Describe yourself in three fictional Coronation Street characters

There's a game going around on Twitter at the moment where you post pictures of three fictional characters to describe yourself. 

I'm taking the Twitter three-game a step further and asking people to suggest the three Coronation Street characters that would best represent you.

Mine are above - and I'm not saying anything about them. You'll have to make up your own mind about the workings of my personality!

Which three Corrie characters would you choose to describe yourself?

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Mary's Burning Man

I was curious as to whether there actually is a festival called Burning Man, something Mary mentioned recently. It turns out, there is. It started in 1986 when two men decided to build a "man" out of scrap wood, soak it in gasoline and burn it on a beach near San Francisco for the solstice. Since they used gasoline (petrol), it went up like the sun flare but nobody got hurt.

The Burning Man leaped from 8 to 15 to it's current 60 feet tall and the popularity of the event now sees nearly 70,000 people attending. It's now held in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada where a temporary city, Black Rock City, rises up every year and it's a full blown themed festival with a midway and art installations and all sorts. After the event, the temporary city vanishes from the desert without a trace. Read more about it here.

The thing is, when I read the story of that first outing of the eight foot tall effigy, this little detail struck me:

"The next thing we knew, a woman, impetuously, ran at the figure, and we had the urge to stop her, but it was too late. The wind was shunting all the flames to one side, and so she ran up to him and she took him by the hand, and stood there. And I think Jerry still has a souvenir photo, and you see the little hand down in the corner of it, holding his hand."

And do you know, I like to think that maybe that was our Mary! It could have been, you know, in an alternative world where Weatherfield exists and free spirits like Mary Taylor abide. It seems like a Mary sort of thing to do, doesn't it? It's more probable, however, that Mary ended up at the current location in Black Rock Desert where it relocated in the early 1990s because she explained "My dream to drive through to the Grand Canyon, the majesty of Mother Earth at her most inspiring, took a wrong turn coming out of Nevada". That wrong turn probably didn't lead her to the beach in San Francisco but maybe that's only because the writer didn't know about the hand holding of the burning effigy.

Tvor (@tvordlj on Twitter)

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Corrie Flashback to 1983: Fiction and Reality blurs

The Guardian online has reprinted an article from July 28, 1983. A cast member from Coronation Street had been in a spot of bother and the article talks about how many viewers often mistake the character for the actor. While you might think that, nearly 30 years on, people are more savvy than that, it does still happen.

The actor was  Peter Adamson, who played Len Fairclough on Corrie from the very beginning and he'd been cleared of an indecent assault charge this week in 1983.  The writer for the Guarding speculated that among the 16 million regular viewers, there would be some that thought the charges were actually laid against Len himself and what would Rita do?

Then, as now, the private lives of the actors seemed to be on display for all in the media. Pat Phoenix, who played the infamous Elsie Tanner, once said "We live our lives in a goldfish bowl" and they still do. As for viewers, not so very long ago, I used to answer the email sent in via the Corrie.net website and though there weren't many, there were some people that would send in advice or criticism for a particular character and you could tell from the tone of the email that they weren't really talking about advising the writers to change a particular storyline. I recall in particular when the character of Alma Halliwell died of cancer, that the scenes and makeup were so good that there were dozens of viewers who really thought the actor herself was ill and was dying and several thought it was in bad taste for the storyline to reflect on the actor's real life health situation.

Back in the early 1980s, the triangle on screen between Deirdre, Mike and Ken rivetted the nation and some of you may recall the publicity in the news papers and on talk shows. Apparently "Newspapers consulted psychiatrists, marriage counsellors, computers and agony aunts. Even the parson on the Today programme seemed to wonder if Ken and Deirdre were real people."

We know that Deirdre did the "right" thing at the time and stayed with Ken. These days, as we've seen recently, that isn't always the case when a dutiful wife and mother stays with her husband.Thirty years ago, Corrie was still reflecting good upstanding morals. As the end of the Guardian article says, quoting Granada themselves: "Coronation Street is the top TV show partly because it shuns sex and violence. We tread warily."

How things have changed.

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