Friday, 10 December 2010

Wham Bam, Thank You, Tram

My first memories of Coronation Street are watching it with my mum and my grandma when I was nowt but a girl.  Mam would be knitting, grandma would be having a sherry and I'd be curled up on the sofa hoping against hope that the dark-haired lady called Elsie Tanner would be in that night's episode.  Mam thought Elsie was a tart, she used to tut every time she came on the screen while grandma and me would exchange a look. We loved Elsie Tanner, we did. 

And for the next 35 years I tuned into Corrie, trying never to miss an episode.

In the early 90s I spent a few years overseas where I missed Coronation Street a lot. This was in the days before iPlayers, before the internet, before Sky+ and high-tech as we know it today. And when I returned to live in the UK I couldn't get enough of my Corrie.

By this time, the internet was starting to take off and the usenet newsgroup (now owned by Google) rec.arts.tv.uk.coronation-st was born in 1995.  The first two words I ever typed into a search engine (such as they were then) were Coronation + Street, and it lead me to usenet.  I realised then, reading the newsgroup, that Corrie fans were worldwide, especially in Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia. And the ones overseas were asking us UK fans what was going on in real-time on home soil in the UK.

I started off writing a couple of paragaraphs once a week for the newsgroup to keep the fans happy, and then those paragraphs grew as word spread about the Corrie weekly updates.  Now, 15 years later, those Coronation Street weekly updates still go out worldwide, once a week by email, to far flung corners of the world. I've got a farmer in Israel who can't get them quick enough, a Canadian airline cabin crew who used to print the updates off and pin them up in their staff cabin for airline crew to catch up on and even one Canadian man who has printed off every single weekly update for the last 15 years and keeps them in a binder!

And now here I am, writing about Coronation Street on the blog and sharing my own Corrie joy with other fans.  This has been the most remarkable week on Corrie, and I can't thank you all enough for choosing the Coronation Street Blog for your Corrie news and views.

GRITTY SAGAS BY CORRIE BLOG EDITOR GLENDA YOUNG, PUBLISHED BY HEADLINE. CLICK PIC BELOW!

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GRITTY SAGAS BY CORRIE BLOG EDITOR GLENDA YOUNG, PUBLISHED BY HEADLINE. CLICK PIC BELOW!