All hail to Corrie’s bubble permed battleaxes
ThE actress Liz Dawn died this week , and her passing snaps shut the last brass clasp on the end of an era. for 34 years she had played the character of Vera Duckworth in Coronation Street, one of the last in a glorious cavalcade of brash, strong female characters who dominated the ITV soap throughout its earlier years.
hilda Ogden, Ena Sharples, Annie Walker, Emily Bishop, Betty T urpin, Elsie T anner, Bet Lynch, Phyllis P earce, Blanche hunt and Deirdre Barlow — these are names that would be embroidered in gold on my marching banners, these are the women whose bubble perms and preposterous earrings should be carved with pride at the top of any Corrie totem pole.
from Ena, who looked like W inston Churchill in a hair -net, through to Phyllis with her kippered voice, and Blanche, who really did make grown men blanch with one swivel of a beady eye, they were all magnificent creatures.
Today’s milksop soap stars can only shrivel into whiny inconsequence in the shadow of these great matriarchs. They just don’t make them like V era and the gang any more.
Vera Duckworth actually stopped appearing regularly on screen in 2008, when Miss Dawn’s ill health forced her out of the show. This was a blow. No longer would she stomp past Alf ’s Mini Market in one of her appliqued jumpers, ready for a fight with anyone.
She once told Bet L ynch that she had ‘no more morals than a cat’s behind’ (censored version) and she always worried about being seen as common.
‘With a loft full of pigeons and a V auxhall Nova, who could think that we were common?’ her husband Jack (Bill T armey) reassured her. he called V era ‘my little blowfly,’ while she once called him ‘a bone idle, tight-fisted pig’ when he gave her a nightie from the charity shop for Christmas.
Vintage Coronation Street, of course, but no one would be laughing at that now.
NOWADAyS,it is against the law to mock the feckless, quite possibly a hate crime to suggest that if underclass Jack got up off his backside, he could have done better.
Indeed, the absence of festive largesse and gifts for downtrodden Vera would not be a cause of mirth and hilarity, but a reason for a harrowing K en Loach- style Christmas plotline spread over three dreary weeks and ending in a stabbing because of austerity cuts.
Even if life, as the Duckworths sometimes observed, could be ‘as tough as a dead dog’s head’, things were never that bad.
Although she was V era right down to the tips of her orange nail polish, Liz Dawn never had any professional acting training . She was the daughter of factory workers who worked in a factory herself.
She sometimes sang in Northern clubs, where she was spotted by a talent scout. Someone took a chance on Dawn ’s raspy energy , her salty presence and her ability to curl and uncurl her lip like a malevolent camel.
I’m so glad they did, even though it is hard to imagine the same thing happening today to such an unknown oddball. The only way you can break into acting now without a drama school back - ground is if you went to Eton, modelled for Dior, are the offspring of Jude Law , once dated P rince harry or all of the above.
yet these Corrie women had something about them onscreen that was irreplaceable; a true grit and a weathered sense of having lived a real life. Of suffering but surviving.
Anne Kirkbride — who died in 2015 — played Deirdre Barlow for 42 years and her passing left another chasm at the core of the sh ow. Smoking her fags, taunting Ken, making her signature dish of stuffed marrow, she was unmissable.
Rita Sullivan (played by Barbara Knox, who is 83 tomorrow , happy Birthday!) is the last woman standing on the Coronation Street cobbles, the unlikeliest newspaper shop owner in the Greater Manchester area.
RITA
sells copies of the Weatherfield Gazette and sherbet dabs with a regal air and a fastidiously maintained pompadour worthy of Marie Antoinette.
One sometimes wonders if Barbara’s exalted, real-life position as Coronation Street royalty sometimes smokes into her on- screen persona, though Rita is nothing but dignified.
however, recent scenes have found her ‘confused’ at a party and now it seems as though she has a brain tumour. I don ’t think I can bear to watch that decline, but then I haven’t been able to watch the soap ’s general decline over recent years either.
Now that all the great Coronation Street battleaxes have gone forever, vanished like bowls of Betty’s hotpot on a cold night in the Rovers Return, Corrie is a much poorer place.
how I miss these tough Northern women with their acid tongues and terrified husbands, their pinnies and their rollers. Not to mention their epic sense of comic timing and those killer lines, delivered with relish.
The new generation just can ’t compare to their baroque charms, while the current storylines fail to engage. Apparently, a tearaway teenage character is to collapse after smoking the lethal drug spice.
you what, lovey? Ena or Bet or Elsie or Blanche would have sorted out that nonsense in five minutes flat.