Part of American culture; forever the voyeur. Being the perennial fly on the wall, the eavesdropper, the casual leering bystander. Before the days when Reality TV took over and rendered the Soap Opera somewhat obsolete, it had a long and healthy life – celebrating the chaste and the prurient – the downtrodden and the maniacal. During the halcyon days of Radio, that little box with a speaker sitting in your living room, bedroom, garage or spare room was your sole companion to the world of entertainment, information and the stories of life – well . . .life imagined.
Soap Operas were a huge phenomenon and they lasted decades, well at into the Television years. Even now some soap operas in other languages from other countries are lining up on the likes of YouTube and Netflix, the Latin ones under the title Telenovella, but the idea is still the same – dirt, lust, corruption, revenge, hysteria, mayhem and a festival of glaring gazes. Flaring nostrils not withstanding.
Of course, during the days of Radio it was all imagined and America was good at imagining things, particularly the lust part and it was all geared in the direction of the Housewife, the one perceived to be sitting home all day, doing next to nothing, save cooking, cleaning and putting up with nearly constant barrages of endless commercials all with the intent of persuading the captive audience to buy and consume and buy more.
The Soap opera ran the gamut but the common thread was a: the organ and b:the cliffhanger – everything else was fair game.
So now we come to The Guiding Light, one of many Soap Operas which fed a steady diet of pathos and hysteria for a whopping 72 years (it transitioned to TV in 1952 and continued until 2009) – this episode from December 3, 1947 promises to be torrid and scandalous and overflowing with moral implications. Despite mental dalliances and overactive imaginations, the stories don’t wander in the territory of potential obscenity but leave lots to the imagination.
You may have missed the phenomenon of the Soap Opera or never hooked into it in the first place, but this was Americana in its most raw sense of the word.
Press Play Sit back and enjoy what you might have missed.
