Happy 60th Birthday Coronation Street — the soap that refuses to take itself too seriously
Happy 60th #Happy60th
Back in the early 90s, it was an open secret at ITV that the biggest challenge schedulers faced was finding a comedy to fill the half-hour slot to follow Coronation Street in the evening. The problem? Nobody actually paid to be funny could make the nation laugh like Reg Holdsworth, manager of supermarket BettaBuy and self-appointed saviour of Weatherfield’s women.
“Come on ladies, grasp it firmly, it’s a horn of plenty!” trilled actor Ken Morley on one memorable occasion, raising his eyebrows and moistening his lips in encouragement. Fortunately, he happened to be on a carnival float at the time.
This all changed when he fell in love with shelf stacker Maureen (Sherrie Hewson). Before long, they found themselves canoodling on a waterbed in Reg’s flat on the very same afternoon that Derek Wilton decided to drill a hole in the ceiling below. Corrie’s old fans can still hear the shrieking.
Reg takes his place in a long line of clowns to have lit up the cobbles with his antics, joining ne’er do wells like Jack Duckworth and Eddie Yates, nice but naive dreamers like Curly Watts and Kirk Sutherland, and would-be seducers like Fred Gee, the veteran barman convinced his new wig would pass over the heads of his Rovers regulars.
Amidst the soap’s 60-year rollercoaster of drama, scandal, fires, robberies, betrayals and even murders, these feckless men have been integral in highlighting Corrie’s two great constants: community and comedy.
It helps that throughout those six decades, they have been thoroughly out-gunned by the Street’s force of strong women, with writers often giving the show’s very best put-downs to its long line of battleaxes. This stretches from Ena Sharples – “There’s some very peculiar people in this street” – all the way to current-day Evelyn Plummer – “Between you and me, I’ve seen more life in a mint imperial” – via Deirdre’s indomitable mother Blanche Hunt, and her all-seeing eye. “Skirt no bigger than a belt, too much eye liner and roots as dark as her soul,” was her swift verdict on a friend of her daughter’s.
“Are they bottles of olive oil disguised as Merlot?” she asked her alcoholic step-grandson Peter, before going on to offend with every breath when she accompanied him to his AA meeting. Why did she even go along to what he warned would be “loads of people sat round in a circle talking about their problems”?
“Anything’s got to be better than Loose Women,” she replied.
While these wonderful women stand alone and proud, Corrie has also played host to many a formidable double act. While all marriages and friendships on the Street suffer their share of ups and downs, the underlying affection has been consistent, the humour never far away.
Remember Hilda and Stanley’s second honeymoon, when Hilda pushed the boat out and wore some makeup for the occasion? “What’s that lipstick taste of?” he asked, after he kissed her. “Woman, Stanley, woman!” was her enduring epithet to long-term love.
Just a few doors down, Vera and Jack Duckworth were as furious in their loyal love for each other as they were, simply, furious. It was a testament to their union how quickly they recovered from Jack’s attempt to go out on a blind date with another woman. Of course, Vera got wind of his secret plan, and when Jack turned up to the Rovers – where else? – for his romantic rendezvous, it was an all-too-familiar glamorous blonde waiting to greet him. More shrieking.
Bet and Alec Gilroy could match each other line for line both in humour and in pain, just as Roy and Hayley Cropper laced their important story of transgender romance with levity and nonsense.
Friendship has been equally fruitful. Running the Kabin together for many years, Mavis Riley stood dreaming, while Rita Fairclough rolled her eyes and waited for the papers to be folded. Their chemistry was so effective, real-life comedians Les Dennis and Dustin Gee couldn’t improve on it and simply imitated them for a large chunk of their career as a double act.
Some of the show’s strongest and most striking moments have come when a character crosses from silliness to sorrow. Steve McDonald has evolved from his antics as a tearaway teenager to a rom-com hero, getting married to Karen for a bet before falling in love, to a bereaved father suffering depression.
Equally, Sally Metcalfe’s long crusade to win all available rosettes for Best In Street was put into sharp relief by her breast cancer diagnosis. And the nation wept as the credits rolled silently on the sight of newly widowed Hilda Ogden holding Stan’s glasses case.
It is a testament to the brilliant cast and a lightness of touch in the writing that the story can jump from humour to genuine human suffering and back, often in a single scene.
Moments of high tension are punctuated with a little reassurance of the ridiculous. Think of Mavis asking Ken Barlow to speak at Derek’s funeral, only for Norris Cole to jump up instead for a toe-curling speech that inspired much harrumphing from the congregation. Another time, what began as an intense scene with Todd Grimshaw coming out as gay descended into an unseemly slapstick scrap on the cobbles between Gail Platt and Eileen.
Humour has also always been Corrie’s characters’ most powerful tool to prick any pride, ambitions above one’s station or, even worse, beyond Weatherfield. Vera’s house cladding didn’t get past her neighbours, even when she rebranded Number 9 as “The Old Rectory’. Raquel’s French lessons with Ken were equally fruitless – “Je m’appelle Raquel” was as far as they got. And when Bet Lynch borrowed an expensive dress from Annie Walker for a “do”, she strutted back into the Rovers only to discover she’d spent the evening with it on back to front.
Mavis and Derek’s great plans for garden design were flummoxed when they unknowingly took ownership of a cannabis plant, had to deal with their gnomes being stolen, and then started receiving postcards from them. Les Battersby and Cilla Brown had a romantic night in the hot tub scuppered when Great Dane Schmeichel jumped in and all three fell through the ceiling. More recently, Sally’s pride in her conservatory turned to rage when neighbour Yasmeen upstaged her with an orangery, no less.
These all pale in comparison with Weatherfield’s greatest ever art installation, Hilda’s living room “muriel”, an Alpine landscape she couldn’t wait to show off to open-mouthed guests, Bet Lynch and Annie Walker. “I’ve seen nowt to touch it since Cinerama,” was all Bet could manage, while Mrs Walker politely enquired if she could sit facing away from it, until she “became acclimatised”.
This is Coronation Street at its best, when working-class folk get it wrong, but no one is properly humiliated and all is forgiven. For 60 years these characters and their creators have found wit and delight in the everyday, no matter how preposterous, bizarre, or tragic the plot. And usually, its funniest lines are the simplest.
“I feel like a 16-year-old,” Maureen told Reg after their honeymoon.
“Well you can’t have one, you’re a married woman,” he replied.
Coronation Street’s 60th anniversary special episodes are on ITV on Wednesday and Friday at 7.30pm