Soft soaps are a real washout
ELSIE Tanner! With her buttonstraining cleavage, lax morals and a constant fag on, Elsie was a siren for feckless men. And how Ena Sharples hated her. My earliest TV memory is of the two women having a slanging match on the Corrie cobbles.
Ena – “Winston Churchill in a hairnet” – was scandalised by magnificent redhead Elsie, who was “no better than she ought to be”.
She would sit in the Rovers’ snug sipping halves of milk stout with Minnie and Martha, tut-tutting over Elsie’s short skirts and over-active libido. Happy days!
The only problem with Coronation Street: Battleaxes was it reminded us soaps were once much more realistic and likeable.
Rough-edged and gossip-fuelled, they were happier and more welcoming than they are now.
Soap crime rates today make Midsomer Murders seem like The Darling Buds Of May. Vera Duckworth,
Email me at: garry.bushell@ dailystar.co.uk or write c/o Daily Star Sunday, One Canada Square, London E14 5AP
“Poison Ivy” Tilsley and Blanche Hunt also featured. But ITV forgot Red Ida Clough, the bolshy shop steward who made life tough for Cockney cowboy Mike Baldwin.
Blanche, inset, was the last of Corrie’s great comic monsters. “Good looks are a curse,” she told daughter Deirdre. “You and Ken should count yourselves very lucky.” In soap’s golden age you could believe Weatherfield and Walford actually existed.
We cared about the likes of Stan and Hilda Ogden, and poor betrayed Cockney sparrer Angie Watts too. But soap characters aren’t threedimensional or recognisable any more. They are just interchangeable, ill-sketched ciphers there to suffer the latest misery or tedious box-ticking storyline; which is precisely why viewing figures have plummeted like Eva Price’s necklines. Stan Ogden leaving the bath running was more engaging than Geoff Metcalfe’s unlikely transformation into a violent, abusive monster. ITV are flogging the golden goose to death with endless anguish. Ena would have their guts for garters.