Five Things We've Learned In 60 Years Of Corrie

Women rule, ok.  Watch the first episode of Coronation Street (it's on the ITV Hub right now because they don't really need an excuse to show it again).  It opens with three minutes of women talking, and when a man does finally turn up, it's Dennis Tanner getting clipped round the ear by Elsie.  Right there they'd established their brand: Corrie is a show about women on top and the men are supporting players. Sometimes they raise their head above the parapet and become almost important, sometimes almost equal, but it's mainly a programme about the women of Weatherfield.  Run down the list of iconic characters - the ones you can name without needing a surname - and they're pretty much all female.  Ena.  Annie.  Elsie.  Hilda.  Vera.  Ivy.  Deirdre.  Gail.  Audrey.  Hayley.  Carla.  

Go back through that original cast and you have a load of women who are still legends.  Who remembers Harry Hewitt these days, or Frank Barlow, or even Leonard Swindley?  But Annie Walker - now there's a character.  Whether partnered with Jack or not, Annie ran the pub, glowered at the lower elements, and brought class and dignity to the Street.  Ena brought the vinegar, the judgement, the criticism, while Elsie brought the sex.  Women of all types are here - the mother, the wife, the daughter, the worker, the retiree.  

They kept Weatherfield going.  At a time when women were still being told to stay in the home, the Street's businesses were female owned and run - Annie pretended Rovers was a joint operation with Jack, of course, but Florrie ran the Corner Shop on her own, and Ena was caretaker at the Mission.  Meanwhile the factory over the road wasn't belching out smoke and dirty-faced blokes in overalls, but was instead making raincoats, filled with women on sewing machines making their own living.  Even Emily Nugent - sweet, shy, quiet Emily - was introduced to the show running her own baby linen business.  It's carried on to this day; no matter who runs Underworld, there's always a bevy of women on the machines (plus Sean), and the Rovers has always had a landlady in charge, even when it was owned by men.  

Over the years the cast swelled, new characters arrived, and the list of legends grew.  A one-off exotic dancer made a return as a common-law wife - and there's Rita.  A secretary in a pub chatted to a couple of blokes - hi Deirdre.  A young girl gets her legs splashed by a passing car - welcome to the show, Sally.  Always far more interesting than some new fella turning up.  When Corrie moves into a more traditionally masculine world - gangsters, fights, broody men in overcoats hissing threats in back alleys - it very quickly stops being fun.  Would we have been interested in the men of the Street heading to Majorca?  No.  The ladies larking around by the pool, getting chatted up by Spanish waiters and flamenco dancing?  Absolutely, sign me up, please show this episode on a loop in my brain.

Sometimes you get a man in the programme who is important but it's his relationships with women that define him.  Alf Roberts was never as interesting on his own as when he was paired with Audrey.  Len's will they, won't they? with Elsie was a lengthy thread, and his marriage to Rita was fascinating.  And Jack Duckworth lost a lot of his spark once his little swamp duck passed away.  

Today, the show continues to churn out female characters who are just that little bit more interesting than the blokes.  Why were boisterous Gemma and delightful Emma fighting over the dull as mud Chesney?  Nina has been in the programme a little over a year and she already feels like part of the furniture.  The Baileys are, in the main, pretty boring - apart from the vibrant Aggie.  Tracy, Jenny, Abi, Leanne, Yasmeen - these are the ones we tune into watch and admire and love.  As the great philosopher Beyoncé once said: Who runs the world?  Girls!

Stay North, young man.  I mean this in the nicest possible way, but Manchester isn't very interesting.  Newcastle has its bridges, Liverpool has its cathedrals, Edinburgh has its castle... what does Manchester have?  Some warehouses and a big Nando's.  It's a bit embarrassing.  Thank goodness then, for Corrie, which managed to make the city iconic by presenting it as the home of cobbled terraces and the occasional tram crash.  Admittedly most of those same cobbled streets - including Archie Street, the basis for Coronation Street itself - were swept away in slum clearances in the Sixties, but still, it gave the city something to be proud of.  (And we won't mention the fact that Weatherfield is clearly meant to be Salford, which is the city next door to Manchester and a completely different place entirely).  

Having established itself as the Face of Manchester Corrie then spent the next sixty years making sure it presented itself as the greatest place on earth.  Granada TV invested a lot of capital in being From the North and they were going to make sure you never wanted to go anywhere else.  

