst those over-the-fence, neighbourly disputes drove a lot of the stories, comedy ones especially, in the other soaps (e.g. Max Vs Ron in Brookside, the early Battersbies Vs everyone else in Corrie, Madge Vs Mrs Mangel and so on), this wasn't a factor as such in H&A or ED (and still isn't). 

Without a core street or adjacent houses for neighbours to bicker around, Emmerdale and Home and Away always relied upon those "centre of community" sets (the Diner, Woolpack, School, Kathy's Diner etc) as well as the external backdrops of beaches, farms or dales for this "glue" even more so than the others relied on their pubs, corner shops, factories or car lots. 

Whereas, in the soaps that are set in streets / adjacent streets, the houses almost became characters in themselves, there was less need to introduce new homes and having the continuous, consistent street setting allowed for the formula of entire new families arriving en masse into a pre-existing vacant house (less so in EastEnders perhaps since so many of the houses were divided into flats). Whereas H&A didn't have (or need, given the fostering theme) such fixed houses to allow for this formula (especially in its earlier days before SBH and the Beach House became iconic), hence it's been "lost" since the fostering format was removed. 

Pre-mid naughties (since I've seen very little of the show since), the only families to arrive into the Bay en masse were Michael/Haydn (into a caravan), the Bowmans (into Don's pre-existing house), the Nashes (who had a link to an established character and moved into a never-seen-before home) and, ultimately, the Sutherlands (who moved into the show's most iconic house, so the first time H&A truly matched the arrival story formula of the other shows, as I've described above). 

Also ED and H&A began focusing on one main family. You could also say that about Crossroads, it began focusing on the Mortimer/Richardson family and was set in a motel in a village called Kings Oak.

 

 

[nenehcherry2]

1 hour ago, Homeandawayfan. said:

Also ED and H&A began focusing on one main family. You could also say that about Crossroads, it began focusing on the Mortimer/Richardson family and was set in a motel in a village called Kings Oak.

 

 

Exactly. And the rural settings without fixed streets allowed for "new" (to the audience, that is) characters to "emerge from the background"; folks who'd always lived in the villages and already knew the core characters (e.g. Rob Storey, Selina, Betty Eggleton).

Edited August 10 by nenehcherry2

[Homeandawayfan.]

Also all 3 shows expanded their formats away from the Fletcher/Sugden/Mortimer and Richardson families and became more about the villages. But out of the 3 of them, H&A was the more urbane one right from the start as it focused on brash youngsters being looked after by Tom and Pippa, and these youngsters were filling up Summer Bay and giving this semi rural town a shake up. The school was modern, some of the interior of Ailsa's shop was quite modern around the counter and pinball machine and characters clothes were modern. Also H&A had such a sunny and bright setting.

Edited August 10 by Homeandawayfan.

[James Martin]

Crossroads' final years saw it move out of the hotel and into the village of King's Oak.  Indeed, at the point of axe we were halfway through a transition to calling the show King's Oak, with the interim branding of Crossroads King's Oak having been around for the last 18 months or so.

I'm too young to remember the original but the (first) reboot left me asking similar geographical questions.  Could you walk from the hotel to the KO Café where the teens hung out?  But the geography of the hotel itself was pretty fluid.  And apart from the bar, there wasn't a central congregation point.

[Homeandawayfan.]

I guess Crossroads, ED and H&A found it very hard to keep up with the exact geography of their locations so tweaking helped them and eased the pressure for the writers/producers. And occasionally using different locations to represent the same place onscreen.