Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (74 page)

Finally, in 1956 Procter & Gamble filmed an experimental pilot for a TV version of Ma
Perkins.
They quickly realized that making the transition from radio to TV would be even more difficult than they had imagined. After 15 years of listening to Ma
Perkins
on the radio, listeners had formed their own ideas of what she should look like. The TV version couldn’t help but seem inauthentic and disappointing; sure enough, it flopped.

So they decided to create a TV soap from scratch. This, too, proved to be a challenge—
The First Hundred Years,
P&G’s first original TV soap, lasted only nine months.

Hi Mom!

P&G’s next effort,
Search for Tomorrow,
debuted in September 1951. By the end of its first year on the air it had five million regular viewers. (And once it found an audience, it kept it: At the time the show finally went off the air in December 1986, it was the longest running daily show in the history of American network television.)

Once
Search for Tomorrow
convinced P&G that TV soaps could work, they created a TV version of its radio soap “The Guiding Light,” which ran on both radio and TV until 1956. It was another huge hit, so they added still more soaps to the daytime lineup. By the mid-1950s, they had more than a dozen TV soaps on the air.

Then Irna Phillips, creator of “The Guiding Light” (and the person credited with introducing organ music and the amnesia storyline to soaps) suggested that P&G switch from the traditional 15-minute length to a 30-minute format. She figured that one 30-minute soap would be cheaper to produce than two 15-minute soaps, each with their own sets and staff.

P&G balked. Would viewers sit still for one half-hour soap when they could change channels and get two of the 15-minute soaps they were used to? Company execs resisted the idea for more than two years before they finally caved in and allowed Phillips to create As
the World Turns,
and commissioned another soap called
The Edge of Night
from another producer, both to be 30 minutes long.

The two shows premiered on the same day in 1956 and by 1957 were the two highest rated soaps on television. That was all it took—every single soap opera on the air switched to the half-hour format. And as soap fans—and advertisers—made the switch to TV, the era of radio soaps came to an end. The last of the radio soaps went off the air on November 25, 1960.

Story lines had changed a great deal over 25 years. Depression-era listeners had preferred escapist themes that allowed them to forget their troubles. “Our Gal Sunday,” for example, was about an orphan girl from a Colorado mining town who marries “England’s richest, most handsome lord, Lord Henry Brinthrope,” and “Mary Noble: Backstage Wife” was about a common Iowa girl who marries a movie star. Other soaps showcased the lives of men and women with interesting careers: ministers, doctors and nurses, and glamorous movie actresses.

Worth the wait? In 1986, in the very last scene of “Search for Tomorrow,” after 35 years on the air, Stu asks Jo what she is “searching” for. “Tomorrow,” she replies.

For whatever reason, housewives of the 1950s were much more interested in commiserating with characters than they were in escaping with them or watching them in their careers. Fantasy-themed soap operas steadily lost viewers to soaps featuring people battling terrible illnesses, coming to terms with miserable childhoods, and going on trial for murders they did and did not commit.
The Secret Storm,
one of the most popular early TV soaps, focused almost entirely on the suffering of the Ames family after Mrs. Ames dies in a car accident in the very first episode.

But the most obvious change over the years was the Great Unmentionable—S-E-X. The earliest radio soaps had featured romance, but no sex. In her 27 years on the radio, Helen Trent, the fictional heroine of the show “The Romance of Helen Trent” never consummated a single romance. From 1933 until she went off the air in 1960, her intimate life consisted of an occasional quick kiss and once in a while a sigh or two.

The subject of adultery, when it first appeared in radio soaps in the 1940s, was limited to married women suspecting that their husbands were cheating (invariably, they weren’t). Even divorce remained a taboo subject until the late 1940s; soap opera writers could only end marriages by killing one of the characters off.

By the early 1950s, most soaps had a lone, unmarried “bad girl” character who had affairs. But these encounters were never depicted onscreen, only hinted at with kisses, knowing glances, and the occasional dance with the offending male character. Once an affair was established in this way, it could be discussed, but
never
shown, and the “bad girl” was always punished for her transgressions in the end.

Another barrier fell in 1956, when a story line on As
the World Turns
called for an unhappily married character to divorce his wife and marry his mistress. Procter & Gamble forced the show’s producers to kill the story line before it got too far, but there was no turning back.

The next love triangle came in 1957, when a male character on
Search for Tomorrow
fell in love with his wife’s sister. The tale was made deliberately short in case viewers complained, but they didn’t—and the theme of morally weak husbands lured into sin by immoral temptresses became a daytime staple. By the late 1960s, such love triangles often resulted in illegitimate children; the paternity secrets and child custody disputes that followed could keep a story line going for years.

By March 1970, there were 20 soaps on the air—10 full hours every afternoon; and with the soap audience spread so thin over so many shows, ratings began to sag. In the cutthroat battle for viewers, two new themes began to emerge as audience pleasers.

The first was “young love”—romance and affairs between central characters who were younger than 35, the average age of soap opera viewers. The second was “relevancy”—soaps that dealt realistically with controversial issues of the day, such as drug abuse, abortion, interracial relationships, and the Vietnam War. (One
Life to Live
spent five months on a story line involving Pap tests, and another eight months on one involving venereal disease.)

