Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Year

Don't breathe.  I don't know if you noticed - it was pretty under the radar - but there was this thing called COVID-19 in 2020, and it was kind of annoying?  It caused a great deal of havoc around the world, not least among the soap operas.  EastEnders was forced to take the summer off.  Hollyoaks bitterly regretted doing a "flash forward to the end of 2020" storyline.  I'm sure something happened over on Emmerdale but nobody in their right mind watches Emmerdale so it doesn't matter.  On Coronation Street, the most obvious effect was the show went down to three shows a week for the first time since the mid-90s.  It was actually quite nice.  Turns out three episodes a week is a great number for a soap opera; it's a commitment, but it's not overwhelming, and doesn't tie you into one channel until 9 o'clock.  Bang, you're out by eight, sorted.  It also meant that cliffhangers that were just meant to get you to come back after a half-hour break got a whole two days to simmer, making them that much more exciting and effective.    

The reduction in episodes was ITV's attempt to string out the episodes they had in the can before lockdown arrived and closed down the entire show.  It meant that, for a while, people on Corrie existed in a lovely parallel universe where everything was fine.  While us viewers hunkered down at home eating cheese slices straight out of the packet and refusing to put pants on, the residents of Weatherfield carried on as though nothing had changed.  They kissed!  They hugged!  They went to bars and restaurants!  It did result in some strange shifts in the timeline - for example, they celebrated VE Day in June - but otherwise it was lovely to see life going on as usual.  ITV were forced to put a disclaimer up at the start of each show, however, presumably as Ofcom had been besieged by phone calls from people who didn't go out much even before lockdown hit, reminding the audience that this was all filmed months ago so shut up.

It wasn't until July that coronavirus finally reached our screens, and overnight everything became Covid compliant.  There were one-way systems in the shops, Sally wore rubber gloves the whole time, and there was social distancing all over the place.  The last point meant a lot of unintentional hilarity as characters absolutely refused to go anywhere near one another.  Yasmeen having a heart attack and Imran simply standing on the other side of the room and shouting was one high point, as was Leanne making up with Simon after a fearful row from inside the doorway and never getting near enough for a hug.  The highlight, however, was Gary and Maria's wedding, where they stood two metres apart the whole time (even though they live together), refused to invite their own children, and instead of kissing simply turned round and waved their rings at David Platt.  It was so stupid it was actually funny.  They still haven't quite got to grips with filming in a way that doesn't draw attention to itself; far too many scenes are played out with characters stood in a line, like it's a dole queue.

As the year went on it quickly became clear that there hadn't been quite the radical rewrite of the scripts during lockdown we'd expected.  With no location filming possible, people chased one another back to the Street for conversations, like Gary after he dug up Rick's body, or Margaret when she'd seen Johnny loitering outside her house.  Even though the junior members of the cast couldn't appear, the scripts still referenced them, so Lily ran off and was hunted all over town before being found without ever once appearing onscreen.  

Most strangely, the coronavirus didn't actually affect anything in the show itself.  Sure, people wore masks (now and then - the rules on who does and don't wear a mask seem to very poorly enforced, with many characters taking them off when they got indoors, even in hospital), but nobody actually got the virus.  Jenny mentioned an unseen character who lost both his parents to it, and Aggie had a quick video chat to say she'd be self-isolating for a while because a colleague had contracted it, but that was it.  Nobody got sick or worried about Covid.  In a community like this one, is it really conceivable that everyone would be completely healthy?

On the one hand, you could argue that they were saving us from the horrors of the everyday world by presenting us with entertainment to take our minds off it.  On the other hand, that entertainment involved spousal abuse, robberies, violent assaults and children dying, so it wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs.  Plus, Corrie is mad keen to boast about its social responsibilities - you'd have thought they'd have leapt at the chance to act as a public information film.  Imagine if Evelyn contracted the virus and was rushed to hospital, or Underworld had to close because everyone was told to self-isolate, or if there was simply a conversation about washing your hands.  Instead, while Weatherfield is definitely in a Covid world, it isn't actually a Covid world.  They could be giving us all hope right now by having Rita injected with the vaccine, although that would require La Knox to admit how old she really is, so it'll probably never happen.

Change, my dear, and not a moment too soon.  Corrie has always been fond of replacing characters when they outlive their usefulness, sometimes with almost shocking ruthlessness.  This year, we got a fair few new heads on the Street, as characters and actors were transformed completely.  First up was Aadi, who lost about a foot in height but gained some actual lines to compensate; I think we all saw this one coming, because the Old Aadi had been in roughly four episodes over the last couple of years, even staying in India longer than the rest of his family.  The new Aadi is a charming actor and has slotted right in, with a pleasing nerdiness to him that I hope they keep before he inevitably turns into a serial killer or something.  I like him standing at the side of scenes in the Alahan house, rolling his eyes at his sister's latest antics and making doomed attempts to get his dad to notice him.

