In defence of soap operas

Without wishing to be taken as sanctimonious, it has been one of the greatest boons and banes of my last few years to stand against snobbery in all its tapered forms. Snobbery is the older, philistinic brother to prejudice, both of which name ignorance as their spiteful, chinless father. The more corrosive and inextricably political snobberies came first; the ingratiated males in a university seminar eager to ridicule an acquiescent female. Entitled females clicking in the faces of demurring males. These are the general snobberies that blacken a campus. Then come the artistic snobberies; the unadventurous fun-stranglers who suppose that their genre of music, film or literature is without a peer. The advocates of plotless, pointless and centrifugally solipsistic ‘literary fiction’ are this snobbery’s longest serving and least sufferable technicians. These rheumatic readers limit their enjoyment to store-bought cynicism and floral casuistry, rather than dare embark on a cottaged who-dunnit or a Louis L’Amour western.