‘With only a day’s gap between the pre-Covid life and the new normal, Weatherfield caught up’
ALITTLE over a week ago, settling down for the familiar treat of Coronation Street I frowned, blinked, then cheered aloud before pausing the show and texting my youngest brother Andrew. We are followers; we have no time for cultural snobs who sneer at Corrie.The saga ofWeatherfield generations, quirky and witty and comic and touching (and sometimes melodramatically bonkers) was good enough for Ian McKellen and Maureen Lipman to take roles, for Prince Charles to do cameos. David Bowie was a fan.
I have watched for 40 of its 60 years: my late brother Mike and I shared a flat in our first jobs and arranged evenings around it before video recorders existed.
Once when he was on a business trip I sent him a telegram: “Alf and Renee have named day. Ogdens not invited”. To which he replied:
“All Barcelona dancing in streets at news”.
It’s part of my life.
This odd year, when other soaps juddered to a halt, Corrie rolled on regardless through spring because ITV had a good number of recordings, and rationed them to three a week instead of the usual five.
The producers had decided early on that they would not deprive eight million fans of a familiar fix, but we feared what would happen when they ran out. There were rumours that in June they filmed a few “distanced” scenes to pad out episodes, without destroying cliffhangers, but we weren’t sure what would happen next. On Friday last we finally saw how the trick is done, the first totally socially distanced-filmed episode. And THAT is what made me blink…
First came a casual remark in Roy’s Rolls cafe about an otter in the canal, an unusual development in very urban Weatherfield, I thought. Then I noticed that the cafe had gone take-out only. Later, without comment, we saw a receptionist in a blue mask.
The focus stayed on the ongoing plots – Shelley King as poor Yasmeen in prison for defending herself against the coercive, controlling Geoff, Adam the lawyer increasingly suspecting Mikey North’s truculent Gary of killing the loan shark Rick.
They carried on too with the youthful rom-com miseries of handsome Seb (Harry Visinoni), stuck living with both his ex-girlfriend Emma and his true love Alina, the escaped nail-bar slave (Ruxandra Porojnicu) who renounced him out of sisterly friendship with Emma.
But the pandemic clues slyly showed that time had moved on: the penny dropped. In a flash, that episode brought the Street residents bang up to date, living at the same stage as most of us, cautiously emerging from lockdown. Of course we never saw them in it. And we never will. It’s like a time machine, and quite a coup.
The BBC’s EastEnders ran out of episodes in June and stopped dead in mid-story. It won’t be back until late August or maybe September.
Radio 4’s Archers just offered “classic” episodes, and then the thin gruel of monologues recorded in actors’ broom-cupboards and back bedrooms, where the characters revealed their not very interesting inner thoughts.
Coronation Street opted for rationing and then this mad timemachine, and it works. There were oddities, of course. Rationing episodes meant that they celebratedVE Day several weeks after the rest of us. But now – seamlessly, elegantly and with only a day’s gap between the old, pre-Covid-19 life and the new normal, the people of Weatherfield simply caught up. They exist now in the present, without fuss and without losing the impetus of the big plots (complete with crucial murder clue and a storming arrival by Paula Wilcox as the long-lost mother of Sally Metcalfe’s husband Tim). I suppose that in the producers’ and writers’ original plans Gary and Geoff would have had their comeuppances some weeks ago, and there would have been more snogging and fighting, but the join hardly shows.
By Wednesday they had even screened what is – as tantalisingly revealed on Twitter videos – “the world’s first socially-distanced stunt”. Mikey North pushed Tina O’Brien’s Sarah to safety thanks to a plastic mannequin in a wig, some nifty camera angles and some careful editing to lose the