TUCKED away behind the jumble of prefab offices and concrete car parks at the back of RTE's Donnybrook headquarters is a little slice of Northside suburbia - a small street containing the facades of a pub, a restaurant and a corner shop. Around the corner nestles a small garage and car repair service. This is the exterior set of Carrigstown, home of RTE's twice weekly soap opera Fair City, which has already been shooting for almost two hours when I arrive there at half past nine. For Maeve McGrath, Celia Murphy and Claudia Carroll, three of the younger stars of the series, 7.30 a.m. starts are par for the course in the six day per week schedule. Carroll plays Nicola, the bossy wife of Paul Brennan, who is currently tormented by the discovery that he's the father of a baby by Helen Doyle, who used to ... well, just watch the next episode.
The cast and crew break for coffee before moving into the studio for the next scene, a hospital set where a major crisis is taking place (I'm sworn to secrecy). Soap is hard work the Fair City team produce an hour of television drama every week, shooting with multi camera set ups edited live by a vision mixer. "Some people are very surprised when I say I work a six day week," says Maeve McGrath, who is currently centre stage as jilted bride to be and spoilt daughter Lorraine Molloy. "But it's very hard work, with early morning starts." The schedule is unbending, says director Paul Fitzgerald. "There's no allowance or provision made for overtime, you have to get it in the time allotted. That doesn't leave much time for other work for the cast of more than 35 (although the level of work varies, depending on how involved a character is in each storyline).
For most of the cast, Fair City is a full time job. Both Murphy and Carroll were brought in initially for week long stints, and find themselves still in the show years later. "But you never know what might happen to your character," says Carroll. "You could find yourself written out at any time." The acting career of a soap actor, though precarious, is still more secure, than that of most actors. But life as a young soap star is not the glamorous non stop round of clubbing and parties that people expect, according to Murphy, who plays Lorraine's friend Niamh. It seems like a pleasant life, but fame can be a nuisance at times. "You have to expect a certain amount of people staring at you in the street and in clubs, but it's the guys who get the worst of that."
"People have said awful things to me sometimes," agrees McGrath. "But in general, people are great about it, very cheerful and supportive." In her experience, the show is particularly popular in pats of the country where only the RTE channels are available.
RTE comes under so much criticism (most of it justified) for the quality of its programming that it really should be pointed out when it gets something right, especially when it comes to popular entertainment. The announcement that Fair City will continue to run through the summer this year confirms the soap as the most indispensable part of RTE's entertainment schedule (and may even signal the beginnings of a change in the station's ridiculous annual seasonal closedown). A programme which was once the laughing stock of Ireland has got its act together with good storylines, an attractive cast and an overall sense of self confidence (epitomised by a slick new theme tune and opening sequence), delivering ratings in the Top Ten three times a week (Sunday's omnibus edition on Network 2 regularly hoovers up around 300,000 viewers).
It's been a long haul, though; more than seven years have passed since RTE launched its new shiny, urban soap opera in a bid to compete with the cross channel attractions of EastEnders and Coronation Street. Script editor Tony Holland was brought in from EastEnders to give the series its structure and storylines. But the new soap opera was confused and boring, with too many characters and not enough plot. For its first few seasons, Fair City was a national joke. "People used to laugh at it for years, says executive producer John Lynch, who joined the series from Glen roe at the start of last year. "My impression of it at that time was of nothing happening very last, then you'd cut to a scene where nothing happened even faster, and there'd be a shot of someone riding a bicycle stuck in between. They were trying to copy EastEnders, but Tony Holland didn't realise that the Irish are less direct than the English."
It's been a long haul back, but by 1994 the show was finally beginning to find its feet. There was a lot less talk by the programme makers about depicting modern urban Ireland, and a lot more concentration on the basics. Ratings began to rise as viewers began tuning in in ever larger numbers in response to the exploits of the Doyles, Molloys and the rest of the cast. RTE's perseverance started to pay off many voices in the early days had called for the show to be axed, but executives persisted nonetheless the broadcaster desperately needed Fair City to work. Canning the series wouldn't have solved anything - it would just have been necessary to launch another soap from scratch to replace it. A viable soap is an absolutely essential part of any television schedule, so RTE just kept plugging away until it finally got it right.
