Soap operas feed us diet of hardship and loathing

I AGREE totally with Kathleen Calvert (Yorkshire Post, February 10). Soap operas such as EastEnders and Emmerdale are potentially harmful in their present form.

Their trendy producers will say that it is realism; but surely it is just as unrealistic to be relentlessly pessimistic as it is to be blindly optimistic.

Unmitigated hardship within the home and the community is not normal. Human relationships are not defined by mutual loathing, but it would be understandable if regular viewers of soap concluded that it was cool to be nasty.

Great novelists have rightly reflected the extreme horror and misfortune that life can hurl at us; but who would want a daily dose of Emile Zola or Thomas Hardy after tea?

For a long time, Coronation Street got the balance just about right but even that has lost its soul.

Why does so much TV, not to mention the tabloid Press, persist in insulting us? And if we are as bad as they make out, how about setting an example?

Isn’t that what the BBC used to do before it became obsessed with ratings?