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Down Coronation Street
BILL GRUNDY
Question number one: Why does the totally undistinguished remark 'Now the first thing you'll have to do is get that sign above the door changed' stand a fair chance of becom- ing immortal? And if that's too hard, here's an easier one : why are the four words 'Are them fancies fresh?' immortal already? Of course. Because both are quotes from Coronation Street, Granada Tv's long-run- ning serial which has just reached its thousandth episode and shows every sign of going on, like Tennyson's brook, for ever. (lust to put you out of your misery, by the way, the question about the cakes was Ena Sharples's opening outburst, and the remark about the sign above the door was the very first line in the very first programme.) The show has been running for nearly ten years, uninterrupted except for a strike or two. There isn't any overt sex in it, and there isn't any violence. It isn't uproariously funny, and it isn't overwhelmingly slushy. It isn't all that true to life, nor is it all that escapist. Yet its two weekly episodes have vcry sel- dom been anything other than numbers one and two in the Top Ten lists. In this country it attracts audiences of many millions every Monday and Wednesday evening. They watch it in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong (with Chinese sub-titles!), Hol- land, Singapore, Gibraltar, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Greece (who says the Colonels aren't democratic?) and they even tried it for a time in Thailand.
Its stars have been honoured at Buck- ingham Palace, have taken sherry at No. 10 Downing Street, and are mobbed wherever they go. They receive proposals of marriage, threats of violence, condolences foi their fic- tional misfortunes, and one of them was told by a Chancellor of the Exchequer, 'I think you are the sexiest thing on television'. To millions of people in this country they are real; as real as the people next door, and in some cases more so. In other words, Corona- tion Street is a unique.-piece of television and as such is deserving of serious study. It doesn't usually get it. It doesn't get it again this week in a book by Ken Irwin called The Real Coronation Street, published by Corgi at 5s.
Which is not to decry Mr Irwin's efforts. His book is well worth a read. It isn't the standard Crawfie-type piece of showbiz bilge. Mr Irwin, when the Mirror TV critic in Manchester, quite often annoyed Granada and the cast of 'The Street', and I expect his latest offering will get a few hackles rising from time to time. It's really a sort of history of the show and the people connected with it, written in prose that is never purple, sometimes pedestrian, but is generally the readable style of everyday journalism. But, as I said before, it isn't the serious study that such a phenomenon surely deserves. The inter-relation between Coronation Street and its audience(s) ought to provide enough material to keep any sociologist going to the end of his academic life, and incidentally bring that academic life much nearer to real life, whatever that may be.
Coronation Street is popular art. It must be, if only because of the hold it has on so many people of so many classes in so many countries. It has the essential quality of popular art in that it shows things, rather than explores them. It lays out for ex- amination what people know already, enabl- ing them to inspect themselves to some ex- tent and to approve what they see. It might have been admired by Hamlet, who, you will remember, said that the purpose of playing 'both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as lwere, the mirror up to nature'.
That is not, of course, to say that the mir- ror is unflawed. Coronation Street is not the social document that some of its more ardent apologists would claim. It doesn't rain there enough for one thing. Wouldn't the col- oureds have moved in by now? And wouldn't some of the residents have moved out as a result? Are we really quite as good- hearted as the people in the Street generally are? Or as depressing, according to your point of view? Of course, or of course not, again according to your point of view.
Nevertheless the fact remains that the Street, like Mount Everest, is there and has to be accounted for. Analysis isn't easy, but surely one secret of its enduring appeal is that it works on the assumption that all human life is here, in one way or another. And it also assumes that human life is fascinating, in one way or another. Tho,e are not assumptions that would be readily re- jected by newspaper editors, diarists, gossip columnists, novelists from Tolstoy down- wards, and you and me, particularly if it's our lives you're talking about.
And another of the Street's fascinations is precisely that it isn't quite the social docu- ment it is sometimes set up to be. The ex- tremely skilful people who plot it and write it and produce it and play it are well aware that they are producing entertainment first and social comment second. What gives the Street its special quality is the way, over the years, those ingredients have been balanced, in scripts that have generally been well written and almost always well acted. (Snobbishness may be the only reason why one or two of the stars have not been praised far more lavishly in the past. I see far better acting in episodes of the Street than I see in many a serious TV drama or in many an overpraised epic of the live theatre, so often dead.) The Street's strength is that starting from an almost photographic realism, it allows itself a fantastic touch from time to time. But always it sticks to some simple moral rules, rules to which a great part of its audience can relate. 1t shows people themselves, and it takes them out of themselves. Which sounds to me very much like a formula for ever.
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