‘Real life but better looking’: ultimate teen soap Hollyoaks turns 25

A car breaks down and explodes, a shirtless teen ejects a floppy disk, the police give chase to a man on a motorbike and there is a fight over an empty milk bottle. All of this happens, wordlessly, in the first five minutes of the opening episode of Hollyoaks, broadcast on 23 October 1995.

Set in a fictional suburb of Chester populated by impossibly tanned and good-looking twentysomethings, the surreal and slightly camp first appearance on British TV screens of Channel 4’s youth-oriented series didn’t augur well. “Hollyoaks isn’t so much our first teen soap as a salute to British dentistry,” wrote the Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries in a review that described the show as “inept”. Yet, remarkably, this week it celebrates its 25th anniversary. In its quarter-century, it has managed to carve out a new form of British soap: aimed specifically at young people and addressing everything from drug overdoses to rape, radicalisation and domestic abuse, all at the teatime hour of 6.30pm.

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With one eye on the sun-soaked optimism of Australian imports Neighbours and Home and Away and the frothy American drama of Beverly Hills, 90210, Hollyoaks initially touted itself as the first UK soap to address the lives of young adult Brits, outside of the school themes of contemporary shows such as Grange Hill and Byker Grove. The show’s creator was Phil Redmond, fresh from Liverpool-set soap sensation Brookside, and familiar with courting the youth, having also devised Grange Hill.

“I always wanted to make a show for the post-secondary school years,” he recalls. “It was going to be a rite of passage for young adults, a comedy on the aspirational side of teenage life. It was something we had never seen on British TV before, so much so that the commissioners didn’t think it would work, since they assumed young adults were always out and never in front of screens. It’s laughable how much that has changed now.”

“Hollyoaks was initially billed as the show with no issues,” says original cast member Nick Pickard. “Everyone wanted to be in it when it was announced. People knew Phil Redmond from the success of Brookside and I remember the train carriages being full of hopefuls on the way to the casting in Liverpool.”

Landing the role of the feather-haired chef Tony Hutchinson at the age of 19, Pickard can be seen in the opening scene of the first episode, coaching leather-wearing “bad boy” Kurt Benson (Jeremy Edwards) on the nuances of chauvinism – himself having just escaped that police chase on the back of his motorbike, with his floppy disk.

Pickard has been on screen for the show’s entire 25-year history, making him Hollyoaks’s longest-serving cast member. “It’s so surprising to me that the show evolved to the extent that it has now,” he says. The turning point, he says, was “20 episodes in when one of the characters [the glamorous Natasha Andersen] died after taking ecstasy. That was when the writers decided to start tackling real-life issues affecting young people. It set the tone for what was to come.”

Going from the soap with “no issues” to an almost pathological desire to confront the darkest sides of our tabloid headlines, Hollyoaks was soon the talk of university campuses and colleges for its depictions of underage sex, suicide and anorexia. By 1999, the show was averaging a peak of 4 million viewers a week, and would eventually increase its weekly run to an episode every weeknight. “After the first run of episodes, the audience gave us the feedback that they wanted the British context in the show,” Redmond says. “Where’s the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll? So, we began to write from life, and after that the young audience was with us.”

Redmond points to a 2001 storyline where troubled character Lewis took his own life as one that he is particularly proud of, “because suicide in young men was becoming such a prevalent phenomenon. There was also an episode on testicular cancer where a viewer wrote in a letter after it was aired saying that they had tested themselves while watching, found a lump and then gone to the doctor. He ended the letter by saying we had saved his life.”

Hollyoaks has attracted its share of controversy too, most notably with a 2009 infanticide storyline that was criticised for its similarity to the murder of Liverpool toddler James Bulger. Throughout its run, the soap’s pre-watershed timeslot has proved an obstacle with broadcast regulators, especially since the show was initially categorised as a children’s production, meaning even showing alcohol could be tricky (an occasional after-dark spin-off series Hollyoaks Later allows the show to tackle more mature themes).

“One of the greatest challenges is how to tackle an issue responsibly for a 6.30pm time slot without shying away from the core of the story,” says the show’s executive producer Bryan Kirkwood. “The camera can’t just turn away but we also have to remember that we are here to provide escapism and entertainment, too.”

“We have a saying in Hollyoaks: it’s real life but better looking,” says the writer Jayshree Patel. “People can be snobby about soaps but they provide an important service in reflecting reality, even if it is heightened to create entertainment.” Patel mentions a 2019 far-right radicalisation storyline and an ongoing county lines drugs plot in the show as examples of hot-button issues presented to be in dialogue with the viewers.

“We have a real responsibility towards our young audience and while we don’t want to patronise them, we also don’t want to trigger them. This is why we’re constantly researching and collaborating with external agencies who work in those sectors for their input.” Working with the training and support organisation Small Steps on the far-right storyline, Patel recounts how the episodes led to a spike in referrals to its services. “We start discussions that families would otherwise never have,” she says.

