Dear LPG,

Did you know that people over 65 have been statistically found to watch the most television in the UK?  It stands to reason really as I also found online evidence that we are statistically the largest age group of people who live alone, and the TV does have a habit of keeping you company. 

I am one of the statistics in this category and I don’t know where I would be without my favourite television programs to help me pass the time on a dark winter’s evening.  I suppose that I am also typical of the older female population because the programmes that I have watched more than any other over the years have to be the soap operas. 

Coronation Street, Emmerdale and East Enders have been part of my staple television-watching diet ever since my fifty-year-old son was born and I had to give up work.   I have to say that East Enders was always the most depressing of the three in my view but, since the turn of the century they have all changed track a bit. 

Until then I always thought soaps to be a reflection of everyday life in their unique settings and even when I returned to work the ongoing stories and plots would give my workmates something to gossip about in the knowledge that we were not criticising and verbally dissecting the lives of any real people.  

We all know that soap, like life, is supposed to chronical the births marriages and deaths of its characters but I find it quite disturbing that so many people die in them these days.  There seem to be more murders than ever!

I sometimes find myself wondering if the houses that I pass on the way down the street hold as many macabre and murderous secrets as the ones in Weatherfield, Emmerdale or Walford.  Although I had to stop watching Coronation street for a while as a direct result, I wonder if any one of my neighbours has something in common with Gail in Coronation Street, who still has a body buried in the concrete foundations of her bedroom floor? 

There are enough murder mysteries around for those who are interested in that sort of thing and, while I know that the writers have to keep programs interesting, I would rather be left guessing ‘Who’s the daddy’ as opposed to ‘Who did it’. 

Am I the only reader who feels like this?

EC, Honor Oak Park

LPG found some related online information…

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