Comparison of Hollyoaks and Coronation Street

Within this post I shall compare two popular British soaps, which are Channel 4’s Hollyoaks and Coronation Street that is broadcast on ITV1.
Firstly, Hollyoaks is targeted towards a younger audience of teenagers and young adults up to the age of thirty. This is because the programme focuses on storylines that are representative to this age group of today, such as studying at school and receiving their GCSE exam results. It is also aimed at this age range because the characters within it are of a close age to their audience members and are going through similar life events as them so that they act as role models. Whereas, Coronation Street is aimed at a much wider audience range and therefore contains characters of different ages with a variety of themes to represent the many age groups. However, the soap does contain a majority of older characters, who have worked on the show for many years. This means that even though it is a programme for everyone, it is mainly targeted towards the older generation who can relate to the characters that they watch because the main storylines are that of working life, marriage and divorce, which would not concern younger audience members.
To entice the younger viewing audience that it requires further, Hollyoaks uses popular chart music throughout each episode because they would listen and be interested in this type of music more than any other generation. The production team of this show also use special effects and fast paced , sharp editing, which make it dramatic so that the audience does not become bored of a repetitive concept and will continuously watch every episode that is broadcast to see how it changes. Coronation Street does not need to do this though because it has a successful concept that has been working for over forty years and still is today that already attracts such a large audience. Therefore, they do not need to use expensive effects to bring in a high number of viewers, which then makes it easier to watch.
Another way in which Hollyoaks has become popular with a younger generation is that it can be increasingly risky and daring with serious issues that it regularly focuses on, such as rape or drug addiction because it provides information that its younger audience want to find out about as they have not been through this issues within their own personal lives themselves. Coronation Street limits the types of topics they use because it is for all ages, which includes much younger viewers that these issues would not be appropriate for. However, they do allow these type of issues to be included within the soap because people want to see difficult topics being raised and made widely aware of even though it is not approached as frequently as Hollyoaks.
Finally, Hollyoaks tends to focus on individual storylines that contain a central popular character within the programme and then other characters that have connections to that person. However, Coronation Street uses story lines which normally involve many people and tend to gradually build up over a few episodes across many weeks so that they can develop each character within the story line. This means that its regular, loyal viewers carry on watching the programme to discover what happens next.