Bloggers Stevie and Sophie travelled to
Manchester last week to watch a bunch of upcoming Corrie episodes and interview
some of the stars about what lies in store for their characters. They also met
new Producer Iain MacLeod and he gave them an insight into his plans for his
tenure on the cobbles.
Iain was quick to assure viewers and fans that they wouldn’t see an immediate change from the tone of storylines under his predecessor Kate Oates, but that as a lifelong Corrie fan himself, he had his own plans for the nation’s favourite soap:
Iain was quick to assure viewers and fans that they wouldn’t see an immediate change from the tone of storylines under his predecessor Kate Oates, but that as a lifelong Corrie fan himself, he had his own plans for the nation’s favourite soap:
So what are your plans for the Street?
As we’ve seen in the episodes we've just
watched, the show is at its best when it’s got comedy in it, low-key,
heartbreaking, poignant stuff like the Daniel and Sinead story, some high drama
and action-packed sequences – I think that’s a really good microcosm of what
Corrie needs to be. It’s all about balance. My background with Corrie is that I
like all the funny stuff, but equally I worked on the tram crash, Tyrone’s
domestic abuse, Carla’s rape, Peter’s alcoholism, so my preferences are broad
and I think that is reflected in the audience really. You can’t please all of
the people all of the time, but Corrie’s been very good, since it was conceived
at pleasing most of the people most of the time. I’m hoping we can give
everybody, under my tenure, a little or a lot of what they like.
Which characters did you want to work with
as soon as you got started?
I can say this now the cast have left the
room without risk of offending them! When I came back onto the show it was like
going into the attic of your house and finding a box of toys that you forgot
you had and thinking “Oh my god I’ve got Ken Barlow and Rita!” – again my
preferences are quite broad, I like historical characters but I think we’ve got
a really talented younger cast as well.
I’m a very story-driven guy, my background
is in storylining and the way I run things is if the writers have got a
brilliant story I don’t really mind who it’s for if it’s good and it’s engaging
and keeps me interested then I will tell it. I’ve never been somebody that
pinpoints favourite characters and tries to mould the show around them. Since
arriving the story conferences have been brilliant – brimming with great ideas
for a whole range of characters and age ranges.
We’ve got a BIG story for Amy Barlow coming
up.
Kate (Oates) had a lot of criticism for too
many dark storylines. How did you feel watching as a viewer back then and will
viewers notice a significant change from her time to you taking over?
Kate’s a friend of mine and she’s
extraordinarily talented and a great story teller. In her time on this show she
told some massive, really socially important stories that changed people’s
lives. That’s not the main reason people tune into Coronation Street but it
shouldn’t be sniffed at. The viewing figures speak for themselves, a lot of
what she did was challenging but it was massively successful in terms of
audience reaction and the social responsibility element of what we do.
Since very early in its life Corrie has
always done big “dark” stories, since the early sixties it's visited the darker
corners of human existence. I’m a fan of the show first and foremost and
something of a student of the show so I’ve thought about this. They dealt with
suicide in 1963 for example, Val Barlow was kidnapped and held hostage by a
convicted sex offender who used children as leverage to try and get his way
with her. They did their first train crash in 1967. Into the seventies Deirdre
was sexually assaulted when she was with Ray Langton. So there’s a risk that we
look back with this nostalgic view that it's always just been people whittering
over the garden fence when in fact it’s always been quite challenging really.
The key is to achieve balance. When we do go into those darker areas we will
give fans of comedy something to latch on to as well. But I wouldn’t say Kate’s
stories we too dark at all.
I don’t think people will see a sea-change
in the tone of the show when my name appears on the end of the credits. I am
the custodian of Corrie’s DNA and tone and I don’t intend to do anything
radically different but I will focus on balancing the dark stuff with lighter
stuff and comedy, which is what people first fell in love with about Corrie.
Including myself.
What can you tell us about Christmas?