As such, while Weatherfield may be a borough full of adulterers, murderers, thieves, and general scumbags, Corrie has always been at pains to point out that everywhere else in the world is worse.  Everywhere else in the north is worse.  Liverpool, for example, at the other end of the M62, has churned out a lengthy parade of dodgy blokes, from Jed Stone in the 60s to Eddie Yates in the 70s to the rather more psychopathic Pat Phelan in the 2010s.  Nobody in their right mind goes there.  Meanwhile Leeds and Yorkshire are talked of in hushed tones as some kind of far off land of terrifying orcs, with the Pennines basically being Mount Doom.  Even beauty spots - the Lake District, or the Peak District - are mainly used as backdrops for coach crashes and bus crashes and people falling off cliffs and having to call out the mountain rescue.  Gail and Audrey couldn't go for a countryside power walk without running into thieving gigolo Lewis Archer.  The exception is Blackpool, which the residents make a pilgrimage to every other year; it's a kind of Weatherfield-on-Sea, though only go for a day trip and don't get any ideas about moving there permanently, or you'll be killed off just before you depart like Vera Duckworth.  

If you head south, you'll come back ruined.  Tracy Barlow went to London as a perfectly nice young lady and returned as a demonic she-beast.  Todd Grimshaw did much the same, being a sweet young homosexual until he spent a few years in Sodom-on-Thames and returned to Weatherfield spitting brimstone, and Billy Walker was never the same after a few years Darn Sarf.  When London sends one of its own up North, they're inevitably dodgy as hell, with both Mike and Danny Baldwin being amoral scumbags who would've happily burned the Rovers to the ground if they didn't have a match handy to light their cigar.

Scotland - and I'm using that term deliberately, because Corrie always says "Scotland" as if it's one massive amorphous blob and doesn't have any cities or towns or anything - Scotland is the place to be exiled to.  It's where Peter and Susan went for twenty years before coming back without so much as a Scottish accent, it's where Adam was sent to boarding school, it's where Denise ran to when she wanted to escape from Ken.   Adam is allowed back in the show now because he's a Barlow but it's surprising how many times people use "Scottish" as an insult when they're bellowing at him.  Scotland is the "far away enough to be annoying but close enough that relatives can go up there to visit for a weekend" destination of choice.

If you want to send someone away to disappear for months on end but save them from the dead end of Scotland then Spain is there for you.  Andy McDonald basically runs a halfway house now where he takes in members of his family for months on end when they fancy a break from the telly.  Meanwhile Stella runs a similar service in France for the Battersbys.  Who knows what will happen after Brexit, when people won't have the freedom of movement to vanish to Europe for months on end.  Presumably everyone will emigrate to Anglesey, or maybe a Channel Island.  Or maybe Thailand, because people can't stop going to the Far East these days; we've lost Jason, Sophie and Kate to Asia, while Gail and Eileen discovered themselves out there, and Daisy has recently appeared with a Pattya tan.  Frankly if they'd all stayed in the M postcode they'd be a lot better off.  Maybe not happier, admittedly.

Not everything has to make sense.  If you're reading this, you're a Corrie nerd.  Sorry, that's just the way it is.  But the other 98% of the viewers aren't, so when the show changes something, the public simply accept it - even if it drives us mad.  The producers long ago learned that if you say something with enough confidence, you can get away with almost anything.  This was established right from the start, when the Rovers Return first appeared, and was roughly eight times bigger on the inside than its tiny exterior would indicate.  (Is it a coincidence that the Rovers' trans-dimensional proportions predated the Tardis by three whole years?  Perhaps).  It had a Public, a Snug and a Select, the latter big enough to have its own stage, plus a load of living accommodation out back and a yard.  When the pub burned down in the 80s, it was made a little more realistic on the inside, but the back room is still technically in the middle of Rosamund Street, and the yard extends across the entire back of the pub even though it can't, and there's no room for a kitchen at all, and it acquired a weird flatlet in the 2000s that disappeared again.  The message was clear: don't overthink things, and just enjoy the ride.

To quote Acorn Antiques' fearsome producer Marion Clunes: "We professionals notice.  Joe Public never clocks a darn thing."  Take children's ages, for example.  You'd think being born on television would mean that your birthdate was a fixed point in time, but that's not true at all.  Asha and Aadi are fifteen years old, about to turn sixteen, even though Sunita gave birth to them in 2006.  Mark Redman was born in 1983, but he was in the same class at Weatherfield High as Nicky Tilsley, who was born in 1980.  Peter Barlow was born in 1965, but he joined the Navy in 1978 when he should've been only 13; when he then returned to the show for Susan Barlow's wedding in 1986, he was 21 again.  So much for the Navy maturing you.  And Hope and Jack were born within three months of one another in 2010, even though Hope is a tiny little girl and Jack is six foot tall with a voice so deep it could crack granite.  