Soap Opera, one of the oldest forms of television, is a crucial weapon these days in the battle for audience share between competing channels. When channel zapping and viewer "grazing" is becoming more and more the norm, a strong soap opera is one of the few ways to ensure viewer loyalty. In the world of soap, storyline is everything - the not so simple trick is to keep your audience guessing what's going to happen next. The stories in Fair City are devised by a storyline writer, who hands them on to be broken down into scenes and episodes, and finally given to the scriptwriters. "Previously, on shows like Glen roe, you were dependent on the genius of one individual like, Wesley Burrowes," says Lynch. "But you can't hope to continue working like that. The system can be too rigid, though, so I've broken it down a bit to allow for more communication."
Like ifs British rivals, Fair City is based in a fictional suburb of a major city. There are the usual genre conventions of the corner shop, the pub and the main street on which the characters meet, fall in and out of love, argue, and so on. It's a vision of suburban life which is curiously old fashioned, but also appeals to a more modern, nostalgic idea of "community". Shopping malls, McDonalds and multiplexes don't figure much; people of all classes and ages mingle happily in the one local pub. If the reality of suburban life, in the 1990s is that people communicate with each other less and less, perhaps one of the reasons for the continuing attraction of soaps is that, they're based on the pleasing fiction" that, no matter what dreadful things, people do, they never stop talking.
Certainly it seems impossible to step onto the street into Carrigstown with out being dragged into somebody else's crisis or dilemma. (There are plenty of other peculiarities in soap among them the fact that no one uses the phone when they can call around in person; or that all the characters spend half their lives in the pub but never seem to get drunk; or that none of the characters watch soap operas.) The fiction of a cohesive, integrated community may be nostalgic, but soaps do have to be careful not to get stuck in a timewarp - witness the recent sad decline into self parody of Coronation Street.
The real heart of soap, though, lies in the families and in the mating games. Despite their much higher budgets, extravagant plotlines and multimillionaires, the great wide shouldered American series of the 1980s like Dallas and Dynasty were soaps at heart in their preoccupation with family matters. Marriage, infidelity, separation, and parent child conflict are the lifeblood of Fair City, like any other soap (of all soapy plotlines, the favourite is the "Whose Baby?" one currently operating in both Fair City and EastEnders).
IT can be difficult to get a clear idea of the average annual earnings of an Irish soap star. People might imagine that, if you're on the telly three times a week, you must be pulling in some serious money. But Ireland is a very small country, with a correspondingly small revenue base. With the exception of RTE big guns like Gay Byrne and Pat Kenny, a well known television face is likely to be earning a respectable, but not startling, middle class income.
In the summer of 1995, tensions between cast and management over the disparity in salaries between Fair City and its older, rural cousin, Glen roe led to an industrial dispute which delayed production on the 1995/96 season for more than a month. To the outside observer, the disparity in wages between the two soaps certainly seemed unfair. Fair City actors averaged markedly less in salaries than their rural cousins, despite producing twice as much screen time, per week. According to an RTE spokesperson at that time, "contracts for different programmes reflect the era and environment in which they were first negotiated, and it's in the nature of these things that changes take place".
In other words, compared with Glenroe, Fair City actors were the thespians equivalent of "yellow pack" workers.
The dispute was settled in autumn of 1995 with both sides agreeing to compromise, but it also highlighted some of the other differences between Fair City and Glen roe. While the urban soap has its storylines spread over a far larger cast, Glen roe relies on a core group of four or five stars. The Fair City approach not only allows for more flexibility and diverse storylines, it also ensures that no actor is indispensable, it just takes a brief flurry on the story editor's word processor for a character to move to Galway and out of the show. " Glen roe is dependent on that nucleus of actors, but we have a lot more options in terms of plots," believes Lynch.
Part of Fair City's recent success must be due to its integration of newer, younger characters into the plots. "You've got to be confident to act well on television, but the younger characters also need to seem fresh," says Lynch. "The younger actors are very skilled at appearing natural, but also knowing how to use the technical aspects."
When Fair City first went on air in 1989, there was considerable talk about the necessity of depicting urban life on the national TV station. How effectively soap opera can depict social realities, or whether it should even attempt to do so, is open to question. But one of the annoying things about RTE has been its tendency to blur the distinction, between soap and other kinds of fiction when it is criticised for its drama out put. It may be because of this (and because of a snobbery about soap) that the station hasn't been properly praised for producing a stylish, well crafted, even (whisper it) hip piece of populist television. Strange to relate, but it's, true Fair City is now, officially, sexy.
