In the soap world, the real drama is off-screen: their plots just don't wash with viewers

They've tried axing producers, giving scriptwriters the boot and ruthlessly killing off the characters but to no avail. The British TV soap opera seems to be in terminal decline.

Viewing figures for Coronation Street, the nation's premier soap for the past 41 years, have plummeted by two million during the past year. Three times last month, its audience fell below nine million. The others are not far behind. In the past five years, the BBC's EastEnders and Neighbours have each lost three million viewers, while Channel 4's Brookside - that once set out to be the antidote to the other soaps - has had its audience halved to less than two million.

All this is despite the out-break of incest, rape, murder, abduction, grave robbing, explosions, drug addiction, prostitution, paedophilia and even a crazed internet stalker with which the rapidly turning-over programme makers have tried to titillate their everyday stories of ordinary folk.

This is serious stuff. It has begun to hit the advertising. A 30 second ad in ITV's Coronation Street now costs £20,000 less than it did five years ago – a 25 per cent drop in real terms.

In part, it is a reflection of the general problems that terrestrial television is having to contend with since the advent of cable and satellite. ITV last month had its worst viewing figures on record. But it is particularly acute in the world of the soaps, which now take up 26 hours weekly programming.

Dissatisfaction with soaps can be seen in a number of quarters. Viewers are not just drifting, they are protesting. Fans of the countryside soap Emmerdale recently shut down one of its biggest internet sites complaining they were disgusted by the show's increasingly sleazy storylines.

The critics' knives are also out and the Royal Television Society refused to shortlist Coronation Street for the "best soap" category in its awards this year, on the grounds of the perceived low quality.

The Broadcasting Standards Commission, earlier this year, criticised the increasingly sensational and salacious nature of soap storylines that were unsuitable for viewing before the 9pm watershed, when they are all aired. It was particularly critical of the violent nature of the EastEnders' Christmas Day edition that contained scenes of domestic violence.

Staff at Coronation Street were particularly incensed when EastEnders subsequently swept the board at the British Soap Awards and every single clip shown at the presentation ceremony was, in the words of one Granada insider "someone screaming, rowing, being beaten up – it was all violence, death and mayhem".

All that is a long way from the high-flown claim just three years ago by the BBC's head of drama series, Mal Young, who had spoken in the Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture about the ability of successful soaps to unite society. "They have become our virtual communities, doing more to break down social and class boundaries than any government leader could ever do," he said.

But clearly the viewer can have too much of a good thing. Last year, Emmerdale became the first primetime soap to run five times a week. EastEnders followed Coronation Street's lead by adding a fourth weekly episode and senior BBC figures say a fifth weekly EastEnders is inevitable.

The result seems to have saturated the market. Lorna Cowan, who edits All About Soap, a magazine aimed at teenage soap addicts, may insist that more people still watch soaps than any other kind of programme.

"We haven't run a Corrie cover for five weeks because the programme just isn't as popular with young people as some other soaps," she says. "But even so it gets more viewers most days than Big Brother did at its peak and everyone acclaimed that a tremendous success. It's all relative."

But according to Steven Murphy, editor of Inside Soap: "The extra episodes make people feel that it doesn't matter as much if they miss one. They dip in and out more."

It has all had another effect. Lord Dubs, the chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Commission, says the chase for ratings has influenced the content of soaps, making them more sensational. As a result, the inhabitants of the six houses of Brookside have been subjected to an onslaught of rape, incest, sieges, a burial beneath the patio and a bizarre cult – not to mention TV soaps' first lesbian kiss.

Coronation Street has had the first transsexual. EastEnders has had a shooting, an exploding car and an attempted murder. Next week, Emmerdale will have an exploding lorry. All of which undermines the old notion that soaps work best when they have characters their viewers care about.

That has been the particular problem of Coronation Street. It was peopled by homely folksy types whose characters did not sit easily with hard-edged violence.

It had the kind of tone and humour that had been developed by writers like the one who, before his three-month writing stint came round, would spend a fortnight in the buses, shops and pubs of Manchester writing down all the funny lines he heard. Sensation injected into such a world took on the tone of daft melodrama. And attempts to keep up with the dramatic agendas of the other soaps undermined the warmth and humour that had characterised its population.

A series that had depended on the strength of its characters – great double acts through the decades like Stan and Hilda Ogden, Derek and Mavis Wilton, Reg and Maureen Holdsworth, Curly and Raquel Watts – could not cope with a gear shift into becoming a show driven by dramatic storylines. "They tried to make it like the other soaps, with big issues and campaigns," said one insider, "whereas what we want from Corrie is a nostalgic view of how we'd like to think of life in the north of England".

Belatedly, there are signs that Granada understands that. It has brought back the Street's old executive producer, Carolyn Reynolds, who has instructed that it is to become much more character-driven.

Stephen Murphy is expecting changes: "They have realised there are diminishing returns on all this sensationalist stuff. There is a back-to-basics approach in the pipeline. There will still be good stories. Viewers have come to expect television to be more fast-moving now than in the old days. But they are going back to building character."

It is a verdict with which Phil Redmond, founder of Brookside, agrees. Earlier this year he talked about a new beginning for his soap with "a new anti-sensationalist focus on real lives and everyday issues".

It sounds like the right thing to say. "Look at drama across the schedules," he said, "and there is a greater taste for social comment and deeper storylines connecting back to the audience's real lives.

"I don't think soaps should think in terms of how much further we can go any more. The preoccupation with the next big storyline has made British soaps caricature themselves."

For Redmond, the key to a good soap opera storyline is one that touches the viewers' everyday lives, he said. The only trouble was that he was speaking as he introduced his soap's new long-running storyline focusing on bullying in school – which peaked with a victim killing his classmate tormentor. It is not the kind of everyday world that I see from my window.

Obviously the soap producers live somewhere altogether less salubrious.

VIEWING FIGURES
EastEnders 11m
Coronation Street 10.9m
Emmerdale 8.2m
Neighbours 6m
Crossroads 3m
Brookside 1.5m