Five Things We Learned From Five Years Of Five Things We Learned From Corrie This Week

In August 2017, Grand High Poobah Of The Blog Glenda messaged me and asked me if I'd mind covering the regular Five Things blog for her that week.  I said sure, and began years of writing a mix of insults about Sean, lustful thoughts about cast members, and increasingly dumbfounded critiques of the storylines in the Nation's Favourite Soap.  But now it's coming to an end, so here's a farewell post to cap it off.

Practice self care.  At some point in your life you have to look out for you.  You have to sit back and look at your life and realise, no, this is not healthy, this is not helping you, you need to stop this.  Remember Billy taking heroin in the pews of his church?  Or David shouting at scallies on playgrounds in the hope they'll beat him up?  That sort of self-destructive behaviour cannot end well.  You need to stop and look at the source of your pain and say "I must stop".

This week, I reached that point with Corrie, that final end point.  I wasn't enjoying it.  I wasn't having fun.  It was yet another week where I had episodes building up on my Virgin box and no real desire to watch them.  I was sat with my partner as we decided what to watch and he said, "shall we get Corrie out the way, then we can watch something entertaining?"  And then I saw the previews and got "Max in a racist grooming gang" and... nope.  If this was any other programme in the world I'd have stopped a long time ago.  But Corrie is clever; it knows that if it feeds you a load of tripe, it has to occasionally chuck in the bit of truffle to give you hope.  You get a load of people being murdered, but they you get Mary's amateur dramatics.  You get the sexual exploitation of a young girl, but you also get Steve and Tim sat in the cab office chatting about nonsense.  You get a small child dying horribly, but you also get Ryan posing in a pair of blue boxer shorts.  

This is a show I've watched, on and off, since I was a child.  My mum and dad settled down for Corrie back when it was on Mondays and Wednesdays with me lying on the carpet watching too.  I have weirdly strong memories of Gail and Brian's house because it was so different to everyone else's.  Renee Roberts dying gave me lifelong roadwork anxieties, and I distinctly remember Sally Seddon getting splashed with water by Kevin Webster.  I remember all that, so I'm officially old.  And the show isn't really interested in me any more.  Even when it hit lows before, when there was Derek's gnome and the Battersbys and Reg flaming Holdsworth in every other episode, I still had hope that it was a momentary lull.  It'd get better.

I don't think that way any more.  This programme is not very good, and rather than it being a lull, it's a downward path.  The storylines have got more and more ridiculous.  There are murderers and perverts and criminals all over the place.  The emergency services are a constant presence.  The Rovers is barely in it any more. I don't like this show and I don't trust that someone's going to take over and make it better.  It's going to stay bad, so I'm checking out.  This is a different Corrie - one I don't want to watch.  If you do, that's great: ITV will love you.  But it's not for me.

Six is too many.  The show moved from five episodes to six not long after I started writing these regularly, and at first the show seemed to cope.  There was Eva and Aidan's disastrous wedding, there was Rita's brain tumour, there was Michelle getting stalked; things were happening and the show was managing to deal with it.  We also got that whizzy extension to the set with the totally wrong tram stop which I am still not over.  It soon became clear, though, that filming this many episodes was going to be a strain.  Multiple units filmed simultaneously, which meant characters vanished for months on end.  The cast swelled and swelled, although nobody seemed to move into the swanky new apartment block they'd built and carried on overfilling the two up two downs in the main street.  

And yet, weirdly, even though there was more time than ever for the show, the amount of actual character in it plummeted.  I've long had a theory that the rot for Corrie started when people stopped ordering drinks in the Rovers.  For decades, Alf, for example, would walk into the pub, and something like this would happen:

ALF: Evening Betty.  Pint of bitter, please.

BETTY: Alright lovey.

Alf looks down the bar; Ken is reading his paper.

ALF: Evening Ken.  Can I get you another?
KEN: That's very good of you, Alf.  I'll have a half of bitter.

Betty returns with Alf's pint.

ALF: Same again for Ken please Betty.

BETTY: Alright lovey.

Then Ken would ask Alf how his day was, and Alf would tell him, and you'd get the meat of the scene.  That doesn't happen any more.  Pay attention and you'll see that most of the time when we cut to the Rovers, people are already sat at their tables or stood at the bar with a drink in their hand.  We've lost that little bit of business.  You could say that it was pointless anyway, especially Betty basically saying the same thing fourteen times an episode.  What it actually did was add character to the programme.  It showed people were friends.  It established what their regular tipple was.  It was... nice.  It added to the sense of community.

Community has largely gone from Corrie now.  Because of the relentless filming schedule, you're only on set when you have a proper plotline.  People mainly hang out with their relatives, because those people also share a house with them, so they can film a whole bunch of scenes at once.  Nobody is simply in the pub, having a pint, when other characters are in there.  Has Tim ever talked to Nicky Tilsley?  Does Yasmeen know Aggie?  Kevin and Sally barely talk any more because they both have their own little plot bubbles that don't intersect; same for Tyrone and Kirk.  People turn up, say their lines, vanish.  Every plotline is IMPORTANT and nobody's just hanging out having a chat.  You get couples who have a meet cute, hook up, then don't appear for three months, at which point they have a crisis that tears them apart while us audience members didn't even know they were still dating.

