Soap Operas with a Mission

From the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service radio programme “Health Check”, broadcast on January 25 2010, Tim Cooper of the BBC World Service Trust (BBCWST) and Felicity Finch, star of The Archers radio drama, discuss in an audio file containing chapter 1 of this 5 part series on how radio and TV stories attempt to alter behaviour and save lives by delivering health messages around the world.

The programme uses as examples Wetin Dey, a weekly television drama from Nigeria sponsored by the BBCWST, and The Archers, a BBCWST radio soap opera that has been running for 59 years in the United Kingdom (UK). As stated in the interviews, the strategy of initiating a soap opera like Wetin Dey is to engage people in Nigeria in thinking about health issues like HIV, particularly to help audiences think about the effect the virus might have on their lives. There is a need to understand one's audience, especially its diversity of ethnicity and religion, prior to tackling ways to present sensitive health issues.

In an Afghanistan radio programme script developed by Felicity Finch, HIV is introduced through a character that is infected via a blood transfusion but is ostracised from his village, regardless. A sympathetic character is introduced to try to slowly explain the situation to the village and reintegrate support for the HIV-infected character, again demonstrating the need for culturally correct build-up to introducing sensitive issues and careful follow-up to reinforce potential attitudinal and behaviour changes. Felicity Finch believes that programmes must have very strong characters and storylines to successfully allow the audience to make its independent conclusions on the public health topics presented. Attention to the timeframe is also considered important: programmes are produced in real time so that an illness or accident recovery period takes the actual period of time needed in real time, allowing for a range of authentic emotion and behaviour.

Assessment of this kind of entertainment education for public health includes looking at attitudes and behaviour changes that affect health. Problems in getting true data arise from external factors that influence people, including such problems as the lack of access to testing once one has decided to find out one's status, for example.

An example of a more public change is that of policy change. For example, the previously unacknowledged issue of child abuse in Rwanda was brought into a soap opera, and it then was treated as a problem in government policymaking. The ability of radio to reach people is exemplified by its existence in Taliban-occupied Afghanistan, where much of media was prohibited or heavily censored, but radio was allowed to continue as it had prior to their rule. The programme also mentions that China has joined many countries in using radio for public health message delivery. It uses interviews with people living with the HIV virus to spread prevention messages.