The Living Soap
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''The Living Soap'' was a BBC North
fly on the wall Fly on the wall is a style of documentary-making used in film and television production. The name derived from the idea that events are seen candidly, as a fly on a wall might see them. In the purest form of fly-on-the-wall documentary-making, t ...
documentary series broadcast in 1993, which set out to show the everyday lives of six students sharing a house in
Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
. The six chosen students gave up their privacy for one year in return for free rent and the chance to be on television. Out of the original six participants, four of them left the show and were replaced by other willing students, chosen by a public telephone vote. Although the series was groundbreaking, ''The Living Soap'' attracted the wrong kind of controversy and was taken off the air after about five months, though filming continued. The remaining housemates appeared in two one-hour specials later on in 1994. ''The Living Soap'' differs from most of today's reality shows because, to achieve the sense of currency suggested by the show's name, each episode was aired as soon as it was made. Therefore, the depiction of everyday life was inevitably distorted from episode two onwards by the fact that the subjects were on television every week (students outside the programme criticised it for being completely untrue compared to real life as a student). The programme's subjects complained about the way they were portrayed due to the editing carried out by the show's producers and directors, which included Spencer Campbell. In an episode of the 2008
Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a fourth television service ...
documentary series ''How TV Changed Britain'', former housemate Colin Rothbart explained that he took part in the show not to be famous, but for "a laugh" and to use as a stepping stone into a career in television. Also interviewed was Spencer Campbell, who claimed to have developed the concept of a "diary room", in which reality television participants talk privately to a camera.


References

BBC television documentaries 1990s British reality television series 1990s British documentary television series 1993 British television series debuts 1994 British television series endings {{UK-reality-tv-prog-stub