The other problem with six episodes a week is... that's a lot of telly.  That's three hours of telly.  I watch way too much telly already; three hours of a soap opera is a commitment.  Especially if you, say, go out on a Wednesday night, and you realise you have to watch the next episode on Thursday, or you'll have two on Friday - except there's loads of other good telly on Thursday, so a backlog builds up.  Three lumps of an hour every other night; fortunately I'm not into any other soaps or watching them all would basically be a full-time job.  I'm not exactly a party animal but honestly, who has the time?  

Joy is underrated.  Television should be pleasurable, and sometimes there are people who embody joy.  Emma.  Mary.  The Blessed Evelyn.  Roy.  Nina.  Tracy Barlow, now she's just a bit of a cow rather than being evil.  Tim and Sally.  There are characters who are effortlessly funny and happy no matter what happens.  One of the pleasures of chronicling Corrie over the past five years has been the progress of the Alahans.  When I started, they were a bit of a rag tag family, still recovering from the death of Sunita, still mainly focused on the antics of Sir Devendra.  By 2022, however, they were an absolute ball of happiness, central to the street with their unique energy and pure chemistry.  I could watch Jimmi Harkishin deliver any line in history - once more unto the breach, Bond, James Bond, that's no moon - and he would find a unique and thrilling new angle for it.  Meanwhile, Adam Hussein taking over for Zennon Ditchett proved a game changer for Aadi, as he suddenly blossomed into an adorable nerd with terrible taste in girlfriends.  And we must mention Asha, who is so much more appealing now she's not being lumped with Horror Story Of The Week and is simply allowed to be a lovely queer girl larking about the Street being adorable, and who is portrayed by Tanisha Gorey with exactly the right mix of cynicism and amusement.  I love the Alahans and in a just world there would be an entire episode devoted to them watching lesbian cinema while Aadi ate the good crisps from the bureau and Mary made supportive yet inappropriate comments about scissoring.  (Now bring back Amber, she was ace).

I loved so much about the show over the past five years; mainly the stuff about Mary or Jenny Bradley being astonishingly camp but I'm only human.  It still manages to bring in great characters.  George is a triumph, as is Glenda, and Dee Dee promises so much.  Whenever Corrie embraced its silly side over the past five years I've been so happy.  I loved it when it went daft.  It's a sitcom that's been wrestled into continuing drama form and that is why it's lasted sixty-odd years.  That's its legacy.

Also Imran was ridiculously handsome.  This should never be forgotten.  

The drugs do work.  Obviously the biggest interruption to humanity in the last five years was the Covid pandemic, and Corrie was no different.  It coped surprisingly well; besides VE Day turning up in June and a lot of sudden hairstyle changes you'd never have known it happened.  Which was, in some ways, a problem.  Corrie embraced and also retreated from the pandemic.  Overnight everyone was two metres apart but nobody ever mentioned why.  Suddenly Sally was wandering around in rubber gloves 24/7 and Debbie was turning up in the corner shop in an amazing face scarf but otherwise they all pretended life was going on.  Maria and Gary got married while staying two metres apart at all times which was, on some level, absolutely hilarious; their refusal to kiss in the ceremony would've only been better if they'd celebrated by spraying one another with antibac.  I'm not sure how you cope with a global pandemic on a silly little continuing drama without simultaneously devaluing and over emphasising the perils; the real time to make a drama about a global crisis is when we know how it ends.  

It meant that the sixtieth anniversary storyline, where Coronation Street was due to be demolished for a skyscraper hotel complex, sadly ended up hopelessly fudged.  Some people sold up, some people didn't; a sinkhole was somehow created in David's back yard; there was a weird planning meeting that was sort of dodgy but also not.  Then Ken Barlow pretended to be the Tianenman Square Man and it all became a bit tasteless.  Personally, I'll remember the sixtieth anniversary mainly for that episode earlier in the year where Rita took a ragtag band of characters - aka all the best ones, but also Sean, for some reason - to a layby to chuck Dennis Tanner's ashes all over the tarmac.  That was exactly what I wanted from Corrie, and it still makes me smile.

Breaking up is hard to do.  I wish I could find a way to say goodbye here that wasn't a bit rubbish.  Much like my relationship to Coronation Street itself, I feel like I should shrug and simply say it doesn't work and that's it.  I wish it was some big event that was ending it but it was mainly a realisation that we're just not compatible any more.  So I'll say thank you for the good times.  For Bet and Alec, and Gail, and Sally and Kevin.  For Deirdre and Emily and Norris and Phyllis.  For Jack and Vera and Tyrone and Molly.  For Mike's big cigar and Rita's papers; for the Rovers and for the Kabin.  For so many more fun times and small character moments and general places of entertainment I won't forget and I'll always love.  I'll say thank you for being funny and entertaining and I'll wish you well.  You can be great Corrie, and loads of people love you.  I'm not one of them any more and that's just how things go.

My Twitter handle is @merseytart, though since I'll no longer be talking nonsense about Corrie over there, there's probably no point following me.  Thank you for reading, thank you for being lovely, thank you for everything.

---

---

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