The Guardian view on Coronation Street: more than just a soap
In the Coronation Street writers’ room at Granada Studios, a magnificent black and white photograph of Ena Sharples used to adorn the wall. Wearing her signature hairnet, the legendary denizen of the Rovers Return snug is looking out at grimy 1960s Manchester. According to the onetime scriptwriter, Frank Cotterell Boyce, someone wrote a caption for it: “When I was a lass there was Coronation St, Inkerman Street, the Red Rec. And the rest of the world was all talk.”
Coronation Street, which turned 60 this week, has always been parochial in the best sense of the word. The fictional northern town of Weatherfield is a community unto itself, and storylines seldom stray beyond its borders into real-life Manchester. Instead, the myriad crises and dilemmas posed by changing times come to the street. Against the familiar backdrop of terraced houses, the corner shop and the Rovers, they have all been dealt with, one way or another. However complicated and unpredictable life is, in Weatherfield almost anything can be sorted out over a cup of tea, a pint or, in Ken Barlow’s case, a half.
As British soaps have become a kind of clearing house for headline issues of the day, the challenges have come thick and fast. Over its six decades the show has dealt with subjects ranging from teenage pregnancy to assisted dying. The sensitive treatment of the story of Hayley Cropper, the first transgender character in a British soap opera, was an award-winning triumph. Her moving relationship with Roy, the owner of the local cafe, came to exemplify an essential Corrie truth for all couples: loving and bickering go hand in hand.
The show’s warm, communitarian take has always been a bit too cosy for some. As Ena passed moral judgment on her neighbours in the Rovers, and university-educated Ken rowed with his dad, the programme was criticised as an overly nostalgic take on working-class life. In the early 90s, William Rees-Mogg, the chair of the Broadcasting Standards Council, attacked the low representation of ethnic minorities on the programme at the time. And the arrival of EastEnders – brassier and faster paced – forced Corrie to up the ante when it came to drama, leading to sometimes outlandish plotlines. “Tram Crash Week”, a hyped-up series of episodes coinciding with the show’s 50th anniversary, took Corrie too far beyond its gentle comfort zone for some.
The show’s best notes are generally played in the minor key. And many of the most lyrical, tender and funny moments have belonged to the best roster of female characters in the history of British TV. Ena, Elsie Tanner, Hilda Ogden, Bet Lynch, Deirdre Barlow, Vera Duckworth, Audrey Roberts, Blanche Hunt – all could expertly deliver the cutting one-liner, bringing an adversary down to size; but all were essentially warm-hearted and to be relied on in a crisis. This spiky, humorous sense of local solidarity is in the DNA of the programme. It is Weatherfield’s version of “northernness” – bluff but warm, neighbourly and determined to stand up for itself. In one of this week’s anniversary episodes, the local shop owner Rita Tanner confronts a sharp-suited property developer, whose plans are threatening the street. “I’ve stood behind that counter for 30 years or more,” she tells him. “And I’ll be standing behind it when you’re long gone.” As Britain’s most distinguished soap enters its seventh decade, that’s reassuring to hear.