Here in New Zealand we get to watch Coronation Street some 18 months later than in the UK. So what I have to complain about now may be very old hat to the British. Life on the Street may, for all I know, have improved, or very much worsened – I would need to ask someone Over There. My guess is that it’s not a lot better.
We have just gone through the spectacular tram (or train – various factors such as accent make it unsure) crash off the viaduct on to the Street. This has happened once before to Coronation Street. It was a long time ago, and only a few of us geriatrics remember. But now you do have to wonder why they feel so secure down there beside the viaduct. You would think Locality, Locality might have started to seem somewhat suspect.
This time there was much fire and devastation. Ashley was killed, and Molly too, but leaving her baby thriving. However charming babies may be, this one has problems. His name is Jack, after Jack Duckworth, the lovable old bloke who quietly expired a little while back, sitting in an armchair and fantasizing about his beloved Vera. So far, so good. But little Jack is not the offspring of Tyrone, his mother’s lawful husband, but of Kevin, her former jogging mate, Sally’s spouse. This has been confirmed by DNA tests, for heaven’s sake. I always thought jogging was hazardous. Moreover, you don’t mess with Sally. Just two or three episodes on, you wouldn’t believe how calamitous all this has got.
Peter survived but in a wheelchair. Nick survived more or less unhurt, and as the hero whose intrepid actions saved Peter’s life. Ashley, who also helped save Peter, as we know died.
Devout Coronation Street watchers have all this, and much much more, more or less straight in our minds, although at times it is a delicate balance of memory and sanity. It is difficult indeed to elucidate it here, and I hope the reader is grateful. The new bar being run by Nick and Leanne was wiped out on its opening night, along with the Cabin, Rita’s flat, and the butcher shop of Fred Elliot and Son.
Now the seriously evil Tracy has got out of prison (don’t ask) and returned to the drooping bosom of Deidre Barlow her mother –
Traceeee, luv…! She flowed out of a taxi, net stockings and all, in the Street, in the middle of their commemorative Christmas Carol Service (Ken Barlow I think singing bass), loudly and blasphemously announcing herself as an even better incarnation.
Tracy Barlow redefines original sin. She has a small daughter, Amy, and I think the father is the terminally pathetic Steve of the Rovers Return, but with Tracy that could never be more than provisional. She now maintains that in prison she thought of nothing else but resuming her maternal care of Amy. Like smoke. However, she is busy reclaiming her daughter from the care of Steve and his current wife, the incomparable Becky. It will end in tears. It is being done not so much by fair means or foul, as by an overwhelming preference for foul.
Meanwhile Steve and Becky are caring for another kid, Max, the little blond son of Becky’s execrable sister Kylie. The Execrable Sister has found she can blackmail Steve and Becky for money if they want to keep Max. They have already paid a couple of ruinous instalments, the second being funds Becky lifted from the premises of Dev Allahan and Co during the turmoil of the viaduct crash and fire. This too will end in tears. At the moment Steve and Becky are guilty of theft, probably kidnapping, and (however the charge would be framed) buying a child.
I personally hope Becky stays in the show and goes as we say from strength to strength. She is lovely and colourful. She does everything wrong, she shoots from the lip, and she gets into some delicious punch-ups. Roy and Hayley did her a lot of good and she responded to their love and care. Her personal relationships could be best described as volatile and pyrotechnic, and that’s on a good day, but her heart is where it should be. Becky is one of their best characters at present.
I lack the available energy to unravel the matter of John and Fiz. John and Fiz, also, have a new baby. This one is premature but now apparently making progress. John is a teacher, dismissed for something or other bad and unprofessional, resumed teaching for a while under a false identity, spent time in prison after kidnapping Sally and Kevin’s older daughter Rosie, whom no one in their right mind would want five minutes with, was eventually released, managed to murder a lunatic teaching colleague named Charlotte who had been stalking him, and this got passed off as a casualty of the train crash… I do hope you are keeping up with me. We expend a lot of energy simply coming to terms with how stupid John is.
Ashley (remember Ashley…?) being now deceased, he no longer has to go with his current wife, the slightly unhinged Clare, to live in France. I can’t say whether Ashley would have preferred France with Clare and seriously unEnglish meat cuts, or Eternal Life. He was always a little thick. Nowhere with Clare is what I say.
There are little pockets of sanity in this place. Rita spreads sense, compassion and wisdom. Emily also, sometimes. Betty the aged barmaid actually related the devastated Street to the state of things in her childhood in the London Blitz. I wondered whether that really set it in context, but her point was, we’ve seen it all before.
