Here is my third instalment of my hugely popular Rules of Soaps series.

House Rule 1 – Adoption Rule
In soap land it seems that people seem to be able to adopt children at a drop of the hat. Often people adopt other people’s children for very sketchy reasons. No adoption papers are even signed and the kids just move straight in. Great examples of this are Susan Kennedy and Harold Bishop from neighbours both of which have adopted over one hundred children. Is no-one even slightly suspicious why an old man enjoys having young boys living in his house so much?

House Rule 2 – Tardis
With all these Children moving in you’d wonder where there’s space for them all. The Neighbours script writers cunningly get around this by rarely showing any other rooms rather than the (joint) living-room kitchen. With the viewer blissfully unaware of the size of the house, it can magically grow or shrink to suit its inhabitants.

House Rule 3 – Ownership
Its often very unclear who owns which houses in Soaps, even when it is known completely random people will end up living in peoples homes. A good example is Jenae and the whole Timmins family living at Lyn and Joe Scully’s house in Neighbours.

I’ve no idea who is supposed to own “Beckers Flat” in Hollyoakes:

• Jake is unemployed with a baby so is unlikely to be paying the mortgage
• Becker is in prison for being a paedo
• Nancy is a school girl without a job
• In fact the only person who could have been paying the rent is the comedy stripper character and he left the other day.

At a guess I’d say maybe Tony owns it as he owns most other things.

Radio Station Rule(s)
A short but incredibly true rule, if there is a college radio station absolutely everyone in the soap will listen to it. Even people that have nothing to do with the College, will fanatically listen to the station every time its on.

I’d like to congratulate all the readers who have contributed their own rules of soaps so far, let’s have any other ones you have added to this post. Here are links to Rule of Soaps Part 1 and Part 2 encase you missed them.

Pete Graham xXx