The seeds of the biggest stories for
Christmas are in the episodes you’ve just watched (Stevie and Sophie watched
all the episodes for the week commencing 8th October – and they are
GREAT). I want it to be a Christmassy Christmas. Obviously there’s a history in
soap of trying to do the Angie and Den (Eastenders) Christmas where it’s all
acrimony and divorce papers and vitriol. That’s not really my preference as you
try and digest your stuffing balls and sprouts. You need it to be warm and
lighthearted and reek of Christmas. It will have some heartbreaking stories
within that, and a big shock at the end. Hopefully a surprising payoff to some
of the stories viewers will see next week.
In terms of comedy, which characters amuse
you the most and which would you like to develop?
We’ve got so many! I could watch Mary
Taylor til the cows come home. Kate Ford is brilliant at being that crazy,
pillar to post emotional mess of Tracy Barlow, particularly when paired with
Steve. Dev is another favourite of mine in terms of his eccentricity and his
waistcoats. Rita is also capable of a comic turn particularly when she’s paired
with the formidable Malcolm Hebden. Nobody in the show can’t do it. That’s one
of the things I like most about Corrie.
There’s some really funny stuff coming up
with Ken Barlow.
Will anybody be leaving or “making space”
for any new characters?
I don’t tend to subscribe to the producer
cull. Over the years on Corrie there have been producers who on day three of
their tenure have been in the papers with a photo-shopped picture of them as
the Grim Reaper alongside a list of people they are planning to kill. That’s
never been my style. As I said I’m quite story-driven so there will be
characters that go. But I haven’t got a hit list.
As a fan are there any characters you’d
like to bring back?
This is a tricky one. All my favourite
characters are still in Corrie. All the ones that might have given me a little
frisson of excitement are all dead. I’d have liked to have had a go on Pat
Phelan for a bit!
On Emmerdale you made quite a few
“experimental” episodes. Will you do the same on Corrie?
By experimental you mean weird. I’m sure
the channel would get behind anything we wanted to do. But my gut feeling is
that Corrie’s not the right place to do that. I describe it like this – if
Corrie wrote the original melody for soap, it’s alright for the other soaps to
riff on that and go a bit jazzy, but as soon as the person playing the bass
melody starts to wander of and go a bit weird then the whole ensemble falls to
pieces. Which is a massively strained metaphor! But what I’m trying to say is
that Corrie originated this genre and I think we have to stay true to that DNA.
That doesn’t mean being conservative, we can still push boundaries, but we won’t
be doing flashbacks or hallucinatory excursions into people’s mental inner
landscape. Corrie needs to keep one foot on the ground and remember the show
that Tony Warren designed.
Did you feel nervous about taking over from
Kate?
I’ve done it before! No not really, I think
it’s exciting. Corrie has such history, it’s a show that I’ve loved for decades,
it’s where I cut my TV teeth. It’s a dream come true really. It may come to be
scary as the months roll by!
Kate’s now at Eastenders…
Yes I sent her a text saying “the gloves
are off!” – there’s always been a healthy rivalry between soaps, arguably more
between Corrie and Eastenders. But we plough our own furrow. I don’t see the
shows as being particularly similar in terms of their style and the types of
story they tell. So I don’t think there’s too much overlap. There’s room in
people’s lives for both! And there will be a bit of friendly banter between me
and Kate. Her credits for Corrie will finish on screen about three weeks
before Christmas.
What are the first scenes that you worked
on?
It’s a mixed bag working on some of the
stories I’ve inherited from Kate, building up to the big Christmas day
extravaganza. There’ll be some romance, some comedy, there’s a brilliantly
comedic episode built around a school nativity. I wanted to show as much of the
broad church of Coronation Street as I could.
Are you hoping to mould Sinead’s storyline
into something that raises awareness of her condition, like Coronation Street
has done with other issues?
To an extent yes. But you focus on the
social responsibility angle over the story at your peril. First and foremost it
needs to be about those two young people facing the hardest challenge of their
life. But we all want good drama karma so at the end of it all I do want to
impart some positivity into the world via that story. We’ve got another story
coming up next year that I think would broadly fall into the socially responsible
storytelling bracket. But it started as a story about a character and then
developed.
First and foremost we are storytellers and
performers and writers and we want to entertain people.
@StevieDawson
More on next week's episodes of Coronation Street here.
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