Weight is a hot button issue right now. You can't open a magazine without discovering some celebrity is "celebrating her curves", which is
Daily Mail-speak for "get off the eclairs, lard arse." We're besieged with stories about our portly schoolchildren stuffing their face with Turkey Twizzlers in front of their Nintendo Playbox, never seeing the daylight and having to be airlifted into their Maths lessons.
It's a National Obesity Crisis, the kind of horrific story that gets Bill Turnbull pulling his serious face on
BBC Breakfast while stock footage of straining belts and saggy bellies plays.
That's in the real world. In Weatherfield, fat is good. Fat is fabulous. Fat characters are almost immediately clutched to the bosom of the viewers, because they're warmer, they're nicer, they're lived in. Fred Eliot. Alf Roberts. Jack Duckworth. HRH Betty Turpin. We like characters to be a bit porky. This might be because we're people who spend at least two and a half hours a week plonked on a sofa.
Take Molly Compton. When she arrived on the Street she was chunky. That heaviness told a story. She was the daughter of Diggory Compton, a man for whom the answer was
always pastry. She'd been bullied at school. She was a bit shy. We instinctively knew that Molly had spend her teens wolfing up the stale iced buns while sobbing into her
Smash Hits. We loved her for it. We loved it when she hooked up with Tyrone,
Coronation Street's version of the Marshmallow Man. They were bound to have a happy, joyous life together.
And then she lost weight.
Suddenly Molly became annoying. Thin Molly started wearing tight spandex and crop tops. Thin Molly turned down a fish supper on a Friday night so she could have rice cakes. Thin Molly started talking about her GIs and running round the block and she was
boring. Thin Molly looked at chubby, loveable Tyrone inhaling a fried slice and thought, "I can do better than that." Next thing you know she's bunked up with Kevin in the Bolton Premier Inn, and the audience is cheering when she's crushed under a wayward tram. All that exercise but you still couldn't outrun
that, could you?
Peter Barlow has changed too. He came back from Los Angeles bronzed and slimmer, his belly gone, a healthy glow about him. But he's not the same. When Peter was fat his character was tied up in those extra pounds. Coal black eyes stared out of a face that carried years of disappointment, years of abuse, years of loss. His body spoke to us about the fags, and the gambling, and the drinking, definitely the drinking.
Healthy Peter is all angles now. He's sharper. The sad eyes are still there but they don't fit the package any more.
It feels like he was quietly taken apart in LA and then put back together by a team of crack surgeons, only they forgot some of the parts, like an Ikea coffee table with three extra screws you can't place. I can imagine some oily American staring at a beer gut incomprehensibly and simply slicing it off. He's not whole now.
If you're thin, you can seem hard. It's the way our minds are structured. Beth and Tracy are both balls of cruelty and spite, but Beth seems adorable when she bellows a coarse insult across the Rovers. Tracy just seems like a stick of hatred when she spits another offensive remark over the hotpots.
That's another thing:
Coronation Street isn't built for thin people. Where are its principle commercial spaces? A pub. A cafe. A sweetshop. A corner shop that seems to sell nothing except frozen pizzas and tins of beans. A kebab shop. A chippy. No wonder they turned the Graffiti Club into a Medical Centre; they probably have a defibrilator on permanent stand by. Corrie is the only place in Britain where a group of working women unashamedly knock back pints of lager at lunch and have a daily cake run; in reality all these women would be embarrassed to enjoy their food and drink, and would be having a cheese and onion Snack-a-Jack as a "treat" with their cup of green tea.
It leaves us with a slight suspicion in the back of our minds when a character gets thin without a Molly-style Damascene revelation. Anna Windass has dropped a hell of a lot of weight since she arrived on the street. She came into the show squeezed into trackie bottoms, her face and body bearing the brunt of running around after feckless Eddie and out of control Gary.
Her little round body told us about her character - we got it; she bought cheap, carby foods from budget freezer centres, she didn't have time to exercise, she worried over her family and guzzled down half a pack of Party Rings to make herself feel better.
Now she's lost all that weight but she doesn't seem to have changed her lifestyle at all. She's still serving up enormous meals drowning in gravy and sneaking herself the odd iced bun at the cafe, yet she weighs eight stone three. It doesn't add up. And that angularity comes into it again; a rotund Anna clutching Faye to her generous bosom would have been an image of family we'd all ascribe to. Whippet thin-Anna shouting at Tim in the street doesn't seem maternal - she's just kind of a bitch.
No. If you want to truly succeed on
Corrie you need to pile on the pounds. Think of Steve McDonald. When he was a twiglet, skag-trained limbs reaching across the prison table, he was horrible. He was an annoying twerp who really needed to fall under a Weatherfield Wayfarer. Steve McDonald in 2013 carries round an eight month pregnancy belly, and he's adorable. His jeans strain, he lets out a sigh of satisfaction as he collapses into a chair, and he launches into soliliquys about Penguin biscuits. In short, he's a joy. He's actually enjoying himself, and life, and he's making it fun for us to watch. Stay unhealthy, Steve; keep eating those choccie biccies. All the best people do. Just ask Fat Brenda.
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