Later in the year Todd returned, only now he was Welsh.  His reintroduction involved a terrifying gangster waving a gun around; this problem was solved by Eileen putting on a serious voice.  He's spent all his time since he returned skulking in the back of shot, smirking, eavesdropping, then unsubtly winding people up; I'm not sure why any of his family or friends were happy to see him back because he's been awful.  He's currently on a mission to break up Billy and Paul, but to succeed he'd first have to get them out of bed with one another for five minutes, so good luck with that.  Also replaced this year was Summer, after the previous actress left for "new projects and challenges"; when I was 16 a new challenge involved getting out of bed before noon but that's why I wasn't a go-getting young actor.  This meant we got a truly hilarious scene where NuTodd and NuSummer met and immediately recognised one another, which made me snort-laugh tea all over my carpet.  Elsewhere, Oliver Battersby was played alternately by a pair of twin boys and a Tiny Tears Doll With Real Crying Action, except for when neither option was available and he was played by a pillow with a wig on it.

Of course you don't need to change the actor to transform a character.  Gary continued his move into a highly ineffective psychopath, loitering in alleyways and talking like he didn't have access to Strepsils.  He spent much of the Spring hanging around Rick's daughter in a manner that was one basket of puppies short of grooming; both she and her nymphomaniac mother have subsequently vanished from sight, so either he's bumped them off or they've moved away and not told anyone.  Either way I don't think anyone will miss them.

Meanwhile Shona emerged from her pregnancy, I mean, coma, with amnesia and brain damage.  This was a very special kind of brain damage that made her act like a four year old who had also swallowed some very powerful aphrodisiacs.  She spent 2020 switching between failing to understand what spoons were for and taking her top off and demanding David take her to Poundtown.  She was, in short, incredibly annoying throughout, and I very much miss the old caring, kind Shona.  It doesn't look like there's any cure in sight, either, so really I think pushing her under a Weatherfield Wayfarer would be best for everyone involved.

And then there was Debbie Webster, who they didn't recast despite a difference of thirty odd years since her last episode, and despite the fact that she seemed to have an entirely new personality.  Kevin's perfectly lovely little sister was now basically Cruella de Vil, and while I love seeing Sue Devaney on my telly, I wonder if it might have been more effective if they'd cast a different actress to play this rampaging she-wolf.  Joan Collins, perhaps.

We are all in the hole.  The sinkhole in the back garden of number 8 wasn't the biggest storyline in 2020, not when there were toddlers to kill and women to put on trial, but it was the most important one.  The sinkhole was the storyline that most effectively summed up the Coronation Street experience in 2020.  It was, on paper, huge, and got the big splash on the cover of Inside Soap and in Digital Spy.  It affected only one household and no-one else.  Nobody else in the Street cared about it or discussed it.  It had a ridiculously unnecessary criminal subplot that didn't make sense (have we ever had an explanation for exactly how Ray managed to create a sinkhole in a garden with nobody noticing?).  It utterly dominated the show for two episodes, then was completely forgotten about, save for the odd line a month later.  It simply happened, and everyone moved on, and I feel like that's what a lot of the show has been in 2020.  Some stuff happens and there are no consequences and everyone forgets about it again.

To make six episodes a week, there have to be a lot of compromises.  There are only so many hours in so many days of a week you can work people before those pesky Health and Safety people get involved demanding "breaks" and "humane circumstances" and "an end to slavery".  To get round this, Corrie films more than one scene at a time, so while Jenny and Johnny have a chat in the Rovers, another unit is filming David and Sarah outside on the Street.  It's an efficient way of cramming as much filming into the day as possible but ITV hasn't yet perfected cloning and so it's impossible to have Steve appearing in two places at once.  Add in social distancing restrictions on how many people can appear and how close they can get to one another and you end up with a situation where storylines run alongside one another but never interact.  It's almost as if they film four entirely different films and then chop them together to make up a week's episodes.

When Asha went through her problems on the internet, the only person Dev talked to about it was Mary.  Tyrone and Fiz and their psycho babysitter was a problem they largely kept within the walls of number 9, even when Jade was found slumped in the Alleyway of Doom.  And as I say, the sinkhole was something only the Platts cared about, and even then, they didn't seem especially bothered; it's still there months later, and nobody has broken into a sweat to do anything about it.  There's no gossip any more; there's no chatter; there's no interaction.  When a police car turns up, nobody stands on their doorstep to gawk (although they've been pretty much a permanent fixture on the Street this year so maybe everyone's utterly blasé).  When a couple's marriage breaks down, there are no judgemental chats from the older members of the cast.  If a character dies, they can go entirely unmourned - yes, this is about poor Robert, who's still waiting to be buried, and nobody cares.  The show is now a streamlined machine crafted to produce only cliffhangers and dramatic screengrabs and that's the way it is.

