Word: britishers
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There's no surer sign of a fading soap opera than a lurid plot twist. Unlike their glossy American counterparts, British soaps traditionally aim for stolid social realism, depicting ordinary folk pursuing humdrum lives. Now dwindling audiences are spurring producers to unleash implausible killers and gothic disasters on their workaday protagonists. Take the hapless citizens of Walford, a fictional London borough that is the setting for EastEnders, one of Britain's top-rated soaps. Recent episodes have seen a troubled adolescent kidnap his estranged stepfather, chip-shop owner Ian Beale, to exact revenge for his psychopathic mother's death...
...come to this, that an institution revered for the quality of its output, a global role model for public-service broadcasting, the backbone and guardian of British life, "monolithic and ingrained into our culture," in Greenslade's words, should suddenly seem so vulnerable? One source of the Corporation's problems can be found back in Walford: 9 million saw Jane tackle Ian's crazed captor - far shy of EastEnders' record episode in 1986, when over 30 million watched nothing more dramatic than the marital breakdown of a pub owner and his barmaid wife...
This year, Robertson may need to acquire an autopen. The iconic British car company is expecting already rising sales to soar. Well, relatively speaking. This is, after all, a company whose ambition is to sell a mere 1,000 cars a year. That's a goal now in reach, thanks to upcoming expansions of the Rolls product line, increasing numbers of extremely rich potential buyers, and fast-growing Asian markets...
...developing world, as both a market for and a center of energy innovation. "The new frontiers of energy are much more likely to be in China and India and comparable places than in the [developed world]," said Ged Davis, one of the report's panelists and a British energy economist. "This is where the investments for energy are most needed, and this is where I'm convinced they'll be most applied...
...questions went on, she opened up even more, having conversations with the audience and making jokes about herself in a very British, self-deprecating way. When a voice resonated through the theater from an unseen source, she exclaimed "God...And they say I don't believe in you," alluding to the many people who claim her books are anti-Christian. It was clear that no matter how "bereaved" she felt when she finished writing Deathly Hallows, she loved talking freely about it to so many dedicated fans. After being careful and secretive for so long, she now went above...