Is Corrie now too violent to be on before the watershed?
622 complaints over hit TV soap
IN i ts heyday, anything more violent than a cutting remark from Bet Lynch or a killer look from Ena Sharples would have Street fans reaching for the smelling salts.
But now murder, mayhem and explosions have become run of the mill on the long-running soap – and viewers are not happy about it.
So much so, that the TV watchdog in Britain is investigating Coronation Street for airing ‘harrowing’ scenes before the 9pm watershed after receiving more than 600 complaints. Campaign groups and MPs have also criticised the ‘violent themes’ in the programme. A storyline involving the soap’s villain Pat Phelan has seen his menacing behaviour escalate in the last few months.
At the end of October, a chilling episode saw Phelan – played by Connor McIntyre – force Andy Carver to shoot Vinny Ashford dead, before turning on Carver and killing him as well. Then, in an episode last Friday, he shot dead a third character, Luke Britton, before blowing up his car.
It’s a far cry from the soap that chat show host Michael Parkinson recently lamented was once ‘gen- tle and funny’.
Speaking a few months ago, the veteran broadcaster gave a scathing verdict on the direction the programme had taken, saying the recent storyline was more akin to a ‘horror film than a family show’.
He told Radio Times: ‘I never imagined I would recoil from watching Coronation Street, but the storyline of the kidnapping and torture of Andy and Vinny and their brutal murder by Pat Phelan had little to do with that gentle, funny reminder of life in the North Country I discovered and so admired in the early 1960s.’
Over the last few months, the watchdog has received 622 complaints from viewers involving Phelan’s character and the murder scenes.
Based on these, Ofcom is assessing whether ITV has broken rules on ‘appropriate scheduling’ and pre-watershed violence.
If a broadcaster is found to have breached the rules, it can face a series of sanctions. These can include fines of up to £250,000 (€281,000), being banned from repeating the programme and having to issue a correction or statement.
The violent storylines have not reversed declining viewing figures of the soap, which broadcast here on TV3. In the last year, an average of 6.5million i n the UK watched Coronation Street, which is typically scheduled six times a week. These figures are a long way off its heyday in the 1980s, when it attracted over 20million viewers.
A spokesman for ITV said: ‘Pat Phelan is well established as a villain in a long line of murderous Coronation Street villains, and his evil actions won’t have come as a surprise to viewers.
‘The programme is always careful to limit the violence shown to a minimum to convey the drama and tell the story. We have responded to Ofcom.’