Unlike its competitors, Procter & Gamble stuck to its official policy of avoiding controversial subjects. Big mistake: Racier soaps like
General Hospital
and
All My Children
won the lion’s share of high school and college-age women (and not a few men) who discovered soaps in the 1970s; meanwhile, P&G’s traditional audience— housewives—was shrinking as increasing numbers of women entered the workforce.

Eventually Procter & Gamble spiced up its soaps, but only succeeded in alienating traditional viewers without attracting new ones. By the 1980s, many of its longest running soaps were in trouble:
The Edge of Night
was cancelled in 1984, and
Search for Tomorrow
went off the air two years later.

The highest temperature ever reached in Britain was 98.2°F on August 9, 1911, in Surrey.

By the 1980s, much of the action and excitement in the soap opera world had moved from daytime television to primetime. The trend started in 1978 when
Dallas
premiered on CBS. The first successful primetime serial since
Peyton Place
(1964–1969),
Dallas
inspired a host of imitators, including
Dynasty, Knots Landing, Falcon Crest, The Colbys,
and
Flamingo Road.

Between 1995 and 1999, the daytime soap opera audience shrank by more than a third; this time because of a real-life soap opera—the O. J. Simpson murder trial.

The case, which unfolded live on TV for more than a year, had as many heroes and villains, twists and turns as any soap opera could dream of having, and yet it was real. Millions of soap opera fans abandoned their shows to follow the Simpson trial and the numerous legal shows and talk shows that followed in its wake. How could a fictional drama hope to compete?

Just as importantly, networks and cable channels discovered that true-crime shows and tabloid talk shows could be produced for a fraction of the cost of a soap opera, and could thus earn huge profits even when they didn’t attract as many viewers.

Today, “lapsed” soap opera fans—people who used to watch soaps but no longer do—outnumber fans who still watch the shows. Networks and soap opera producers are working hard to get them back: ABC launched a 24-hour all-soap cable channel so that people who can’t watch soaps during the day can tune in and watch them in the evenings or over the weekend.
All My Children
and other soaps let viewers decide the outcome of story lines by voting on possible outcomes over the Internet.
Days of Our Lives
let viewers vote to determine the paternity of a character’s baby. And
Passions
even let fans decide whether a character should live or die. (Viewers chose death.)

Will any of these measures work? Will soap operas pull out of their current slump and be restored to their former glory? Or will they continue a slow slide into oblivion? The answer is as unpredictable as the soaps themselves. All you can do is “tune in tomorrow…”

A giraffe can run faster than a horse and can go longer without water than a camel.

We’ll bet that you didn’t know that your favorite singers could talk, too. Here are some of the profound things they have to say.

“I get a lot of influences from electric shavers.”

—Iggy Pop

“We can fly, you know. We just don’t know how to think the right thoughts and levitate ourselves off the ground.”

—Michael Jackson

“A performer to me is like a racehorse, except that I don’t eat hay.”

—
Neil Young

“If women didn’t like criminals, there would be no crime.”

—
Ice-T

“My attitude, in purely intellectual terms, was ‘screw you.’ ”

—
Neil Diamond

“I totally appreciate being able to buy, say, this thousand-dollar cashmere blanket…because if I couldn’t, I would hate to have to go back to regular blankets.”

—
Stevie Nicks

“Folk singing is just a bunch of fat people.”

—
Bob Dylan

“The ocean scares me.”

—
Brian Wilson

“A lot of Michael’s success has been timing and luck. It could just have easily have been me.”

—
Jermaine Jackson

“I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. All the points in between, are, well, in between.”

—
Jim Morrison

“You can write a book on each of my thoughts.”

—
Vanilla Ice

“I’d like to get a beer-holder on my guitar like they have on boats.”

—
James Hetfield

“Hair is the first thing. And teeth is the second. Hair and teeth. A man got those two things he’s got it all.”

—
James Brown

The most popular fruit in the U.S.: apples (followed by oranges and bananas).

You’d be amazed at the number of articles BR1 members send in about the creative ways people get involved with bathrooms, toilets, toilet paper, etc. So we’ve created Uncle John’s “Stall of Fame”to honor them.

H
onoree:
Thomas Suica of Monaca, Pennsylvania

Notable Achievement:
Beating the system… with toilets

True Story:
In November 2000, the Sky Bank announced it was building a branch on a vacant lot next to Suica’s home. Suica, a plumber, didn’t like the idea of a bank moving in next door—so he fought back by installing 10 “decorative” toilets on the roof of his garage. About every month or so after that, he rearranged them to create scenes commemorating the changing seasons. (His Christmas display: Santa’s sleigh being pulled by 10 toilet reindeer.)

When the borough of Monaca fined Suica $135 and cited him for creating “unsanitary and unsafe conditions” on his roof, Suica fought back in court… and won: Judge Thomas Mannix threw out the citation, finding that the borough “had not proved the toilets, which Suica bought new, were unsanitary.”

Update:
Sky Bank eventually abandoned its plans to build a bank next to Suica’s house. So is he taking his toilets down? Not a chance—Suica “says he will continue his protest, because he does not trust the bank.”

Honoree:
Joseph Taviani of Bath, Pennsylvania

Notable Achievement:
Decorating his rental properties in a fashion worthy of a town named Bath