Continuity Street

Well, there I was, slumped in my lockdown haze, free for a while from yet another Teams meeting. Escaping from the world of virtual drinks nights and never-ending Zoom quiz evenings. Time to sit back and catch up with Corrie. Not the current stuff. One thing I've found to be refreshing over the last three months is only having to deal with three episodes a week. It's manageable and means that I don't have to sit, bleary-eyed at 5.30 am, trying to cram in another half hour before work.

No, the catch up involved the Classic Corrie episodes on ITV3. Again, they hurl about seventy episodes a day at us so it can take a while to reach 1995. I finally reached those dizzy heights though and was able to marvel at the sheer majesty of Bet, the dreadful Don and the 'oh this character hasn't aged well' Reg. Suddenly the viewer was presented with images of some grim block of flats, presided over by Deirdre Rachmaninov (thanks for that one Vera). Out of the shadows in this dank looking establishment emerged Roy Cropper. There he was - or rather wasn't, for although he looked like the kindly patrician and cafe owner, character-wise he was something else. Confident, creepy and wandering around with a bottle of whisky. This was odd. Then Pretend Roy started babbling on about looking after his sister's kids. STOP! Say that again? Roy's sister?

As seasoned viewers, we should be used to this kind of thing. Moments when continuity collapses faster than Rita's 'posh' voice. Obviously Roy saw so little of his sister and her kids that at some point in 1996, they ceased to exist altogether. Gone and never mentioned again. It's a side of Corrie that is both perplexing and fun. The show's sixty year history is peppered with such loveliness.

Possibly topping the charts, thanks to Victoria Wood's pithy re-enactment of Ena Sharples, are the Barlow children, 'their Peter and their Susan'. Not only did the two regenerate more times than Doctor Who but they also conveniently changed accents. 1970s Peter was wiry, freckled and Scottish. Susan was bubbly and Scottish. By the eighties, the latter was wooden and sporting some bizarre vocal that she must have found abandoned on the Albion Market set. When she eventually returned to be killed off, Susan was a brunette with a bad perm. Early 1980s Peter was a little chunkier and  sandy. By the time we met him again, he was darker and flattening his vowels. Well, it all adds to the jollity.

Forgetting your family is also pretty commonplace on t'cobbles. Remember Sylvia and Tony Ogden? Stan and Hilda didn't. Following their 1964 debut, the Oggies conveniently misremembered having two extra kids. Originally in care, we can only assume that they are there to this day, eagerly awaiting the arrival of curlers and cigarette smoke. It won't be happening. Quite why the extra Ogdens were ditched remains a mystery, particularly when the decision was taken to retain the awful Trevor.

It's easy to forget though. 1970s Gail happily rattled on about her 'mam and dad' so it came as a surprise when Audrey finally appeared, 'sans Mr Potter'. Gail was obviously mistaken into thinking she had a dad. When she eventually did get one several decades later, she then decided to spend the following ten years never mentioning him again. What do you have to say about that then Audrey? Hmm?

We can only imagine that the Corrie team were on the cooking sherry every time it came to hauling Ivy out for an appearance. Long before she was cackling about 'them babbies', she was Ivy Tyldesley. Presumably she had no idea how to pronounce her own name so they dropped a few letters. They also dropped her husband . . . Wilf. A further husband, Jack, also was forgotten along the way. Sadly, according to Ivy, they were never blessed with kids. We can only assume that she'd kept quiet about Our Brian with his Farrah Fawcett hairdo and yet another husband, the laconic Bert. There she was then. Holier than thou Ivy with a string of abandoned spouses.

Some characters end up with multiple families. Others, bizarrely, don't warrant anyone. Take old Rio Rita for example. It's staggering to believe that in almost half a century on the cobbles, Rita has only had one family member. Just the one. No parents. No siblings. No cousins. Plus in an age of social media and DNA tracing, not a single person on Planet Earth has bothered tracking her down. Is there some dark, evil backstory concerning everyone's favourite clapped out cabaret act? Or did she just emerge one day, fully formed in a tie-neck blouse, wagging her finger and bellowing 'now then lady . . .' We will probably never know.

Nowadays Corrie is a much more well-oiled machine and it's unlikely that Izzy and Gary would ever forget about . . . err, thingy or Sean would fail to mention his son, what's his name. Eeh - them poor babbies.

By Clinkers to Riddle.

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