For Kieron Richardson, whose character Ste Hay was the subject of the far-right grooming episodes, being on Hollyoaks for the past 14 years has affected more than just his career. “When I started on the show, I hadn’t publicly come out and my character was straight,” he says, “but the producers wanted to introduce a gay storyline and even though I had fought to not succumb to stereotypes in my acting, I ultimately decided to come out on screen. I realised there weren’t many young people on TV from the LGBT community any more and so I decided to own it. It was the best decision I could have made.”

The transgender actor Annie Wallace similarly experienced a coming out on screen with her character, the school headteacher Sally St Claire, who first appeared in the show in 2015. “I transitioned in 1989 but I lived in ‘stealth’ and I had never thought about coming out on national television,” she says. “It was a big step for me since I hadn’t talked about trans issues growing up, but at the age of 50, I stopped caring what people thought of me and decided to go for it.”

Recruited as part of an open casting process for trans actors in 2015, Wallace has since become the first recurring trans actor in British soap. “People responded really positively because if you can see it, you can be it,” she says. “If you are ‘other’ to the straight world we see on TV or in the media, your world feels restricted. But once you do see people like yourself just living their lives, suddenly everything feels so much more open.”

When not delivering hard-hitting drama, Hollyoaks can stake a legitimate claim to be the silliest soap on TV, too. Notably absurd storylines from the past 25 years include the ditzy Carmel McQueen finding Jesus’s face in a potato, student India eating a laxative-spiked pizza, and newcomer Kevin Smith telling the locals that he was an alien from another planet. Then, there are the sartorial choices, serving as a roster of the gaudiest picks of the 2000s, from the McQueen clan’s love of leopard print and hoops to countless asymmetrical fringes and Pickard’s mini-ponytail. For all the fashion faux-pas, it has never lacked for glamour, with cast members such as Nathalie Emmanuel, Emma Rigby and Ricky Whittle graduating to US shows such as Game of Thrones and American Gods, prompting plenty of “Hollyoaks to Hollywood” headlines.

Soaps have seen their ratings decline across the board in recent years as they struggle to compete with on-demand content from streaming services. Yet Hollyoaks’s mix of suds and seriousness seems to be working: 50% of its 1.5 million average audience is currently made up of under-35s, making it the youngest-skewing soap on TV. While it can’t match the 8 million viewers that Coronation Street, the highest-rated UK soap, receives, Hollyoaks is looking to transition with its young audience on to more varied screens.

“We now have several generations of the same families watching the show together,” says Channel 4’s head of drama, Caroline Hollick. “People have grown up with the show and they’re introducing it to their kids, which means that while it has a youthful spirit, it has shifted towards a wider audience.” A major presence on the All 4 streaming service, Hollyoaks has also launched in the US on the Hulu network and shares mobile content on Snapchat.

Back on screen, a beleaguered Tony is embroiled in yet more unbelievable drama that is the lifeblood of soap – this time concerning his wife cheating on him with his dad. Despite an unprecedented pause in production in the first half of the year due to Covid (it’s currently airing four days a week rather than five), the show has readied an anniversary-week extravaganza that will see fan favourite Kurt Benson return to town – despite having seemingly died in a jetski accident back in 1999 – as well as Come Dine With Me specials featuring the cast, and a repeat of that shonky first episode.

“The show is now almost unrecognisable from its beginnings but it has changed with the times and we’re living in a moment where there is more to be explored than ever before,” says Pickard. “It’s up to shows like ours to do that work.”

The scandals in this Chester suburb won’t be stopping any time soon.

Hollyoaks, Monday to Thursday, 6.30pm, Channel 4

Chester draws: Hollyoaks’s most memorable moments

1996: Natasha’s overdose
Bad boy Kurt Benson’s girlfriend Natasha (Shebah Ronay) dies of an overdose after having her drink spiked with ecstasy in a club.

2000: Luke Morgan’s rape
Footballer Luke (Gary Lucy) was bullied by his teammates then raped in a landmark late-night episode and continuing plot line.

2001: Lisa’s bullying
Lisa Hunter (Gemma Atkinson) was the subject of a bullying and self-harm storyline after initially being targeted for her popularity at school.

2007: John Paul and Craig
Initially framed as heterosexual friends, the pair’s secret affair has become one of the show’s most enduring love stories.

2007: incestuous romance Starting to date after Rhys had run Beth over with his car, the pair soon realise – at a funeral – that they are in fact half-siblings.

2009: deadly parachute fall
A parachute sabotaged by a love rival leads to death for Sarah Barnes – a 2010 British Soap Awards spectacular scene of the year winner.

2019: far-right radicalisation
Newcomer Johnny (Ray Quinn) groomed Ste Hay (Kieron Richardson) into a far-right gang after Muslim doctor Misbah failed to save his sister.

2020: county lines
A new family infiltrate the Hollyoaks school, recruiting students for a drug-running gang in the soap’s latest hard-hitting storyline.