I long to be Pam Ewing
When legendary TV soap opera Dallas ruled the small screen, I coveted the looks of Sue Ellen Ewing, JR’s trophy wife with the trembling bottom lip. These days it’s the widow Pamela Ewing I long to be, when she woke up one morning and walked into the bathroom to find her husband Bobby in the shower.
This seemingly mundane domestic scene caused viewer outrage because the audience was asked to believe that the entire ninth season of the show had been nothing but a bad dream.
Bobby had been run over and killed by a speeding car, viewers had mourned his death, and a whole lot of weird water had flowed under the bridge. With viewer ratings plummeting faster than a Birkenhead sink hole, the producers of
Dallas wanted to take the whole thing back and pretend the accident, and everything in its sorry wake, had never happened.
Those horrified by Brexit and the election of Trump may find themselves coveting the Widow Ewing experience of waking up one morning to find that those shock horrors had never happened. Perhaps UK and US voters hadn’t lost the plot and been algorithm-ed and Cambridge Analytica manipulated off track, and the world still had a semblance of sanity and stability to it.
Countries were still happily dosey-doing with old familiar trading partners without fear but some favour, and there were no unexpected nasty knock-on sanctions breaking up setpiece quadrilles and square dances.
But longing for the good old days, which were actually quite bad but Disney Fantasy happy land in retrospect, doesn’t get you very far down the lost track. Democracy is dying, chaos theory increasingly rules and is ruled by He-Men authoritarianists in charge of sorting the world’s problems out as the credentials of the Fourth Estate are called into question.
In the near future, there may be no journalists left to do the business of speaking truth to power, or even recording world events. History will become propaganda in the hands of the victors as the ice melts, the oceans rise and the far-sighted 1 per cent retreat to their safe sweat spots to wait it out as the masses perish and the earth is made clean for them again.
Pardon me for sounding like a trailer for Steven Spielberg’s next apocalyptic movie. Normal transmission will be resumed in the next paragraph as I take it back to another soap that even predates Dallas.
Kiwi Coro fans will have to fasten their safety belts because they’re in for a bumpy night. Surviving members of this remote but resilient tribe have been asked to absorb 18 months of
Coronation Street viewing.
In one go, fans will have all the births, deaths and marriages, murders, muck and mayhem condensed into a two-hour show to almost get them up to speed with where the soap’s at now on the other side of the world.
Such indecent haste applied to sacred scripts will surely affect the subtle circadian rhythm of plot and characterisation, causing a nasty time warp. Ancient actors’ names like Ken Barlow will be turned backwards in on themselves to become Nek Wolrab, The Snug (at the Rovers Return) will become The Guns, the centre will not hold, it will all fall apart and Albert Tatlock will be blasted back from the past to rematerialise, wearing blue eyeshadow and singing Skyfall.
Speed kills and fans should be able to slowly watch a box set option to catch up quietly in their own time. Binge-watching may be the next best thing to a Widow Ewing dream experience creating plot loss and a blurring of reality. With the right dosage, fans should catch up by the winter of 2020.