Coronation Street producer Kate Oates has given her views on Corrie's current, darker storylines. She was speaking to David Brown of the Radio Times at this week's Radio Times covers party, held at Claridges in that London.
Kate Oates said: “I realise that, at the moment, Corrie is divisive. I love the old-school viewers because they’re key to our audience. But the audience is changing – the dynamic needs to move and shift. It’s all about keeping current with what people want. As long as we cater for everyone in the mix, then I think we’re doing OK.”
And on the darker tone of Coronation Street, Oates said: “I will quite happily accept that it’s darker. But I do think that we’ve got a good balance – what I enjoy best about that dramatic mix is when you’ve got comedy within the darkness. I’ve never been a fan of slapstick. I’ve never been a fan of ‘comedy strands’. But I like dark humour and gallows humour. Yes, sometimes the show is dark – certainly the Phelan story in particular. But we balance it out. We’ve got a good overview of what we want the show to be about.”
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18 comments:
I don't think it's balanced at all, she's deluded!
Yeah, she doesn't know what the hell she is talking about. Read the comments Kate. The audience says they are sick to death of the Phelan storyline and have stopped watching the show. I'm still watching...waiting for Kate Oates to move on.
i disagree strongly with Ms. Oates' comments. The show as it stands now is NOT balanced. Dark humour....dark storylines....same thing....still dark, still dreary. So she does not like slapstick?? Is that what she considers the show to have been before she arrived? I will say again, I think she has turned Corrie into another version of Criminal Minds which I used to watch but had to stop. Corrie has become one horrible storyline after another and I would not mind that if there were still some brighter storylines...so what if they might be mindless and foolish....what's wrong with having a laugh?? The actors on Corrie are talented and can carry off both the humourous and the dark storylines. What is wrong with having both!
I'lll go along with Kate Oates for as long as she continues to defend the comedic side of Corrie - it's what differentiates Corrie from the Shouty-Cockney Misery-fest on BBC and the unrealistically cosmopolitan " North Yorkshire " based Emmerdale ( I live in North Yorkshire and cosmopolitan it ain't 😉) - KEEP CORRIE COMIC 👍🏿👍
I know there are younger viewers and viewers in my (old!) generation who love or love to hate Phelan. The younger ones have been brought up with dark and violent tv series, and the older viewers amongst my friends are gothic horror fans and adore Stephen King. But loving Phelan isn't the same as loving Corrie, and there are precious few parallel storylines strong enough to balance out Phelan's. Heaven help Corrie when they can keep it going no longer or the actor, himself, has had enough. Like Alison King was, Connor is in many of the scenes in every episode and it must be exhausting. As for Kate Oates' comment about humour, I agree with her views in general but it isn't borne out in the show. We do end up with a kind of slap stick eg: Brian and Cathy, Moira and her beau (Jim Moir). We don't see enough of the surreal humour like Audrey and Gail in the lap dancing club. Humour is subjective so maybe not everyone found that funny. We don't get enough witty one-liners. There definitely isn't a balance otherwise KO wouldn't be trying to persuade us there was.
Turning the show into a copy of Eastenders is not what I call done for "a changing audience" or that the show even remotely has a good balance.
"I, I, I, I, I...I, I, I, I..." I counted nine "I's" in just that one and a half sentence snip from the Oates interview.
So, she likes gallows humour. Sorry, but I saw nothing funny about the many views and use of a firearm on Corrie recently. It feels at times like the show is going American, the very thing so many of us always loved the lack of for so many years.
It's all thumping music, big hairstyle and make-up budgets, and a lack of respect for what provided Oates with her current job - that is, the loving development of the show over many years. Sure, I love change too. but this feels like a deliberate tearing down of historic norms. And it's being done with heavy equipment, rather than an artist's sensitive touch.
If the show is doing so well, why is she doing so many interviews lately trying to defend herself against the many complaints I'm sure are pouring in, if this blog is anything to go by. If Twitter rules Oates, she needs to watch what it's doing to "democracy" across the pond.
I've noticed a few interesting changes in how the show is shot - different angles, zooming in on close ups, that sort of thing, and I think that's great. However, CS is becoming darker and darker without much of the lighter side to balance it.
