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| Picture copyright: Woman and Home magazine |
Anne Marie Scanlon is a
writer and journalist who currently writes a weekly column for The Sunday Independent newspaper. Over the past decade Anne Marie has
contributed to many newspapers and magazines in Ireland, Britain and the United
States including The Evening Herald,
Woman & Home, Prudence and The New York Dog magazine (sadly no
longer with us) as well as working as a broadcast journalist on RTE Radio.
Anne Marie has covered fashion, beauty,
life-style, celeb interviews, gossip, book & theatre reviews as well as
writing regular columns over the years. She is also the author of It’s Not Me… It’s You! (A Girl’s Guide to Dating in Ireland) which was published in
November 2005. In January 2007 Anne
Marie gave birth to her beautiful son, proving that her dating guide works!
Anne Marie has been recommened by novelist Marian Keyes as an
authority on all things Corrie! She has taken up our challenge for a celebrity to write about their love of
Coronation Street. And in return we're donating £10 to her charity of
choice which is
Barnados.
If you'd like to write a celebrity Corrie Blog post for us,
all the details are here.
And now it's over to Anne Marie...
Coronation Street & Me
Let me tell you about depravation – being a child in the
1970s with only ONE television channel.
Oh yes, dear readers, one lousy channel and that channel was RTE (Telly
Eireann as it was dubbed in Father Ted). I still have vivid memories of miserable
Sunday nights when I had to stay quiet for an hour while my mother and Granny
sat glued to The Riordans – a weekly
rural soap. They were both from the
country but I was an urban child and had no interest in the price of heifers,
silage or any of the other farm-related dramas that afflicted Tom and Mary
Riordan.
When I was nine we moved house and gained access to what was
then called ‘piped TV’ (sorry, no idea either).
Suddenly we had four, yes FOUR channels to choose from and better yet,
we could finally watch Coronation Street. Oh my, how different the exotic world of
Weatherfield was from the farms of Leestown, the home of the Riordans. My Granny and I were instant addicts and
would sprint to the living room as soon as we heard the famous theme tune start
at 7.30 on Monday and Wednesday nights.
“There’s that cat again,” Granny would inevitably comment as the famous
feline settled on the roof. I thought it
was quite an insane thing to say, did she not realise the titles were filmed
and not live? You’d never know with my
Granny because if you asked her she’d have said she didn’t hold with Coronation Street at all. She pretended to disapprove of the whole
thing and enjoyed tutting and sucking her lips whenever Elsie Tanner and Bet
Lynch appeared. To me they were (and
still are) the epitome of glamour.
It’s not news to hard core fans like myself that Corrie has
always had strong women characters – Annie Walker, Ena Sharples, Rita, Bet, Elsie
and of course Betty, were mainstays when I started watching and even though
they were all very different they shared the same streak of independent thought
and action. In those dark days Coronation Street was one of the few
places on TV where women were given leading roles and weren’t relegated to
playing the ditz, dolly-bird or long-suffering wife. The other thing about Corrie at that time was
that they sometimes featured Irish characters who were not terrorists or priests,
which was nice because most Irish people aren’t terrorists or priests (and they
weren’t in the 1970s and 1980s either).
My beloved Granny passed away thirty years ago and I now
have a five year old son. My life has
changed beyond all recognition (which is only right over three decades) and
Corrie has changed too. Of course it has, but for long term fans like me, the
great characters, the fabulous writing and the wonderful humour will always
keep us watching, despite some of the plots stretching credulity (Betty owning
the Rovers for thirty years and saying nothing – hardly)
. My five year old is not a fan. Yet. However, he does recognise the theme music and always remarks on the cat
when he sees the credits. Everything
changes while somehow staying the same.
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Other Irish links include barman and chef Ciaran McCarthy who was played by Boyzone’s Keith Duffy.