And of course, Roy and Hayley. Roy entered the Street years ago as a spookily intelligent single bloke with a little unmanly kitbag and a fixed almost emotionless expression. Hayley arrived as an unhappy transsexual. This, one might have thought, was unpromising material. They are now an oasis of simple sense and sanity amid the morass of strife, stupidity and pain.
Coronation Street seems to eschew strong and sensible men. It wasn’t always so. It is now. Ken Barlow is infuriatingly weak and compliant, a moral wimp. I am devoutly opposed to violence in the home, but Ken’s Deidre does need a sharp smack across the chops at weekly intervals. Steve too is weak. Kevin, relegated by the stupid Sally to pariah status in his own home, seems unable to say to wife and daughters, “This is my home, my property – if you don’t like living with me, you leave…” Strong men on Coro do appear occasionally and ephemerally, but they tend to be obnoxious, and merely passing through. Tyrone routinely reverts to child.
I haven’t mentioned Gail. Gail is a bloke’s most frightening nightmare. She believes she is the ultimate Mother Hen, totally devoted to her children, now all adults – well, at any rate, in the physiological sense. True adulthood is a rare and precious commodity on Coronation Street. At present, what they mainly have is fertility and scattered homicidal traits.
Gail has a kind of descending face. There is no chin. She is supremely self-righteous, and seems sublimely able to set aside her own history. (This is a feature of the women on Coronation Street.) Nick is Gail’s son. There is nothing anyone can do about that. Gail had a daughter, Sarah Louise, who got pregnant to someone at age 13 or thereabouts… There is much more I wanted to know about that, but they have faded from the plot. David is Gail’s youngest. David has no redeeming features except that he seems to sense when to be afraid. He is a manipulating, amoral prat. Gail still tries, futilely, to bind it all together. She too has spent time in jail, convicted of the murder of her latest husband… I am too tired to recall what happened about all that. She lost her job as the local GP’s receptionist because she was caught opening confidential patient files. She said, “I would do anything for my children…” So that’s alright then.
Now, I am really beginning to wonder whether the reader is keeping up.
But you still don’t know about Gary. Gary is the wayward son of some couple I have not yet come to terms with. His father is a kind of loose-limbed begger of free drinks, a career welfare beneficiary, and his mother is a reasonably capable woman who copes with all this and hopes the best for her son. But Gary, having just been rescued from criminal conviction by the false testimony of one of his mates, enlists in the army and gets sent to Afghanistan. We have much anxiety and wailing about that. And of course, Gary eventually gets home wounded, and with the memory of a couple of his mates killed.
So this is now about post traumatic stress, war neurosis, shell shock, and it did have possibilities for insightful social commentary. When the big disaster hit Coronation Street, Gary immediately saw himself back on the battlefield in a fire fight, and he assumed the foetal position and shivered. His training and experience might have made him invaluable in that crisis, but instead he simply hid. I guess the facts of PTS are well known and documented – there was a very moving sequence on just this near the end of the M*A*S*H series, when Hawkeye Pierce succumbs to war neurosis – but Coronation Street really failed to see this important theme well developed.
Barefaced lying is a fundamental of the transactions of Coronation Street. They all lie. It is a kind of reflex. And it entails a constant thread of utter stupidity. Their lies routinely get found out. Then they fight. Simple candour is never seen, except perhaps in Rita or Emily. Events are interpreted to children by means of lies. I wonder whether this is unexceptional culture in and around Manchester.
Another really tedious thing is how they speak to each other. I mean, their cruelty in speech and action. Tracy thinks nothing of deliberately hurting just-bereaved Clare with talk of her “late thick-headed husband”. In the Rovers, in their homes, out in the street, wherever they meet, they say unforgiveable things to each other, accurately hit out at tender spots, react with cruel vengeance. Is this really reflecting that culture? Verbal cruelty happens in NZ families too, of course, but what we encounter on Coronation Street is much worse in both intensity and frequency.
And the hypocrisy… Most of them have what might be described as adventurous marital and extra-marital histories. Long-time watchers know this. But given, for instance, the fact that Kevin has fathered the late Molly’s baby, Kevin’s wife Sally is immediately afflicted with amnesia about her own story. Kevin is assailed by the most rancorous hypocrisy – and he seems simply to take it. I do not understand these things. Very few of the Street’s characters are in any position to cast stones.
And so it goes on. 50 years, now. They must have something right. And of course the show changes. What entertained us in the days of Ena Sharples would possibly bore us now. But would it…? I am not so sure. I remain as fascinated by the characters of Trollope or Hardy as ever. Perhaps it’s that Coronation Street always has to attract new viewers and make money. Back in the early 1960s, Tracy Barlow would have been inconceivable and incomprehensible. Now everyone recognizes her.
