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When ‘Soap Operas’ frist came out they were aimed at housewives who would be avilable to listen and the ‘soaps’ where aimed at them with soap  manufacturers using this time to adverts which is were the name ‘soaps’ come form.  This traget audince of women is still many the audince that views ‘soaps’.This is as the storylines appeal to more of a female audince but mordan ‘soaps’ are trying to reach a wider audicene this can be seen with ‘Hollyoaks’ being that the actors used were normal mordals before, which makes that sopa appeal to a more male audience. Other soaps have tried to appeal to a younger audicen as well by having a mixer of charatcers doing this makes the soap appeal to both audlts and young people. However from the reseach I have found that most ‘soaps’ foucs manly on the audlt side and there is not a ‘sopa’ aimed at young people.

            The time which ‘soaps’ on follow each other which allows view to wacth more than one. Their also strat after school/colloage or work which allows a wide audience to be able to wacth the ‘soap’. However the genre of ‘soap opera’ is said to be in trouble, with audince numbers droping over the past few years. Some industry insiders say “that the recent dwindling in the number of shows still on the air is just the beginning of the end”. This is said to be because there is a dissatisfaction in the quality of the storylines and charaters are no longer relatable. Knowing this means that when I creat my new ‘soap’ I need to make sure that I can creat charatcers that my traget audience will be able to relate to, as well as keeping the storyline exsiting.   

            The term soap opera has at times been generally applied to any romantic serial, but is also used to describe the more naturalistic, unglamorous evening, prime-time drama serials of the UK such as ‘Coronation Street’. What differentiates soap from other television drama programs is the open-ended nature of the narrative, with stories spanning several episodes. The defining feature that makes a program a soap opera is that it, according to Albert Moran, is "that form of television that works with a continuous open narrative. Each episode ends with a promise that the storyline is to be continued in another episode". Soap opera stories run concurrently, intersect, and lead into further developments. An individual episode of a soap opera will generally switch between several different concurrent story threads that may at times interconnect and affect one another, or may run entirely independent of each other. Each episode may feature some of the show's current storylines but not always all of them. There is some rotation of both storylines and actors so any given storyline or actor will appear in some but usually not all of a week's worth of episodes. Soap operas rarely "wrap things up" story wise, and generally avoid bringing all the current storylines to a conclusion at the same time. When one storyline ends there are always several other story threads at differing stages of development. Soap opera episodes typically end on some sort of cliffhanger.