MOST of us look at the lives of soap characters and think the things that happen to them could never occur in real life.
Take Coronation Street's Sarah-Louise Platt. She's had one dad murdered, had her step-father attempt to kill her, had a child while a young teenager and been involved with an internet paedophile.
Emmerdale has regular murders and car smashes and even had a plane crash into the Woolpack, fortunately, for the programme's producers, wiping out most of the programme's dead wood in the process.
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In EastEnders, there's fights aplenty and each character must by now have slept with every other.
The defunct Brookside probably outdid the others with explosions, murders, drug addiction and not one, but two sieges. No wonder Sinbad, the window cleaner, uprooted to the much calmer streets of Weatherfield when the programme was pulled from Channel 4's schedules. He's much safer on Coronation Street.
None of this, of course, happens to any of us. Except it does. We read about it every day in the newspapers and the Sundays are full of bizarre stories.
It's just that when these things actually happen, they don't occur with quite the same intensity as they do in a daily half-hour soap.
So it was that my grandad turned out not to be my grandad, while my real one spent most of his adult life in mental institutions, having once attacked my grandma with a red hot poker and on another occasion bought a load of chickens. They didn't have anywhere to keep them, so he thought they could live in the house.
Apparently, my grandma used to be embarrassed when people came round as he would insist on sitting there reading the Socialist Worker newspaper. I never did quite understand what was wrong with that, but she left him and re-married to the man I grew up thinking was my real grandad.
I recently found that my non-real grandad had a daughter who became pregnant at quite a young age and whose own daughter still believes she is her mother's sister. Now that is the sort of thing that happens in soaps.
Other TV-type events involved a woman on our street being murdered by her husband and one of my dad's friends doing a disappearing act after admitting he was gay, which you probably couldn't be as a factory worker back in the 1970s. No-one we knew ever saw him again.
My girlfriend left me for my best friend and promptly made a packet on selling the flat we lived in together, and my brother's wife swapped him for a wealthy pub owner twice his age.
All of the above examples would probably make it on to a soap, but you only have to watch one on a regular basis to realise that what happens to the characters in the most part is not good. You really wouldn't want to be them, although you may fancy earning the wages of the actors who play them.
So, the next time you find yourself moaning that nothing ever happens, jot down some of the major incidents that have occurred in your life and be thankful that, for the most part, it's relatively quiet.
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