Saturday, 17 March 2018

Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Week


Google Maps don't cover Weatherfield.  I will swallow many of Corrie's contrivances.  I will accept people without two pennies to rub together still going out for their breakfast, I will accept everyone working eight feet from their front door, I will accept that the new tram stop just isn't right.  I will not, however, believe that two teenage girls would use an A-Z when they have smartphones in their pockets.  I mean, where did they even get it?  If they dug it out of Ken's sideboard it'll be at least thirty years out of date; it's probably still got Archie Street on it.  Filming of this scene was presumably delayed for twenty minutes while the director explained to the actresses exactly what a paper map was.


Summer's been through enough already.  Someone's said this exact line every week for the last nine months.  "We can't possibly do X, Summer's been through enough already."  And then they do X, and Summer suffers even more.  In fact I'm starting to wonder if it's all her fault.  Think about it; she's had THREE dads so far - one died, one is missing, and as for the third...  Billy was a perfectly lovely vicar until Summer came along; now he's robbing the neighbours and shooting up in the pews.  On top of that she's overdosed on spice, been kidnapped, has a murderer for a step-grandfather and couldn't even hang around outside the school gates for two minutes without a pervert trying to entice her into his car.  Perhaps Summer should just be sent to a nice quiet boarding school somewhere in the Orkneys, out of the reach of trouble.


Corrie continues to push the pre-watershed boundaries.  No, I'm not talking about David's rape; I'm talking about some of the filth that the writers and actors are sneaking into the scripts.  There was Gemma not being able to swallow a sausage after a night of passion with Tyrone, which raises all kinds of questions about his downstairs equipment.  There was David calling Josh's mum's habit of picking up lorry drivers "mother trucking".  And most magnificently, there was Mary's former shell collecting hobby, leading to the observation that "my pink slit conch was very much admired."  Absolutely obscene.  I put my foot through my television and I shall be sending ITV the bill.


Semillon is made for sharing.  It was wonderful to see Audrey and Gail knocking back a glass or fourteen of white wine and chewing the fat.  Knowing Audrey, that's probably her third bottle of the day.  They bonded over their shared gullibility without ever saying "Nigel Havers" because let's be honest, we were all thinking it.  Gail hasn't shown as much enthusiasm for Rosemary's psychic gifts as Audrey which is understandable; when you have four dead husbands it's less a reading, more of a conference call.  


The power of Christ really can compel you.  What's scarier than Pat Phelan?  Turns out it's Pat Phelan filled with religious fervour.  He was far more terrifying forcing Billy to beg for the Lord's forgiveness than when he was running around with an actual firearm.  You can tell Pat's a Catholic by his distinctly fire and brimstone version of God; this was a deity who judges and punishes, not the weedy Church of England version practiced by Billy and the Bishop (who will always be Jez from Gimme Gimme Gimme to me).  Pat's God wouldn't have booked Billy into a Christian rehab centre to be tenderly brought back to full health.  He'd have locked him in a bare room to pray for purity and salvation while furious nuns battered him with rulers.  Which raises the question: exactly what kind of punishment does Pat expect to get when he crosses to the other side?

@merseytart has never had a problem swallowing sausages.



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5 comments:

  1. Brilliant review as usual! Glad I wasn’t the only one that saw (and enjoyed) Gemma’s sausage gag...

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  2. Great Five Things We Learned, Scott! I look forward to this every week as a sort of palate cleanser, bracing myself for next week's slice of reality-with-a-heart-of-gold on the cobbles.

    Gosh, the writer's are increasingly sliding in the blue jokes aren't they? Now we've got Carry On Corrie, Trainspotting Corrie, Casualty Corrie, and Corrie: The Bill. I guess the next build-out will be an inner city vertical farm on the walls of the high rise buildings on an abandoned estate. Call it Emmerdale: Corrie.

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  3. I love the ongoing game of tag played by Corrie’s wondrous team of writers. You can just see Jonathan Harvey saying, ‘OK, do what you can with that’ as he finishes his 18 minutes and hands over to the next in the team. I just hope the reality intrusion of Costa and Co-op doesn’t infect the fantasy world of our favourite street

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  4. EXCELLENT review.

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  5. Really enjoy reading these each week. Thanks for writing them!

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