There's one thing soaps do better than anyone else: death

CULTURE SHOCK:'EXTRAORDINARY," says Amanda in Noel Coward's Private Lives, "how potent cheap music is." The same might be said for cheap drama. Soap operas are not, and are not intended to be, great art. But moments like the death of Jack Duckworth on Coronation Streetthis week remind us there is something they can do better than Shakespeare or Ibsen or Friel: death.

I don't mean the kind of deaths soaps actually specialise in. A research paper published in the British Medical Journal in 1997 considered this vital topic. ("Objective: to measure mortality among characters in British soap operas on television. Design: cohort analysis of deaths in EastEndersand Coronation Street, supplemented by an analysis of deaths in Brooksideand Emmerdale. Main outcome measures: standardised mortality ratios and the proportional mortality ratio for deaths attributable to external causes.")

It found that being a character in a soap is the most dangerous occupation on record, with a higher mortality rate than bomb-disposal experts, racing drivers or steeplejacks. Soap stars were three times as likely to die from violent causes as the rest of the population. Their survival rates for cancer (which got Jack in the end) are also much worse than those of the general population. Overall, taking up residence on Albert Square or Coronation Street was compared to “living in an environment akin to a war zone”.

A lot of the time soaps cheapen death by making it ludicrous. Three people died of a mystery virus while Brookside, once a genuine serial drama, was in its own death throes. Emmerdaledisposed of four redundant characters by having a plane fall out of the sky on top of them. (Even the British soaps have not ventured as far over the top as the disposal of Fallon Colby in the spin-off from Dynasty, The Colbys:she was abducted by aliens. The chance to watch her ascension into heaven is the main justification for the existence of YouTube. Although, come to think of it, Benjy's sudden decision, in The Riordans, to go off to Africa as a lay missionary achieves something similar without the expense of special effects.)

It is precisely this rash of serial killers, rare viruses, virulent cancers and hideous accidents that makes the soap opera the home of bad drama. In this world of calamities, characters are like pigs you rear for later consumption in your back garden: they may be warmly familiar, but it is better not to get to too attached to them. They are literally disposable.

Yet when a soap lets someone die a normal death it can be intensely moving. In matters of mortality Coronation Streethas retained some sense of restraint. (The BMJ study found that a character in EastEnderswas twice as likely to die during an episode as a similar character in Corrie.) The evil Richard Hillman driving Gail Platt and her family into a canal, screaming, "I love you," was Corrie at its worst, especially as the whiny Gail survived. But Jack Duckworth's passing on Monday night was a reminder of why the series has lasted for 50 years.

The most obvious asset of a soap is time. Unlike characters in a play or a film, its protagonists age with their audiences. The ageing process is not an illusion generated by make-up and acting skills. Which means, too, that the journey towards death is the underlying narrative of the long-term soap character. As well as cheapening death with cynical stunts, the form can enrich it in the simplest and starkest of ways. Like no other form, it gets at the idea that death reveals the dignity and importance of even the most unregarded of people.

Take a look (it's on YouTube: "Hilda Breaks Down 1984") at the superb scene from Coronation Streetin 1984 when Hilda Ogden opens the package containing the effects of her dead husband, Stan. Hilda and Stan were the predecessors of the Duckworths, the hapless vulgarians who make the other residents of the street seem posh.

The scene is wordless and could not be simpler. Jean Alexander (Hilda) slowly unties the string around the brown paper package. We see, in close up, the fancy dressing gown and slippers that were obviously bought in order to appear respectable in hospital. The camera focuses on her hands as she lifts the gown to reveal the case containing his black-rimmed NHS glasses. As the camera catches her from the front, her face slowly crumbles. She buries her head in the case as if she is going down into her husband’s coffin.

Jack Duckworth’s demise didn’t have quite this emotional elegance or dramatic restraint. There was a Brendan Smith-style cheesiness to the idea of having his dead wife, Vera, appear to him at the end. But it afforded an immense dignity to a character whose general function in the series was that of a clown. And there was no simple sentimentality. Some of Jack’s last lines were about “a run of bad luck that lasted 43 years” and how “it’s a rotten world”. But there was also a kind of nobility in his final word on Vera: “We cared about each other.”

Jack died the antithesis of the soap-opera death, passing away quietly in his armchair, alone. The drama lay in the lack of drama: the sheer ordinariness of everyday mortality. It was the kind of death you couldn't show in a film or on stage or even in a death-driven TV drama series such as Six Feet Under. It depended entirely for its effect on the accumulated familiarity of decades.

I doubt if anyone has ever quoted the poet Derek Mahon in relation to Coronation Streetbefore, but there's a line of Mahon's that seems appropriate: "At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime." Coronation Streetis often ridiculous and Jack Duckworth was intentionally so. But just now and then it can remind us of the sublime core that lies at the heart of even the most unimportant lives.