The Trib (45 page)

Fáilte Towers
is, indeed, poo-tastic. I think Brian Dowling (who's been quite funny throughout) summed it up nicely when he said: ‘I think the s.h.i.t. [he spelled it out like that] is going to hit the le big fan. It's going to splatter. I am going to have shit on my face. Michelle is going to have shit on her face. Claire is going to be covered in shit, Donna's going to be covered in shit. So is Evelyn. We are all going to be covered in shit' (I'm sure someone in RTÉ is, as we speak, devising a programme called ‘Poo Island' which takes this literally).

Richard Dawkins, the proselytising atheist, author and scientist is presenting a new series
The Genius of Charles Darwin
, and he would have loved
Fáilte Towers
, proving as it does, that intelligent design can't explain everything (‘If there is a God then why does he let
Fáilte Towers
happen?' I might have asked my mother as a troubled child, if my life had been edited by the time-bending editors responsible for
Fáilte Towers
).

Anyway, amidst what is otherwise a very well-organised elucidation of the detail and discovery of Darwin's theory of evolution, Dawkins decides to go into an English secondary school to destroy the faith of some religious teenagers. What Dawkins doesn't seem to grasp that it might be possible to believe in evolution and an almighty deity. So the show finished with some poor teens pummelled into admitting that maybe there might be something in this evolution thing, while adding ‘I'll still say my prayers though,' as if that was something to apologise for.

Now, Dawkins also talks to geologists, biologists, visits the Galapagos Islands, looks for fossils, and clearly explains how Darwin's big idea changed everything. But he can't stop himself demonstrating a total disinterest in other points of view – saying things like ‘no reasonable person could believe otherwise' or ‘evolution is a theory of life on earth far more wonderful and more moving than any religious theory of creation'.

I'll keep watching, on the off-chance Dawkins arm-wrestles God into admitting he doesn't exist, or better still, announces what I'm sure he secretly thinks – ‘I, Richard Dawkins, created the universe. It was wet that Saturday and Mother told me to go to my room and play with my trains ...'

Stuart Carolan and Barry Murphy's romantic comedy
Little White Lie
wasn't quite fully evolved. Which is a shame, because much about it was really cool – the characterisation, the parodies of Irish TV and radio programmes (‘so you found an earlobe in your cornflakes?' says a Joe Duffy-like radio presenter), and some lovely dialogue.

Even the daft setup had potential – a struggling actor (Andrew Scott) pretending to be a psychiatrist to woo a children's television presenter (Elaine Cassidy). But it lacked sexual chemistry, so the will-she-won't-she, will-he-won't-he drama didn't really come off.

It was as if Carolan and Murphy got so involved in creating the detailed little world of their film that they didn't bother colouring in the core relationship.

Still, it was very funny, very watchable, and in its atypical depiction of Dublin and Dubliners, very refreshing. In fact, I'd love to see it expanded out into a fully-fledged drama series where the characters would have more time to develop. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that the budget for such things is wrapped up in about ten years of poo-farming at
Fáilte Towers.

A lifelong fan celebrates his love affair with
Corrie
on its fiftieth birthday.

5 December 2010

I
remember the date, or I think I do, all these years later. On 23 November 1973, a Friday, I arrived home from school to find an enormous aerial attached to the chimney of our house in Kilkenny. In those days, there was no cable TV outside Dublin, so if you wanted BBC and ITV you had to get your hands on one of these metallic monstrosities and point it towards Wales in the hope that it would trap a stray signal on its way from the valleys. For some reason, this always worked better in winter than summer, when reception regularly disappeared into a noisy fuzz on screen.

To add to the occasional woe, Harlech TV and BBC Wales would often break in with the local news and sport from Llandudno. But to a ten-year-old already getting impatient with the nightly entertainment in one-channel land, the aerial was like a bailout to a zombie bank. The television addiction started around about then, as did a lifelong love affair with the Welsh accent. So, too, a few months after that November day, did my relationship with
Coronation Street
.

The affair was more of a slow-burner than love at first sight. My mother watched it regularly, at 7.30 p.m. on Monday and Wednesdays on HTV, and my initial reaction was that if the adults were watching it, it must be rubbish – a reasonable point of view for any child to take, but wrong in this case. Over time, I found myself sneaking surreptitious glances at the television to see what all the fuss was about. By the time Betty Turpin, Emily Bishop, Hilda Ogden, Rita Fairclough, Mavis Riley and Bet Lynch won a Spot The Ball competition to go to Majorca in the early summer of 1974 (and actually went and shot some scenes there) I was hooked.

Three of those people are still in the series, and you always feel that Mavis is on the verge of popping over from her home in the Lake District for a cup of tea, a liquid as important to
Coronation Street
as oil was to Dallas. It's a series that values its old characters. Even when it was under ratings pressure in the 1990s to bring in a raft of younger, better-looking residents, it always treasured its oldies, always found decent storylines for them.

Looked at purely as a working environment, it has clearly been a happy place to earn a living. Ken Barlow (forgive me if I refer to these people by their
Street
names; that's how I know them and their real lives are of no interest to me) has been there since the first episode, fifty years ago this Thursday (9 December). Emily Bishop celebrates her half century in January; Betty Turpin (or Williams as she is now, following
Coronation Street
's practice of making all married female characters take their husbands' names, feminism bedamned) is there forty-one years. Rita Fairclough (now Sullivan after her 1992 marriage to the kindly but fatally haemhorrage-prone Ted) has been around thirty-eight years. So has Deirdre Barlow, daughter of the fantastic Blanche Hunt, who died earlier this year on her holidays in Portugal. She made her first appearance in 1975. Jack Duckworth was there more than thirty-one years before his own recent death, brought about by a tragic combination of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and a broken heart. He was the 115th
Street
character to die.

