Coronation Street

Anyone catch the BBC Four episode tonight? Well I only saw the last 10 mins (I did set the video and I did leave it on BBC Four this morning but all I got was a blank screen! ) anyway I thought it was quite good, very old style, especially with the bit in the Stateley hall where Mr Walker and Stan Ogden run out for the free beer was very funny.

Can we have more please?

There's nowt so queer as Todd's tale

Coronation Street is fostering homophobia among its viewers

Roy Hattersley
Monday June 7, 2004
The Guardian

For the first time in 40 years, I feel obliged to take Coronation Street seriously. I have followed the fortunes of its residents - admittedly with diminishing enthusiasm - since Ena Sharples was caretaker of the Mission Hall and Jack Walker landlord of the Rover's Return. Until now the idea that the soap opera might have social significance never entered my head. I thought of it as northern working-class life reflected in a benign distorting mirror. The fairytale quality was part of its charm.
Early episodes consciously avoided reality. They were set in the only northern town which was not home to even one family of Commonwealth immigrants. Lord Bernstein, the true begetter of Granada Television, was worried about how the communities which Coronation Street caricatured would react to West Indians drinking in their local. Faced with a choice between objectionable truth and acceptable invention, he decided that it was best to keep Weatherfield white.

Britain has moved on since then and Coronation Street is now multiracial, even though its Indians are stereotype shopkeepers and lady lawyers. But Weatherfield is not free from prejudice. The storyliners have made one character, Todd, gay. And the rest of the dramatis personae - with the belated exception of his mother - treat him like a leper. The plot remains an obvious fantasy. But I wonder how many of the programme's 18 million viewers see Todd's treatment as a vindication of their irrational antagonism. "Normal people all feel that way. Haven't you seen Coronation Street?"

To be fair to the script writers, they have made Todd behave in a way which entitled his erstwhile friends and neighbours to complain about his conduct. First he was reluctant to acknowledge his homosexuality. In an earlier episode, there was a "gay kiss" - disreputably advertised as a rating-boosting sensation. But he treated the revelation of his inclination like the symptom of an infection that could be cured. While he was coming to terms with his emotions, his girlfriend became pregnant. They planned to marry and lived together. Then Todd faced up to the truth. As well as moving in, he came out.

Had the consequent fury been a reaction to the pregnant teenager's distress, Coronation Street would be guilty of nothing worse than Mills & Boon style melodrama. But much of the anger was directed towards Todd's homosexuality itself. His brother refused to sleep in the same bedroom. The half-brother of his bereft (though not deserted) girlfriend painted obscenities on his door. The girl herself responded to the idea of a patched-up relationship with the old joke about his hitting her with his handbag. Her mother proposed an HIV test. Aids is still regarded as the gay plague in Weatherfield.

Todd's occasional gay lover possessed all the vices that the prejudiced associate with homosexual men. He was devious, manipulative and selfish. Worse, he gloried in a predatory promiscuity, a universally deplorable characteristic which television drama glamorises in heterosexuals but deplores in gays. When Todd tried to end their relationship, he threatened to see what he could find in Canal Street - according to the script, a place in Manchester where gays congregate.

Although the past six weeks of Coronation Street must have increased anti-gay prejudice among the soap-watching classes, I am not sure how loudly we should complain about it. No balanced person objects to the Merchant of Venice on the grounds of its undoubted anti-semitism. We do not worry about Othello creating the misconception that Moors always strangle their wives. The comparison is not as far fetched as it seems - unless you believe that the encouragement of irrational hatred is acceptable if it is the work of genius or that the problem is the audience not the play.

Works of genius are likely to be watched by a less impressionable audience than is attracted to Coronation Street. But, as a still regular viewer, I am reluctant to believe that all of us who drink vicariously in the Rover's Return are as boneheaded as Kirk, the regulation idiot who has appeared in different guises since the series began. The complaint against Coronation Street is that it has suddenly lurched into social realism. Nobody expects to sit next to Shylock on the bus. Very clearly we are supposed to believe that Todd's story could be true.

Perhaps it could. But that does not make it typical. So it does not entitle homophobes to think that their prejudice is a normal emotion and that they need not feel guilty or stifle its expression. Conscience is always calmed by the discovery that our sins are not unique. It is as often stimulated by reason as by virtue. Coronation Street is in desperate need of a sensible character who says, in a matter of fact sort of way: "There is nothing intrinsically wrong with being gay."

Tonights episoder were bloody superb.

Beautifully done.

I enjoyed tonights very well, good from beginning to end, the only thing I didn't like was the announcer at the end of the first episode, it ruined what was a quiet moving scene.

Liked the bits with Leanne and the bar that was Corrie comedy.

For all the whinging in many of my previous posts...

...I'm warming to Bradley Walsh.

Not sure about Mrs Baldwin yet though...