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I sit down to watch the soaps at night, just like most people, but am sometimes left wondering why I do. In my opinion, some of the stories do not reflect real life.

My two favourites are Emmerdale, and Eastenders. Emmerdale is set in the Yorkshire Dales, and as I am from south London, I love to listen to their northern accent. When someone buys a cottage on this show, the chain never breaks down, the solicitor does their work most efficiently, and if the buyer decides on a Monday to live in it, they can be moved in  within a couple of days, contracts are exchanged pronto, and completed. Removal vans are never totally booked up, there is always space to hire it immediately. I just wish this were true, as then moving would be as stress free in real life, as it apparently is in a soap.

Every soap has to have a local pub, and in Eastenders, it is called the Queen Vic. Every person who has been jilted, or had a bad time in  life goes in there, without fail, and then manages to drown their sorrows and get totally legless. When Phil , who was a reformed alcoholic, recently went off the rails, we watched him lurch around making a fool of himself and generally turning his life upside down over a period of a few weeks, all because his mother had a go at him for  not killing her ex lover. Then miraculously one day without any help from anyone, Phil is off the bottle, and acting normally again. It was a a brave attempt at a hard hitting storyline, but how could we take it seriously when Phil was suddenly cured without any explanation as to how?

We all know how difficult it can be to find work at this time, but not if you are in a soap. Suddenly when someone is seeking a job, there are vacancies at the cafe, and in the pub, or someone needs a secretary or a PA without even leaving the village. I find all this quite amusing, but if they want to depict life as it really is, then script writers should write about the every day things that drive us mad.   That is true life.