Ena Sharples, queen of the lost soap stars
ELSIE Tanner! How Ena Sharples hated her, with her button-straining cleavage and lax morals. My earliest TV memory is of Elsie and Ena having a slanging match in black and white on the Coronation Street cobbles.
The formidable Mrs Sharples – “Winston Churchill in a hairnet” – was scandalised by magnificent redhead Elsie, who was “no better than she ought to be”. God-fearing Ena would sit in the Rovers snug sipping half pints of milk stout with Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst, tut-tutting over Elsie’s short skirts and over-heated libido.
Ena was a hard nut but as she reminded one opponent on Coronation Street – Battle Axes (ITV, Monday) “you haven’t cracked me”. The only problem with this enjoyable romp down memory lane is that it reminded us British soaps were once much more realistic and likeable. For all their rough edges, these gossip-fuelled kitchen sink dramas were happier and more welcoming places than their modern equivalents. Soap crime rates make Midsomer Murders seem like The Darling Buds Of May.
Vera Duckworth, “Poison” Ivy and Blanche Hunt also featured as battle axes; ITV forgot Red Ida Clough, the bolshy Baldwin’s Casuals shop steward who made life tough for Cockney cowboy Mike.
Blanche 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 that Weatherfield and Walford actually existed. We cared about the likes of Stan and Hilda Ogden, and poor betrayed Cockney sparrer Angie Watts too.
Soap characters aren’t threedimensional any more. They’re 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.
Classic Eastenders ( Drama, daily) gave us the soap’s mighty atom, Peggy Mitchell, or “my little handbrake” as Frank Butcher used to call her.
Barbara Windsor’s Peggy was a breath of fresh air until the writers inevitably chipped away at her credibility. There were ludicrous boyfriends (Harry Slater!), her logic-defying friendship with Fat Pat, and her 2009 transformation into Ma Barker demanding murders. Even Violet Kray didn’t order hits.
Which makes me think of the three maddest soap stories: 1) the Bouncer’s dream episode of Neighbours 2) backwards day on Eastenders, when everyone went into reverse 3) Fallon getting kidnapped by aliens on Dynasty (although if ET had seen her mud-wrestling Sammy Jo, could you blame him?) Discuss...
THERE’S a big buzz about Little Birds ( Sky Atlantic, Tuesday). Juno Temple plays naive American debutante Lucy who is shipped off to Morocco to marry an English aristo. The pastel colours in Tangier are so vivid, the shenanigans so sordid, that the show could have been called Fifty Shades Of Azure. We’ve already seen a bondage murder, urolagnia and explicit sex scenes. In fact, the only person who is virgo intacta here is lovely y Lucy whose drippy husband Hugo Cavendish-smythe (Wills from The Windsors) has no interest in her. Lucy’s arms dealer father
Grant (David Costabile) arranged the marriage to pressure Hugo into selling weapons to creepy, sadistic French secretary/governor Pierre Vaney. Their wedding night was a disaster. But then as Lucy found out, her hubby is far keener on his Egyptian lover.
Little Birds takes many liberties with the thin Anais Nin story (sin is Nin’s thing, not plots). Sophia Al-maria has fleshed it out into a camp 1950s melodrama, with side orders of murder, colonialism, orgies, jazz and multiple perversions. I rather liked Nina Sosanya as libertine nightclub singer Lili von X.
Lucy is more interesting than she at first appears. She may wander about like a tranquilised Doris Day but she’s a dab hand with a pistol and isn’t easily conned. The action is in Tangier but it’s a fair bet that by the end more than one character will have been taken up the Casbah.
What’s become of the Cillit Bang advert man, Barry Scott? Is he furloughed? Despite being fictional he’d be a better celeb than most of those on Celebs Go Virtual Dating ( E4, Monday). Certainly more recognisable. The celebs here are chancers who have been on reality shows like Geordie Shore, Towie and Love Island. So not celebrities at all. The producers seem to think it’s a hoot to have straight people go on dates with bisexual people of the same sex. It actually smacks of desperation. The only ones with talent here are the singer who remotely d dated Pirate Pete Wicks, a and Phil Kerr who writes the sarky voic voiceover script.