Coronation Street: A Likely Story

Reprinted with permission from fab TV blog PauseLiveAction

Just when I thought that Waterloo Road would be the only show which I would pick fault with every scene due to my employment in education, along comes a pretty dire storyline from the team at Coronation Street.

For some unknown reason, the powers that be are still flogging the terminally boring character of John Stape. A man who has returned to the screens more times than a cuckoo has to a clock, he is the only character that can have a saucy affair with a flighty, saucy young minx, find himself beaten up twice, spend months in jail, be at the centre of a wedding plot and stage a kidnap and still be less interesting than a debate with Ken Barlow over which colour is better between light grey and pale green.

The latest ploy to try and make John entertaining (rather than the more obvious idea of axing him) is to have him steal another teacher’s identification and begin working in a secondary school under a false name. This is a man who must have a bear-like tatooed lover back in the nick as he seems pretty damn desperate to go back there. He’s still boring mind you, but I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that.

What we’ve seen is John steal an old colleague’s ID, apply for a job Monday, be interviewed on Thursday and get the job and working there on Friday. I wish being appointed to a school was this quick! This is a procedure that normally takes weeks but this is by far the least troubling of the many plot-holes. Firstly, how is John going to get references? The staff who knew the man John pretends to be (Mr Fishwick) will be more than likely to ask him if it’s okay to write about him. It’s standard practice in education (and all other walks of employment for that matter) to contact your referee and give them the heads up that you need a reference in advance.
Secondly, a criminal police check can take up to and including 6 weeks to come through. And we are expected to believe that the school will let John come into the school and work unsupervised the day after he gets the job? I don’t know of many schools who would take that risk!

And how does he expect not to be caught? The other staff in the school are bound to have come across Weatherfield High before seeing as it’s not too far away. School staff visit other schools all the time for educational visits, sports competitions, meetings and other jobs. Just by word of mouth, the silly man is going to come undone at some point. He even forgot to answer to his fake name when called into interview for goodness sake!

I love Corrie but sometimes they treat the viewers like idiots. The plot scripting at the moment needs some serious tweaking. Even if this fake teacher plot were accurate, it would still be nauseatingly dull. And as for the Molly and Tyrone stuff, the sudden disappearance of Sally and the complete dropping of her cancer storyline and the ongoing saga of Sunita wanting to be closer to the shop, I won’t even go there as I will take up this blog’s entire bandwidth!

Phew! I understand that my post seems to be a bit of a messy rant. I should get an English teacher to check my work. Although Mr Stape-wick will be too busy dodging loopholes…