The recent anorexia storyline in our teenage weekday drama Hollyoaks is just one of the interesting issues that many viewers have been contacting us about over the past few weeks.
I first became aware of the reaction to this subject when I noticed a poll on the Hollyoaks forum asking members whether they thought the way Channel 4 had handled this particular storyline had been responsible.
Around two-thirds of the posts agreed that we’d handled it well, although several viewers had also contacted the channel through viewer enquiries to say they thought it had been unrealistic. Others were concerned that portraying anorexia might result in copycat behaviour.
Most people, whether critical or not, seemed to feel it was an appropriate subject to tackle in a teenage drama. Given the recent flurry of debate about whether the fashion industry is behaving responsibly by employing size-zero models, this feels like an interesting subject to debate.
I spoke to the commissioning team at Channel 4, who had taken advice from Beat (formerly known as the Eating Disorders Association). They were very conscious of the need to avoid showing how the two anorexic characters were managing not to eat (for example there weren’t any shots of Hannah sticking her fingers down her throat in order to make herself sick), and had intended the storyline to show the dangers of anorexia – dramatised as Hannah’s poor skin, hair loss and ill-fitting, baggy clothes, together with the deterioration and eventual death of Melissa.
There was also a support line for viewers promoted after these episodes were broadcast, while information about the eating disorder was published on both Teletext and the Channel 4 health pages.
Do you have any views on the programme? How do you think anorexia should be portrayed on television? Do you think it’s helpful to deal with these sorts of issues in drama? Please let us know what you think by posting your comments below.
