TASK 4

Compare And Contrast Dr Who and Eastenders.

Eastenders is a Soap; a soap is normally broadcasted four times a week, all year round.
It is a realist soap drama, which explores the issues of a working class community e.g. divorce, poverty, drugs and human relationships. The scene is built around an east end community, the locations include a market, a pub, a cafe, a chip shop and the characters homes. The narrative is always linear, sometimes restricted and sometimes unrestricted (depending on the character) the ending are both open and closed.

 This program is linear which means it has a start, a middle and an end and also has no flashbacks. it also includes four on going narratives at once, this is another reason why it is known as soap. Eastenders has both subjective and objecive narratives. it is subjective because the audience know what the situation is and what the characters are going through e.g. feelings and emotions. it is also objective because sometimes the audience dont know whats happening and therfore find out the same time the character does. due to four story lines going on at the same time, the scenes will keep changing and will therefore focus on a different characters situation one scene at a time.

In contrast Dr Who is an anti realist program due to the fact that it is all based on fantasy. The propps' theory is used in Dr Who, this is shown because the daleks are the villains, the dispatcher is the prime minister, the doctor is the hero, the helpers are Amy and Rory and the damsel in distress is oswin. programmes that use the propps' theory will have these five main people, the helper, dispatcher, hero, villain and damsel in distress. Dr Who is mainly anti-realist but also has realist aspects in it aswell such as the human relationships. this programme is non linear due to it having flashbacks which reminds the audience what happened previously and sometimes when the characters are thinking about something, the flashbacks will appear.

In conclusion the differences between Eastenders and Dr Who is that Eastenders is a realist program which is based around real life scenarios whereas Dr Who is anti realist because it is all fantasy apart from the scenes which contain human relationships which are realist. Dr Who has two on going story lines whereas Eastenders has four at the same time. Eastenders is linear because it has a structured sequence which flows however Dr Who is non linear because it contains flashbacks and does not flow in a sequence like eastenders. Both programmes use objective and subjective narratives for example they'll both have scenes where the audience and characters know whats going and and what they're going through, but they will also have parts where such events will come as a suprise to both the audience and the characters.