Four years in an hour

One of those occasions where the idea is so much better than the reality could possibly be:

The Nine network [in Australia] will roll all episodes [of American daily soaps Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless] made in the past four years into two one-hour specials, to bring Australia’s programming up to date with the United States.

(source: Nine News)

This should be like Tom Stoppard’s joyful The (15 Minute) Dogg’s Troup Hamlet, in which everything pretty much everything gets crammed in, actors haring ever faster about the stage as they realise they’re running out of time, and which includes, as an encore, a one-minute Hamlet.

You can be sure it won’t be anything like that, of course. The only way of getting four years of plot into one hour is through lots of tedious exposition. It’s a shame, because there’s the germ of a winning idea here. For those of us who don’t care to watch soap operas, but have to communicate with people who do (i.e. half the population), it would be a public service to have, instead of a weekly omnibus edition, a weekly microbus: a five-minute preciswhere no conversation involves more than twenty words and all the entrances and exits are done running.