Brookside only lived long enough to see its 20th birthday, but during its run, it did grasp the lesbian nettle with more aplomb than EastEnders. Brookside can claim the first prime-time lesbian kiss on British television, between Beth Jordache (Anna Friel) and Margaret Clemence (Nicola Stephenson), in 1993. And what a furor it caused!

The kiss was so controversial it was shown as close to the nine o’clock watershed as possible, and was edited for the Saturday afternoon omnibus. It even made it into the top five of a recent poll of top TV moments, a list which included Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and England winning the 1966 World Cup. Momentous indeed.

In many ways, Beth was a stereotype—the victim of child abuse and domestic violence, she and her mother killed her father and buried him under the patio—but she transcended labeling thanks to Friel, who managed to make Beth both brave and vulnerable. Unfortunately, she died in prison, and Margaret went back to dating men.

The British soap with the best lesbian representation so far is clearly Emmerdale, which began in 1972 and limped along for a decade and a half until new management in 1989 resulted in a plane falling out of the sky and culling half the cast. From the wreckage stepped a lean, sexy soap, as well as the new character of Zoë Tate (Leah Bracknell), the local vet and daughter of a self-made lord of the manor, who had returned to the village with a secret: she liked girls.

If there is one thing Emmerdale exceeds its EC quota on, it’s bitches. If a character is female, chances are good that she is conniving, manipulative and sexually unfaithful. But Zoë Tate was always portrayed as decent, honest and straightforward. People trusted her. Her sexual orientation became common knowledge shortly after she arrived; everyone in the village more or less accepted it (her best friend is the local vicar); and ten years later, she's still alive.

In recent months, Emmerdale has turned Zoë into the mad/bad lesbian stereotype, but for the last ten years she has been a positive role model. Her girlfriends have covered quite a cross-section of working-class and professional women; she can count a nanny, hairdresser, long-distance lorry driver, solicitor, and an ex-hooker among her conquests. She even married one briefly in 1995. Although most of her girlfriends were barely discernible in appearance from the straight female characters, a few of them did push the gender envelope a little.

On the whole, British soap operas include women that we would not likely recognize on the street as lesbians. Nearly all of them could pass as heterosexual (read: traditionally feminine), and quite a few go through a lesbian phase (even though they are adults) and then go back to men. Or they simply leave the program altogether. Zoë Tate is the only one who’s stuck around, even if she is currently incarcerated in a mental hospital.

But despite their mixed record on lesbian representation, soap operas have done us some good simply by including lesbian characters. There was a public outcry over Brookside's kiss between Beth and Margaret in 1993, and more fuss six months later when Emmerdale's Zoë Tate kissed her first girlfriend before 8pm, but with each lesbian couple, the outcry has diminished.

Now women kissing on British television has become almost commonplace, cropping up on tea-time soaps such as C4’s teenage-oriented Hollyoaks, and Five’s Family Affairs, without a hair being turned. Mary Whitehouse must be spinning in her grave.

There is a lot to be said for familiarization, and this is where soaps are most effective. Fifteen years ago, many people went through life thinking they’d never known anyone gay, and thus their prejudices were never challenged. It maybe a distorted picture, but soaps do reflect real life in their own twisted way. Beamed into the nation’s living rooms day after day, showing different ways of life, soaps demonstrate to viewers that some of those ways of life aren’t that different from their own, after all.

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