Have you been affected by issues raised in tonight's episode?  What are we going to do about the Baileys?  Because after their splashy debut in 2019 as Corrie's first all-new black family, they spent 2020 either teaching us Important Lessons or being ignored completely.  Early in the year, Ed and Michael were subjected to racist abuse from a non-entity character who was only in two episodes; this allowed the Baileys to let us all know that racism is bad.  They asked all the other characters from ethnic minorities in the show to step forward and deliver a speech about how awful things can be; this cured racism, the nasty Bistro manager was sacked, and everything was fine again.

Similarly, James was sort-of outed on Twitter, and he had to quickly back track with the help of the football club and pretend it didn't happen.  Everyone knew the truth though and a different non-entity character appeared to be rude to James.  He told everyone at the club that he was in fact gay, and one of the other players - a non-entity one, of course, not Tommy Orpington - was mean to him.  This demonstrated that homophobia is bad, but James laughed it off, and the rest of the team laughed as well, and the nasty football player was never seen again.  

Meanwhile, when coronavirus hit, Aggie immediately disappeared from our screens.  This was because the NHS is working hard and as she was a nurse she couldn't be around for her family's business.  Apart from when she decided to wander off and look after a sick aunt for a while, but never mind that. It was a message that was immediately undercut by Leanne suing the heck out of the National Health Service because they cared about the quality of life of her dying child but that wasn't Aggie's fault.

The point is that the Baileys still don't exist as proper characters; they're more like a lecture delivery system, wheeled out of the plot cupboard to tell us about an issue then sent back in again.  (The plot cupboard, incidentally, is that weird one they built in Emily's back room that looks like it goes into Ken's lounge).  In the process the show has managed to accidentally imply that the residents of Coronation Street are really racist; while all the other characters have friends and partners, the Baileys only ever talk to one another or to other black people, as though none of the white characters in Weatherfield want to be seen with them.  Ed was at the protest against the redevelopment, but I don't think he got a single line, and he certainly didn't turn up at any of the meetings.  When James got a boyfriend, it was a black actor employed specifically to play his boyfriend; meanwhile, after an abortive flirtation with Michelle last year, Michael found love with... Grace, another black character imported into the show specifically for that purpose.  Remember how Edison bonded with Ken over their record collections?  When James chatted to Bethany?  When Aggie worked alongside Roy?  Did they all have a falling out?

In fairness, the Baileys did have one non-issue storyline this year, unless you count definitely get a DNA test for any children you may have as an important life lesson.  That was the revelation that baby Tiana wasn't actually a Bailey after all, but was simply a baby Grace borrowed to taunt Michael with.  It was a bonkers twist even if it was yet another variation on Women Who Lose Their Babies Go Insane Very Easily.  Michael was the only one of the family allowed to have any development, mainly because he was the only one who left that awful living room and went and talked to someone else.  Admittedly it was Alina Pop!, so he may as well have stayed at home and had a conversation with that huge sofa for all the use she was, but baby steps.  My wish is that in 2021 the Baileys talk to people they don't share a bathroom with.  And also that Grace gets locked up and is never seen again, but that's probably not going to happen.

Celebrate good times - come on!  This year, Coronation Street reached an amazing milestone, and celebrated with a wonderful episode that brought a smile to the face of every viewer.  No, I'm not talking about the 60th anniversary episode, where they put Yasmeen on an unconvincing roof set and made everyone hang around outside the brewery like a street party in hell.  I'm talking about the 10,000th episode, back in February, where a party bus of unlikely comrades went off into the wilds of Lancashire to scatter Dennis Tanner's ashes.  You might like your anniversary shows to involve fire, explosions, and minor members of the cast getting clubbed about the skull; personally I like a load of women - plus Sean - trapped inside a karaoke bus on the A583 wheeling out old enmities (Rita and Audrey) and making new pals (Nina and everyone).  Honestly, you could make Corrie twelve episodes a week, and so long as the second episode on a Friday involved Gail and Sally getting hammered together, I'd be happy.  

It was a reminder that, in 2020 especially, joy is the best.  Joy is what carries us forward.  You can get grim murders and angsty violence and people skulking in back alleys in every other show on television.  Joy, though; joy is in short supply, and when it puts its mind to it, Corrie can be pure joy that uplifts and thrills.  Now that's the vaccine we all need.

Since it's a week until Christmas, the author is going to start drinking mulled wine tonight and not stop until the 1st of January.  Follow the descent of his liver on Twitter @merseytart.

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