I don't mind the odd dark story thrown in, as long as there's a good balance, which at this point, there is definitely not.
I was really disappointed in seeing Andy die after all his torture - and unless Phelan comes clean about it, no one will know (including Steph) that he didn't dump her by text and ran off on her.
Yes its true, the Bethany underage grooming story was hilarious and the male rape story promises to be a barrel of laughs too.
Kate Oates must be living in an alternate universe if she thinks that Corrie is "balanced".
Maggie Muggins said it really well.
I don't see any balance to the storylines and Corrie rarely did any slapstick until Oates arrived so I wonder if she even watches all the episodes or just focuses on her favorite dark storylines and delegates supervision of the rest.
Corrie's humor used to come simply from the fact that life and people are sometimes funny not from having actors act like clowns or idiots the way Rosie,Brian,Cathy,Gemma and Gina do.
Like most long time Corrie viewers I've had no trouble liking Corrie and seeing it evolve over the decades so it seems reductive to hear her justify the changes she's made by the need to also cater to a new audience. Didn't almost all the previous producers manage to keep old viewers while adding new fans without resorting to constant turmoil and exploitation?
Just read online that according to alleged information from an insider Phelan is going to meet his end when he is pushed off a cliff by Eileen after the bodies of some of his victims are found at his building site. I presume these are the bodies of Vinny and Andy unless he commits any other murders beforehand. If this is true I hope that it is also discovered that he was Luke's murderer and that he framed Anna and possibly that he did nothing to help Michael when he was dying. It would not be fair if only some of his crimes were discovered and Anna continued to suffer in jail for a crime she did not commit and Luke's murder was still blamed on racists.
To be frank, simply killling him off in this fashion, if the rumours are indeed true, seems far too easy an exit for such an evil character. Ideally his crimes should be discovered while he is still alive and he should be made to stand trial for them punished with life imprisonment, with all the residents of Coronation Street learning just how evil he is and the full extent of his crimes. Just having him fall over a cliff seems just like a convenient way for the writers to contrive his exit and may not necessarily prove that he framed Anna and murdered Luke, therefore leaving the whole nasty Phelan saga with a far from satisfactory ending.
Well Ms Oates...with all due respect to you...you have lost this 30+ year Corrie viewer to your 'balancing' issue of this show....SHAME!! It truly makes me sad that I no longer can watch the show I once would never miss... I guess one of your younger audience viewers will pick up where I left off...is that how you see it??
To my way of thinking, if Phelan simply falls over a cliff to a quick death he will not have received any real punishment for his horrific crimes; in particular for his cruel and sadistic imprisonment, torture and murder of Andy; his cruel persecution and sexual exploitation of Anna culminating in her unjust imprisonment, and his horrific murder of Luke when he was burned alive in his car. For justice to be served and for CS to maintain it's supposed reputation of being a moral show, Phelan must be made to suffer as he has made others suffer.
If he is indeed to have such a quick death in contrast to how he has killed, tortured and persecuted others it seem to me that this is just a convenient way of saving Ms Oates and her writers the trouble of having to tie up all the various loose ends of Phelan's evil deeds properly. Just get him out of the way quickly so that we can get on with the next unpleasant storyline involving someone else.
"Divisive" the word used by those who can't think of anything else when they realize that they'd better blame others for their own terrible decisions. I guess Kate told us..haha....next!
I wasn't going to chime in to echo what's already been said more eloquently by others. But then I realized the more comments that are made, the greater the odds that something might change. Wishful thinking, maybe, but anyway. I agree that there are far too many dark storylines. It's sad that Kate Oates seems to believe that there isn't enough drama in everyday life (the essence of classic Coronation Street) to supply material that would interest all viewers. I think there is, you just have to be more creative. It's harder than identifying "issues" that can be exploited
At this point I'm so desensitized to the continual violence and misery on the show that when I read David was going to be raped it didn't faze me in the least. That's really sad.
Anon 00.24
I carefully avoided reading the blog about Phelan's death only for you to blurt it out here. Thanks a lot. I was reading these comments to find out what people thought about Kate Oates.
Cheer up, I doubt he's really dying in the next couple of weeks. Even that's going to get dragged out
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