Community as context: EastEnders, public service and neoliberal ideology

Abstract

This article uses 21 in-depth interviews with viewers of the British soap opera EastEnders to investigate the extent to which it can be described, in particular through its handling of social issues, as a site of cultural citizenship and, via the concept of public service, of resistance to the current neoliberal hegemony. The article’s analysis of viewers’ talk confirms previous claims that EastEnders mobilises a nostalgic sense of community with which viewers identify, and goes on to argue that this is in fact a cultural expression of a social-democratic worldview which has lost its once-hegemonic position. Following a comparison of the British and the highly commercialised Spanish media ecosystems and their corresponding popular public spheres, the article concludes that a commitment to public service ideals contributes to sustaining spaces which, like EastEnders, can work as counter-hegemonic sites to the cultural logic of late capitalism.