Sometimes characters who weren't meant to be permanent join the show full-time, resulting in a significant re-jig of their personal life.  Both Julie and Emma turned up as guest characters then once they became proper cast members found that they were closely related to people on the Street, an amazing coincidence that is in no way realistic.  Ivy Tilsley - then called Ivy "Tyldesley" - started out working in the factory in the early 70s, with a husband at home called Arthur.  Then she appeared in the Rovers with her husband Jack and talked about how she couldn't have children.  But by the time she moved into number 5 she had a husband called Bert and a son called Brian.  That may be a perfectly fine timeline for raunchy Lynne Perrie, but for straightlaced Catholic Ivy it was all a bit much.  Meanwhile, have we ever got to the bottom of whether Mary's mother is alive or dead?  She had a funeral, but then a few months later Mary was chatting to her on the phone.  Perhaps she got better.

Family members can be quietly disposed of when they're no longer needed.  Stan and Hilda had four kids when they first arrived in the show, with the two youngest in care.  They seemingly stayed there forever because by the Seventies the Ogdens only had two kids; somewhere in Greater Manchester there's a children's home with two seventy year old residents patiently waiting for their mum and dad to collect them.  Maybe someday we'll meet the two older brothers Tim used to talk about and who Geoff entirely fails to mention.  Gail initially talked about growing up with a mum and dad, before we discovered flighty Audrey had her out of wedlock and brought her up on her own, while Michelle simply forgot that Ali existed for much of the Noughties and referred to Ryan as her only child.

Of course when Ali and Ryan did return, they looked rather different to when they left.  Corrie treats some characters like Princess Mombi in Return to Oz, changing their heads when necessary to suit the demands of the plot.  We've had two Davids, three Nickys, four Tracys, and eight Amy Barlows; Elle Mulvaney has played her since 2010 but she must still suspect that they could sack her any minute when they decide Amy would be a more interesting character if she was a nine-foot tall blonde glamazon.  Of course, then she could always do a Jane Hazelgrove, who played Sue Clayton in the 80s then returned to the show as Bernie Winter.  It's surprisingly common for actors to reappear in this way - indeed, some regulars initially appeared in smaller parts, with Michael le Vell playing paperboy Neil Grimshaw two years before he turned up as Kevin Webster, Sarah Lancashire playing a nurse before she became the legendary Raquel Wolstenhulme, and Dame Beverly Callard showed up as the wife of one of Brian Tilsley's mates before she became Liz McDonald.  You don't even need to be a regular - Anthony Schaeffer has played an incredible fifteen different parts in the show since 1980.  The point is, everything in Corrie is a lie, and we just have to put up with it.

Sometimes you fall by the wayside.  Look, not everyone can be Rita Fairclough.  Coronation Street has been home to a bushel of legends over the decades, but it's also housed some characters who simply... existed.  While the 60th anniversary celebrations will rightly concentrate on the icons, let's not forget some of those along the way who didn't quite make the grade.  Like the Claytons, who bought number 11 in January 1985, but were so boring they were written out of the show eight months later.  Or Jerry Morton, who filled number 6 with his children - even putting one in a shed out the back because there weren't enough bedrooms - and then disappeared the following year when it became clear the most interesting member of his family was his poisonous ex-wife.

Back in the 60s, Dickie and Audrey Fleming were introduced as the new owners of number 3 in a shameless bid to attract youthful viewers.  They were young and sexy and fun and nobody cared and two years later their contracts weren't renewed.  Similarly, Matt and Charlie Ramsden were introduced as a pair of glamorous professionals at the turn of the millennium - a doctor AND a teacher!  Together! - and they lasted until 2002, leaving barely any trace.  Being famous isn't enough to save you from the chop; Michelle Collins swept into the show as new landlady Stella Price in 2011, but she was incredibly unpopular, and finally limped offscreen in 2014.  

Then there was the Hopkins family, who took over the corner shop in 1974.  Daughter Tricia was nice enough, and parents Nora Batty and that Welsh teacher off Please Sir! were ineffectual, but Granny Hopkins was a swirling tornado of unpleasantness, and the family were written out in 1975 after they grassed up Betty for having her Gordon out of wedlock and passing him to her sister to raise.  Tricia clung on for a year more, but really her major influence on the show was her best mate - one Miss Gail Potter, who came to visit and never left.  

Now and then a resident would suddenly acquire a relative who'd turn up for a while and then get swiftly canned when the producers realised they were awful.  When Hilda Ogden left in 1987, that meant there was a vacancy for a gossipy cleaner at the Rovers, and introducing Vera's mum Amy to fill the role must've seemed like a good idea.  Unfortunately, Amy was vile, and she went off to live with her sister four months after her first appearance, before dying offscreen.  Vera's long-lost dad Joss Shackleton's tenure was even shorter, simply vanishing into thin air after three months.