So when I'm asked why I love
Coronation Street
so much (and I really do love it, with the unshakeable passion of the perpetually smitten), I usually start with the old characters, with the way the show constructs a community around them, celebrates their importance, instills them with the wisdom of years and uses them as an often humorous sounding board for the madness in their midst. Fourteen of those 115 deaths were murders so Ken and Betty and Emily (whose husband Ernest was one of those gunned down) have clearly seen a lot. And yet they manage to keep going, these wise old heads, living their mostly non-eventful lives, keeping a beady eye on proceedings and giving the whole thing an air of reality, even when the more outlandish doings of some of the younger ones have you wondering whether this is the last days of the Roman empire or a working-class street.

The question of
Coronation Street
's ‘realness' comes up from time to time. Fifty years ago, a tightly knit community on a quiet terraced street with a pub on the end was probably a common enough occurrence in England, or at least common enough to make it believeable. Not so now, goes the argument against the
Street
's credibility. Such communities don't exist any longer. Even on terraced streets, people don't know many of their neighbours, still less sleep with them, which seems to be Item No. 1 on the
Corrie
residents' association list of things to do. Nobody works across the street from their homes anymore, like Tyrone and Kevin and some of the girls in the knicker factory. Having a pub on the corner is an alcoholic's dream, not a working-class reality.

So what?
Coronation Street
has never made any serious claim for itself as a reflection of wider English society. The recession has had no effect on its storylines whatsoever. The recent change of government has gone almost entirely unnoticed. There hasn't been a word about the Irish bailout. The show exists mostly inside its own little bubble, and is all the better for it.

Where
Coronation Street
does fall down for many people is on the question of race. When it finally brought in a character from what used to be the colonies (Dev Alahan, from India, in 1999) it gave him a corner shop to run. Regular black characters like Fiona Middleton (now departed) or Cheryl, the stripper turned barmaid, or Lloyd in the taxi firm, are lighter-skinned black people than you normally meet around Manchester. The one exception, Shirley Armitage, who was Curly Watt's girlfriend for a while in the late 1980s, was brought in mainly to be a victim of racism. You get the impression that if Ozwald Boateng turned up on the street, he'd be given a job stitching knickers but no meaningful lines to utter. It's as though the
Street
's producers have concluded or decided that somebody very black might frighten the viewers off. In 2008, that other great soap opera, the United States of America, tried something similar with its president, so
Coronation Street
has set a bit of a trend in that regard.

I suspect that people are making too much of the race thing, however. One reason I like
Coronation Street
is that its producers (and many of its actors, I suspect) are hostile to political correctness and see it as the scourge of creativity. The smoking ban in Britain in recent years was greeted on the
Street
with a veritable army of cigarette-brandishing characters, who seemed to be there for no other reason than to challenge the nanny state.

This distaste for state intrusion into the life of the local community can also be seen in
Coronation Street
's consistently hostile treatment of policemen and women, a subject worth an entire article in itself. Stereotyping being the enemy of political correctness,
Corrie
has gone out of its way to give us characters – like Sean Tully, as camp a gay man as you could find, or Jim McDonald, the drunken, fightin' Irishman – who have traditionally existed in jokes but not so often in reality. The object is not to be offensive but to make the point that people are entitled to think whatever they like, no matter how much it may annoy liberals.

Which brings us nicely back to Ken Barlow. The only character on the
Street
since that first episode fifty years ago, Ken was also the first person I remember noticing in my early months as a fan. Who knows why? I was a bit young for philandering. In those first episodes, Ken was due to go to college, a journey of discovery he hoped would provide a permanent passport away from
Coronation Street
. For Ken, being a socialist and a liberal did not involve living among the working classes. Fifty years later, however, he is still on the
Street
, still unhappy, still railing against the status quo, which these days involves marriage to Deirdre, the worst-dressed woman in England.

Over the years, that discontent has manifested itself in sex, which has become almost as important to
Coronation Street
as tea. As I write, six characters are involved in infidelity or have notions in that direction. I watch now, a forty-seven-year-old fan, and wonder, not entirely disapprovingly: where do they get the energy? This is especially true when seventy-one-year-old Ken (who's had twenty-five girlfriends, including three wives, over the fifty years) is putting it about which, for once, currently, he isn't. Still, you know if you're a regular viewer that it won't be long before some
Guardian
-reading floozy turns his head again. He is, in many ways, one of the great tragic characters of English popular culture – permanently defeated, frustrated and on the verge of an escape that never happens. And yet, despite it all, he retains a certain nobility and an admirable lack of bitterness. He's my favourite character.

Like I said, it's the old ones who get to me, although it's to
Coronation Street
's great credit that it keeps producing wonderful characters, young and middle-aged, as well as old, of whom very very few rely on the aforementioned stereotypes for their success. I'm a bit of a NIMBY when it comes to
Corrie
and am always uneasy when a new character comes to town. Will they be credible? Funny? Able to blend in? They almost always are. Families like the Battersbys, the Harrises and, more recently, the Windasses, arrive like whirlwinds of disruptive energy and over time are civilised into funny, attractive and sympathetic characters.