Power of soap operas

Once upon a time, many years ago, Mexican soap operas burst onto the Kenyan TV scene and quite a number of people were hooked. There were several other soaps running at the time, mainly American, but there was just something about these Spanish soaps that gripped us from the word go.

Yes, the acting was atrocious, the sub-titles were distracting and the plots were painfully predictable, but we remained glued to the point where evening activities in my mother’s house were structured to ensure that those 30 or so minutes (which included the sponsors’ adverts that usually appeared just as we were about to fall off the sofa from sheer suspense) were free so we could feast on the fictitious lives of the various characters.