Lovely Violet Wilson still gets a mention now and then as the mother of Sean's son Dylan; not mentioned is her awful sister Lauren, who bounced around being nasty for six months then went to Spain and stayed there.  Nobody cared.  After Dennis and Linda left the show, Elsie needed companionship, so she took in her niece and nephew Sandra and Bernard Butler.  Not even the fact that Bernard was played by future Rene Artois Gorden Kaye could make this pair interesting, and they soon returned to Saddleworth.  A decade later, Elsie's grandson Martin moved in with her, but he was a saddled with a truly dreadful Brummie accent so he didn't even last until the end of the year.  Here's a bit of advice for anyone taking up a part in the show: really try to make your mark in the first couple of months.  Otherwise you'll be quietly sent off to Ipswich and never seen again.  

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  For a programme to reach sixty years of success, it has to adapt and move with the times.  That means that a person who started watching the show in the 80s has different expectations of what Corrie is to a person who started watching in the 60s or the 2000s.  The world changes, people change.  Hence a lot of grumbling from people - myself included - that the Corrie of 2020 isn't the same.  It's too violent.  It's too morbid.  It's too depressing.  Where are the jokes and the nonsense?  Why aren't there old ladies sitting in the Rovers drinking milk stout?  Why don't they have street parties any more?

There's always been a streak of darkness running through the show.  Do you know who the first person to die in Coronation Street was?  May Hardman, in episode 7; a brain tumour caused her to collapse in her hallway and she passed away alone.  That was on the 30th December 1960 - they didn't even last a month before the Grim Reaper was called in.  Since then, people have carked it with disturbing regularity, in car crashes, under buses, with terrible diseases, dropping a toaster in a bowl of water.  The first suicide attempt was Christine Hardman in 1962, and she would've succeeded if the papers hadn't got wind of it and kicked up a fuss and made them do a hasty rewrite.  The first murder was in 1968, when Elsie Tanner's estranged husband Steve was shoved down some stairs; his murderer turned up two years later, held Minnie Caldwell hostage, then shot himself.  The tram crash in 2010 was preceded by a train falling off the viaduct in the Sixties; the first baby to get kidnapped was in 1962.  Divorce, adultery, abandonment - they're meat and drink to a soap opera and Corrie has returned to the well over and over again.

The show has never been perfect.  It was plagued with low budgets in the Sixties, and nearly axed by Granada in 1967 for being old-fashioned.  In the Seventies it was hit by strikes.  In the Eighties it lost its last few original cast members and struggled to replace them.  In the Nineties it was so boring an axeman had to be brought in to cull the dead wood.  In the 2000s it became hysterical and had to be calmed down.  In the 2010s the hospital set was in the show more than the Kabin.  Over and over the show wanders off track and has to be corrected, but it always comes back. 

The difference between Corrie and every other show is the how.  No matter how huge the show gets it continues to succeed through its own unique charm.  Corrie at its best is the wonder of the everyday, the joy of the banal, the happiness in the tiny touches.  It can do big - it has for decades - but what people remember, what people love, is the small.  It's the characters and the jokes and the keep on keeping on.  It's the sigh and the pull yourself back up.  It's the laugh with your friends over a cup of tea.  It's the absurdity and the glory of everyday life.  It's Hilda's muriel and it's Annie's bingo hall carpet.  It's Jack's plastered glasses and Vera's laugh.  It's Mary's mother and Reg's water bed.  It's Roy's shopping bag, it's Elsie's lippy, it's Bet's earrings, it's Gail's husbands, it's Steve's gurns.  It's Derek's paperclip car, Audrey's Noise, Kevin's moustache, Ena's tongue, Phyllis's blue rinse, Betty's hotpot, Eddie's giggle.  It's Jerry's nose, Emily's goodness, Rita's singing, Deirdre's sexy specs, Tracy's tapes, Sally's conservatory, Todd's kiss, Val's hairdryer, Dev's WAY of speaking, Minnie's cat, Mavis's dithering, Emma's smile.  It's Terry's wickedness, Albert's grumpiness, Hayley's kindness, Richard's black gloves, Stan's vest, Ray's sideburns, Blanche's snark, Liz's skirts, Curly's slicked-back hair, Jim's accent, so it is, Mike's cigar, Angie's pint glass, Alma's turned-up collars, Suzie's cheekiness, Don's leg, Percy's war stories, Carla's big glass of red wine.  It's the Rovers and the Kabin and Roy's Rolls and StreetCars and D&S Alahan's.  It's Ken Barlow, the rudder on the Street, the one constant, Corrie forever.  It's sixty years.  Have a pint in the Rovers and enjoy.

This blog post couldn't have been written without the geniuses at Corriepedia.  Thank you for all your hard work.

The author will be celebrating the 60th anniversary with a bottle of wine.  This is no different to how he spends any other Wednesday, to be fair.  Even though he's gone all misty-eyed here, he'll continue to be a cynical bitch over on Twitter @merseytart.  And here's a reminder of one of Corrie's finest ever moments to finish.

---

---

All original work on Coronation Street Blog is covered by a Creative Commons License