BRAZIL:The plot lines may be impossibly far-fetched but Brazil's soaps have real clout when it comes to racking up global audiences, writes Tom Henniganin São Paulo
Ireland is set to star in the latest offering from one of the world's great dream factories when the country will serve as the backdrop for the latest Brazilian soap opera Eterna Magia.
Debuting in May on Rede Globo, the world's biggest producer of soaps, the series will be partly set in the Ireland of the 1940s. It will serve as the European base for the lead character, Eva Sullivan, a Brazilian concert pianist setting out to conquer the Old Continent.
Eva will be played by Malu Mader, one of Brazil's biggest stars and most photographed women. The dramatic heart of the soap will revolve around Eva and her two sisters, who are all in love with the same man.
Unlike their Irish and English counterparts, Brazilian soaps are not known for gritty, kitchen-sink realism, preferring instead glamorous settings and impossibly good-looking casts who wind their way through months of melodrama involving villains, clowns and star-crossed lovers. One recent hit series ended with the villain of the piece escaping to Europe with her lover who happened to be the grandson of her granddaughter's partner.
Eterna Magia also looks set to keep realism at arm's length. One of the Sullivan sisters will be a white witch and Celtic mysticism and culture will form the backdrop to the series. Filming will start in Ireland next month and locations are set to include Temple Bar and Glendalough. Like all Brazilian soaps - known locally as novelas - the series will run six nights a week for several months.
Globo produces about 2,500 hours of novelas each year, or the equivalent of 1,200 feature films, making it the biggest producer of drama in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records.
Most are produced at Globo's huge studio compound in Rio de Janeiro.
Here directors, scriptwriters and stars are all retained on contracts in a manner that resembles the studio system of Hollywood's golden years. Each show and its stars are ruthlessly promoted on the station's other programmes and in the newspapers and magazines owned by the group, which will also do their best to hide or gloss over stars' peccadilloes.
An unchanging diet of soaps and football, combined with the country's leading nightly news programme, have made Globo the dominant broadcaster in Brazil and one of the biggest in the world.
In anticipation of the soap's run, several leading newspapers have already run features on Ireland in their travel sections and Ireland's debut in Brazil's soap universe could provide an unexpected boost to Irish tourism. A recent soap that featured Greece led to a rise in Brazilians visiting the Aegean, and a previous series that was partly set on an ocean liner helped increase Brazilian interest in cruise holidays.
Most Brazilians are only dimly aware of Ireland, which has not been greatly marketed there. The closest most get to the Emerald Isle during a holiday to Europe is London, before heading off to destinations such as Paris, Rome and Barcelona.
Peter O'Neill, a Rio-based tourism consultant, believes the Irish tourism industry should move fast to try and capitalise on the soap.
"Eterna Magia could represent millions of euro in free publicity for Ireland and Irish culture. I feel it would be a great pity for Tourism Ireland to miss out on this unique opportunity which may not present itself again."
Such is the global impact of Brazil's soap operas that by the end of the year Ireland, as portrayed in Eterna Magia, will have graced screens across the world. Just last year alone Globo sold its soaps in 73 other countries, with an estimated daily global audience of 100 million people, on top of the tens of millions watching in Brazil.