Obscure Box

The Aussie pop-diva is busy plugging her new album Aphrodite so it's natural then to take a look at her website to check out her past.

Plunge in to the About section and there's some interesting reading about her career.

Those of a certain age will remember her most for her character of the blonde bubbly Charlene bursting in on the TV series Neighbours. (Of course she'd been on other TV series before but this show was the one that really shot her to TV stardom.)

What kind of TV show was it? A "soap" according to the Kylie website.

Does "soap" need the quotation marks?

To me those marks tend to imply some doubt about the description.

I know it's not soap as in the cleaning product, but surely soap is also a recognised description of a serialised radio or television program characterised by the likes of Neighbours and the rest.

The phrase soap opera is in my Macquarie dictionary with the accepted alternative of just soap.

Out of interest the term soap opera for a TV series first started back in the 1930, according to the The Museum of Broadcast Communications.

The "soap" in soap opera alluded to their sponsorship by manufacturers of household cleaning products; while "opera" suggested an ironic incongruity between the domestic narrative concerns of the daytime serial and the most elevated of dramatic forms.

Kind on ironic that the entry also uses the quotation marks around the word soap, but only in the first paragraph.

However, the rest of the entry is peppered throughout with quotation marked words such as "open", "closed", "women's", "housewife", "Hollywood", "addiction" and so on.

Are they all really necessary? I "think" not.