The sample episode of EastEnders, shown in Britain in June 1998, had 32 scenes with an average length of 18 turns each.
Dramatic scenes are short in modern day UK soaps.
Audience attention spans should not be threatened. There is always something else about to happen. There are other channels that can be surfed if the viewer's attention is not held. This work has largely been applied to written texts rather than spoken, and to expository rather than narrative texts. Nonetheless, I feel that the Hoey model is a very useful one for the analysis of soap opera.