Television
Roger Lewis
Grand old soap Coronation Street is 60, and so am I. Which of us has worn best?
I bet the programme doesn’t have to get up to urinate throughout the night, which, no matter what the trans lobby may say, is the singular consequence of possessing a prostate. On the other hand, trams don’t fall off the viaduct and land in my lounge room, either.
I used to watch Corrie religiously, but then my faith in Weatherfield ebbed – when Fred Elliott, the preposterously loud butcher, fatally cracked his skull on Audrey’s escritoire; when Hayley vanished, taking her fashionable red coat with her; when Hilda Ogden scarpered to keep house for a soft-spoken doctor in the Lake District. My friend Eve Steele, who played nutcase Anne Malone, was locked in a fridge at Bettabuys supermarket in 1998 and may still be there.
When the show introduced younger characters, who went in for arson, depression, terminal illness and what have you, I couldn’t be bothered.
Nevertheless, a batch of anniversary documentaries reeled off interesting statistics: Coronation Street has involved 12 suicides, 24 murders and 57 births, including one in the back of a taxi and three in the ale bar of the Rovers Return.
Of the 131 weddings, 36 were bigamous or else the bride or groom got jilted at the altar. The Rovers has employed 66 barmaids, and Rita has received 15 proposals of marriage. The factory has burned down five times. Three cars have plunged into the canal. There have been 26 charabanc trips to Blackpool. Data abounded in A Very Royal
Christmas. Her Majesty signs her 750 Christmas cards in August, when there is nothing else to do at Balmoral. At Sandringham, there are 52 bedrooms and the place is run by 200 staff, who over the festive season serve 1,200 mince pies. There may be nine corgis underfoot.
Invitees will have five costume changes – breakfast attire, church gear, afternoon frocks, evening gowns and, in between times, what’s called ‘scruff order’, ie there’s no official need to wear a tie. Making everything worse is the way a bagpiper marches round the dinner table.
‘They tuck into the finest food,’ we were told, over loops of stock footage. ‘They know how to relax. They know how to enjoy themselves.’
Is there a more dismal breed on earth than the royal commentator? Because at best they are only ever seemingly in the know. It’s all conjecture. Yet here they were, at it again, the same crew as always: Richard Kay, Lady Colin Campbell, Dickie Arbiter and Paul Burrell.
They smirk and blink in embarrassment, as if they know full well they are talking bollocks. This programme was a glimpse of the hell of the afterdinner circuit or cruise-ship lecturing.
As an insomniac, I watch odd things at odd hours – eg Alan Yentob having to put on a serious face when Tracey Emin told him she’d legally married a rock in her French garden. And what I do enjoy coming across are period publicinformation films, like the one where Bernard Cribbins suggested it’s a bad idea to poke a faulty toaster with a metal-handled knife.
Another one, Sea Dreams, about Torquay, ‘the perfect holiday destination’, was
narrated by Johnny Morris. I remember Johnny Morris. He used to dress up as a zookeeper; chimps would knock his hat off and lemurs shot up his trousers.
‘There are still real fishermen around here, you know,’ said Johnny unconvincingly about the Devon resort. What a terrible place it looked – dirty sand, a brown sea, drooping pine trees and dead ferns. There were fat women in bathing caps and self-conscious couples canoodling in a park, next to hopeless tulips and blighted cherry blossom. A cheerful orchestra played in the background.
It was evident from this documentary why, at the end of the Sixties, everyone packed their bags as soon as possible for the Balearics. Yet there was a kind of mad, desperate charm in the way Johnny’s script tried to insist the English Riviera was superior to anyone else’s Riviera. Sea Dreams put me in mind of Carry On Abroad or Carry On Camping, where the message is that what the British like best are, as Betjeman said, sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea and plenty of cold rain.
One of my favourite series is Walking Britain’s Lost Railways, which has added new episodes. Rob Bell follows ripped-up lines in the Highlands, the Cotswolds and across Dartmoor to Ilfracombe. I relish seeing the overgrown ravines and abandoned viaducts, covered in moss. The Victorian engineering is magnificent – the tunnels and escarpments. Instead of wasting billions on HS2, the Government should reinstate the railways destroyed by Beeching.
But why does everything I love about our islands inevitably fall to the wreckers – architectural gems, woodland, ways of life?