Any second you may suddenly disappear
Robert Cooper
SECRETS OF THE STREET by Lynne Perrie
Blake Publishing, £14.99, pp. 297 Soap addicts are a loyal breed. I know because I am one — but only as far as Coronation Street is concerned. So is my mother, my jet-setting younger brother (video pre-set never to miss an episode), another two older brothers, a sister-in-law and a four-year-old daughter. A family telephone call quite often begins, 'Isn't it awful?'; not the prelude to a domestic cri- sis but a reference to an especially high- octane episode of the Street. Daughter apart, we sat down to watch the first episode on Friday 9 December 1960 and have been watching ever since. Allowing for holidays, power cuts and the Equity strike of 1961, I reckon I have spent three months solid glued to the Street. I have tried to wean myself off it, with doses of EastEnders and Brookside, but time and again I return to the addictive agonies and ecstasies of Weatherfield. Why the compulsion? The combination of continuity of story-line and brilliance of script has kept the Street ahead from the word go. Ken Barlow, the Street's intellec- tual, is the sole survivor from day one, apart that is from myself, my mother, aforementioned brothers etc. The on-off saga of Ken and his wife Deirdre, both long since separated, kept us chair-bound for weeks. Would she, wouldn't she go off with the cockney wide boy, Mike Baldwin? On the night she finally gave Baldwin the heave-ho, Manchester United (the home team) was playing at Old Trafford. This of course was before pre-set videos. To the cheering crowds, the scoreboard flashed up the news everyone longed to hear: DEIRDRE AND KEN UNITED AGAIN. The tabloids have always loved the Street, either revealing in advance a forthcoming drama (usually a violent death as yet another character is written out of the plot) or revelling in the often seedy real lives of the actors who play the leading roles. Exits have changed a good deal since those early monochrome days (when the Friday episode went out live). Martha Longhurst was, if I remember rightly, the first to go. She collapsed in the Snug at the Rover's Return, with Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell looking on. Departures have grown more subtle and drawn.out since. One of the most recent was Ivy Tilsley, played by Lynne Perrie, Who had been on the Street 23 years. The tabloids had a field day with 'Poison Ivy'. — or was it Lynne Perrie?— had had a face-lift which left her looking, in her own Words, 'like I'd gone ten rounds with Frank Idruab'. Viewers complained at her appear- ance and Granada TV decided Ivy's tune Was up. In one of the drama's more inge- ruous retirements, the Street's Catholic has now been sent off on retreat, probably lever to return. Thanks to advance notice itt the tabloids, we all knew it was coming. Miss Perrie, however, did not take the mat- ter kindly, and a court case followed. Now she is getting her own back with the Publication of her autobiography, written With two Sun journalists to help set the tone, The sticker on the front cover says The book they couldn't ban'. Would that they had. This thinly veiled attempt at .sensationalism is little more than a blow- bY-blow account of the state of her knickers (Yes, I'm sorry too) over a number of years: 011' oft bp, down, half-mast. Unlike her rather sanctimonious character, the real Miss Perrie is a right old hell-raiser. She drinks, she gambles (I've blown £250,000), she does unspeakable things with men any- where, any time, any place (the top deck of a bus sticks in the mind).
Like the real Ivy, her life has had its miseries. Her son is HIV positive, she has had a battle against the bottle. Her hus- band — to whom she has been married for 44 years, by all accounts in less than wed- ded bliss — makes her grumpy on-screen husband Don seem a positive dreamboat, no mean feat. But the reader's response to all this is numbed by the incessant barrage of intimate revelations with very few details spared. Lynne Perrie is infinitely less inter- esting than the pugnacious Ivy she has por- trayed so brilliantly. More's the pity chuck.
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