Soaps and reality

Reality TV is big business. But don’t forget the soap operas. Before Big Brother and the recent wave of ‘D-list’ celebrity bashing programmes, the soaps could almost have passed for reality TV themselves. We all know that some members of the public have difficulty divorcing fiction from reality. So when a soap character physically abuses his on-screen wife, the poor actor playing the role finds himself being abused in public by people who thought he was beating up his wife for real. What’s all this got to do with protection I can hear you ask? Well, I was reading the other day that a char...