Fintan O’Toole: Will Brexit end like Emmerdale or Crossroads?
If only the scriptwriters could kill off half the cast, or pretend it was all just a bad dream
‘Brexit is not a soap opera. It is admittedly quite a show and, up to a point, entertaining: a camp performance with its own peculiar blend of farce and tragedy.’ Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA Wire
If Brexit is a soap opera, which soap opera is it? It has to be an English one, of course, and not one of your trendy, niche, late-night cleveralities either – whatever else we can say about Brexit, it is a saga for a mass audience. It is daytime TV with wobbly sets, incredible characters and wildly erratic plot lines.
So the shortlist really comes down to two: Crossroads and Emmerdale. These are two long-running soaps that found themselves in deep trouble because the writers had lost the plot and audiences were in equal measure perplexed and bored.