Trouble brewing: Kim Tate, right, causes mayhem on her return to Emmerdale
This year it was named Best Soap at the National Television Awards. What is behind its success? For a start, today’s Emmerdale has almost nothing in common with the sleepy series that first graced our screens in October 1972. That programme, Emmerdale Farm, focused on rural matters as seen through the eyes of a traditional, upright Yorkshire family, the Sugdens, and regarded the escape of a flock of sheep as an exciting cliffhanger.
That all changed in 1993, when the show was given a reboot by way of a plane crash which wiped out several characters and set the tone for a bigger, sexier and more dramatic Emmerdale. Ever since, the show has remained well-planned and tightly plotted. Recent storylines, such as the revelations about Aaron Livesy’s childhood abuse at the hands of his father Gordon, or Ashley Thomas’s battle against dementia, have been gripping. The show also specialises in twists and sudden shocks. At this year’s British Soap Awards, Emmerdale’s Hotten bypass crash, a multi-car pile-up caused by crazed Emma Barton pushing husband James off a bridge, was named by the voting public as the Greatest Moment in the 20-year history of the awards.
And nasty Emma Barton is just one of a string of great baddies; not just Kim Tate but also conniving Cain and Charity Dingle and psychotic Steph Stokes, who once took her father Alan’s girlfriend prisoner and kept her gagged and bound in her cellar, while keeping Alan doped up on painkillers.
The show is also not afraid to experiment – in December 2016, it filmed an entire episode through the eyes of dementia sufferer Ashley – and has been blessed with some of the best actors in soapland (from Jenna Coleman, who starred in the soap for four years, to Charlotte Bellamy, who plays Laurel Thomas, Ashley’s widow).
But perhaps Emmerdale’s greatest asset is its ability to laugh at itself. Les Dawson called the show “Dallas with dung” and this week’s episodes seem to be deliberately channelling America’s Eighties supersoaps. Who can forget the Dynasty series finale when Joan Collins’s Alexis Carrington fell backwards from a second-storey balcony? Emmerdale always takes its storytelling seriously, but once in a while something happens that says to the viewer: “We know this is ridiculous.”