They’re not wrong to wonder.
The Coronation Street of 2025 is a different beast to the Coronation Street of 1960.
The vast majority of us will know the origin story of our beloved soap. A young writer by the name of Tony Warren had an idea for a series set on a back street in Salford.
A real Northern street with the personalities he had grown up with - strong women who didn’t let life get them down. The battleaxe and her cronies passing judgement in the Snug between pints of milk stout, the working-class family with an aspirational son who could never quite bring himself to leave the Street.
The idea was that the show would reflect normal life.
The arguments, the conversations, the interactions that made up the minutiae of normal life. For the first time, we could get to know the characters on a deeper level than we ever had before.
We could cry with Elsie Tanner as she got her heart broken yet again, we could laugh fondly at the snobbishness of Annie Walker, who saw herself as above the back street pub she ran for years, we could listen in on yet another argument between Hilda Ogden and her great lump of a husband, as she often referred to him.
Throughout the seventies and eighties, the characters who were around from the beginning faded, to be replaced seamlessly by Street residents who remain icons to this day. We’d be gripped at the latest development in the feud between Ken Barlow and Mike Baldwin, feel a little sorry (but not too much) for Jack Duckworth as his wife laid into him, spend time in the Kabin with the chalk-and-cheese duo of Rita Fairclough and Mavis Riley, then wander over to the Rovers where Bet Lynch was ready to heckle one of her regulars.
What happened?
Today, I turn on Coronation Street and the show is so far removed from the original vision that Tony Warren put forth in 1959.
We see more of the police station and the hospital than the regular Street sets - a quick Google search tells me that we haven’t seen the inside of the Kabin since February 2024. Sensationalism and shock seem to rule the day, with stabbings followed by house fires followed by sieges. The characters go through more trauma in six months than a lot of us see in a lifetime.
All the classic characters I mentioned above were before I was born. I came to Coronation Street during the height of the Hillman story - on paper, a sensationalised serial killer story. And yet there was enough heart, enough community, enough sense of family for a young kid to latch onto. I wanted to know what would happen next to Gail, to Audrey, to a family reeling from Richard Hillman’s various misdeeds. And very quickly, I connected to the other characters. Roy and Hayley. Jack and Vera. Ken and Deirdre.
The soap we all love has lost its way. For proof of this statement, all you have to do is to compare a new episode to an episode of old. I’m not suggesting for a moment that they re-make episodes in the style of the 1960s, or even the 1980s. But I urge the producer and the writers to remember the show they’re making. This isn’t a crime drama. This isn’t a medical drama.
This is Coronation Street. The heartbeat of many of our lives for 65 years. It has its own identity, its own purpose, its own story to tell. And it won’t be found in non-linear storytelling, in sensational events done for shock value, in issue-based stories sandwiched on top of one another.
It can be found in the minutiae of life.
