Published in the Journal of Development Communication (Vol. 10, No. 1, pps. 68-77), this paper is an interview of Miguel Sabido, a writer-producer-director of theatre and socially responsible soap operas in Mexico whose work spawned the entertainment-education (E-E) strategy and has inspired various E-E efforts worldwide. Conducted on December 13 1997 by Arvind Singhal and Rafael Obregon, this interview includes reflections by Sabido on his journey over 3 decades to develop a theory-based production method for the social use of commercial soap operas.
Sabido begins by discussing the role that television soap operas can play in educating the public. Recognising that TV has emerged as an "important moral authority", and that people seek its guidance in making everyday decisions, he stresses the melodramatic tension between good and evil as key to TV soaps' power to depict good and bad social behaviours. He also describes the audience's intense involvement with the characters, their curiosity about what will happen to them, and the natural human tendency to gossip (such talk, especially if it revolves around key social issues, can create a climate for social change, Sabido notes). He uses the metaphor of the game of "nintendo" to illustrate the way in which audience members watch a soap opera not just for the story (much of the time, the outcome is predictable) but, rather, for the way in which individual viewers can interact with their TV set in an informal kind of moral game. Sabido believes that audience members have both an intrinsic capacity and an appetite to learn from soap opera characters - provided that the educational messages do not come across as pedantic.
For Sabido, a key strategy in creating effective E-E soap operas involves basing them on human communication theories (e.g., Bandura, Bentley, Jung, MacLean, and several others referenced here) that are pragmatic and applicable. He firmly believes that academic theories like these can provide a method that can be operationalised, or translated into thoughtful, valuable, socially good media messages. Sabido elaborates on the importance of bridging the distance between the academic and creative worlds, noting that having a methodology enables one to develop a hypothesis about what effect a programme can have on an audience, and then to evaluate the hypothesis so that one can replicate success. He stresses that "'good' programmes do not happen out of the blue. Rather, they are thoughtfully structured, developed, planned, and produced." In short, he encourages his fellow producers to "work with our minds as academics do."
To tap into the social potential of commercial TV, Sabido recommends the following:
- Analyse the communication circuits (e.g., the regular evening soap opera) that commercial television has already established, strategising about how to compete - both with respect to quality and entertainment value - with such programmes. For example, when considering the use of epilogues, which are concentrated 30- to 60-second moral messages, Sabido suggests that the epilogue-giver should have a charming, appealing quality so that the audience sympathises with them rather than finds them boring or pedantic. Success in delivering these epilogues has been experienced with a range of diverse communicators - from celebrities to streetchildren.
- Systematically incorporate, within the design of an entertaining soap opera, the values expressed by very high moral authorities that all stakeholders respect, such as a nation's constitution or the various United Nations' charters. In this way, it is not Sabido or any other producer who decides what is right and wrong; E-E programmes are, then, "only a bridge" to broadly recognised principles, rather than an expression of personal ethical convictions.
Challenges that Sabido has encountered include the gap between the media message and the social support infrastructure, which has left people who are motivated by a message (e.g., on family planning) unable to act out on their behaviour (e.g., through accessible and high-quality family planning clinics). He has also met with resistance to his work within his own country, which he describes here. That said, he still believes that a theory-based production method can be the basis for carefully-crafted soap operas that help societies understand and learn how to act to address their salient problems...at the same time achieving commercial success.
