Coronation Street Independent Research

Coronation Street is a British soap opera which was first broadcast on Granada Television in the year 1960. In September 2010, Coronation Street became the World longest running television soap opera. It being a soap opera, it follows the convention of having an open narrative, which now means the soap has had over 8000 episodes, and is still on going.

The soap is aired on various days of the working weeks, and usually shows two half hour episodes on each of the evenings it is on.
I would say the target audience of this soap would be much larger than that of Channel 4 Hollyoaks, and even BBC, Eastenders. I would say that this soap is much more of a family soap, and would attract people from 14 on wards. I think this soap would particularly be popular with more mature people, that would prefer to watch a soap like this one because it's quality and good repuataion is guaranteed by how long it has been running and how successful it has been.
While viewing an episode of Coronation Street, I noticed that they represented almost every age range, this adds to the verisimilitude aims of all soaps, as in this case, they are trying to depict an ordinary street, and who would live on that street.

In terms of gender I would say that both genders are represented equally in this soap, and have to same amount of dramatic story lines and screen time. Coronation street depicts life in a more realistic and "down to earth" way. When I watched Hollyoaks I saw that nearly all the females were in dresses and looking very feminine, whereas Coronation Street showed more of a variety of people and their dress sense, once again relating to real life scenarios in a more realistic way.
Sexuality is shown throughout the episode of Coronation Street I watched, as it shows us into the loves of many hetrosexual couples. Although the soap has been running for a very long time, it also has shown how it has moved with the times by having homosexual male and female characters.
'Coronation Street is noted for its depiction of a down-to-earth community combined with light-hearted humour and strong characters' - Wikipedia
In terms of class, Coronation Street has become famous because of its representation of common working class citizens, and the character involved tend to be in demographic grouping D and E.