Coronation Street
By DEREK HILL eNSTEAD of draping wards with pictures of ISanta Claus, hospital sisters in different parts of the country have been hanging up pictures of Coronation Street and its inhabitants,' reports TV Times in an issue containing an eight-page supplement on the Street and a promise of eight more pages next week, which will include an astrologer's forecast of `what the stars have in store for Ena and her neighbours.' Ena Sharples is now the second best-known lady in the land. When Violet Carson, who plays the part, went to Blackpool to switch on the illuminations, handkerchiefs fluttered from fields and gardens, people lined the city route and a crowd of 6,000 jammed the ceremony. When Elsie Tanner (Patricia Phoenix) opened a shop in Leeds, crush barriers and mounted police had to be used, and the story was on the front page of the News of the World.
Coronation Street goes into seven-and-a-half million homes. It has an audience of between twenty-two and twenty-three million twice a week. One of its two instalments almost always tops TAM's programme ratings of the week, with the other instalment seldom below third or fourth place. The team responsible find them- selves growing belligerent when they see people out in the street between seven-thirty and eight on Mondays and Wednesdays. And they have taken note that the record ,audience of thirty million for the Royal Command Variety Per- formance indicates that they can still find their way into another two-and-a-half-million homes.
The rise of Coronation Street from an affec- tionately regarded local serial (which several areas, including London, initially did not net- work) to the most extraordinary phenomenon in the history of British popular culture has oc- curred in just over a year. The ratings have now been consistent for about three months and show no signs of falling off. The most obvious reason for the programme's success is the almost ecstatic degree of recognition and identification which it allows. Derek Granger, the producer, claims that it is the first wholly working-class saga, that where similar serials are fundamentally authoritarian Coronation Street keeps the authorities at bay. It speaks, he says, `in a demotic accent in a wholly democratic world.' It is entirely free from patronage, largely be- cause it is the work of people with enough ex- perience of Northern working-class life to love its qualities, not with the thin-blooded theoretical approval of so many intellectuals, but with the kind of relish which only comes from experience.
Coronation Street is written and produced without any of the cynicism so evident in most of its competitors. None of its characters are designed to be typical or average. What audi- ences recognise and respond to so passionately are the familiar elements in the particular. A conscious attempt at creating an `ordinary' per- son inevitably creates a fictional stereotype. But' an individual slattern or gossip can provoke im- mediate recognition.
At a time when community feeling is rapidly disappearing, a large part of Coronation Street's appeal is undoubtedly its almost nostalgic sense of group interdependence. Many letters from viewers have such a `those-were-the-days' flavour about them that the production team have been worried that the programme might be too old- fashioned. Certainly there's a blitz-like com- panionship among Coronation Street's inhabi- tants. The overall theme, after all, is people's general desire to improve their lot during a period of social upheaval, and the sense of being all in it together to some extent overlooks the fact that this present state of flux is marked by a more individual and even competitive striving than ever before.
The loss left by the dwindling sense of to- getherness may be unconscious, but it is exactly this loss, which is twice a week filled by Coro- nation Street. And the fulfilment lasts much longer than the two half-hours the viewers spend in this snug world. Gossip about their own neighbours can be and often is replaced by speculation about these new nationally shared neighbours. Watch Coronation Street often enough and you'll almost feel that these charac- ters do live just around the corner. Almost, but not quite. For they share a larger-than-life quality which the team believes is the second principal reason for the mass delight in the pro- gramme. `Originally,' says Granger, `the charac- ters were more naturalistic, more dour, and the pace was slower. But there's been a kind of or- ganic change. The cast have undergone a process of fantastication, and the whole thing has be- come more nimble.'
One striking thing about the characters is that for all their faults, often realistic enough to be irritating, , they remain extraordinarily sym- pathetic. There isn't a villain among the lot. Audiences can be critical of aspects of each character's behaviour, yet they're never against any of them.
And with this concentration on the essential good-naturedness of everybody goes a cautious excision of the boring and routine. As a result, life seems a bit pell-mell in Coronation Street. There's always something going on, and as often as not it has to do with,some kind of unneces- sary secret or misunderstanding which a moment's frankness could have cleared up in no time. The pride in the deftness of the pace, echoed in the rather glib attempts at imitation film-cutting between scenes, is misplaced, for Coronation Street, like Hancock, can be at its best when next to nothing is going on. At present the programme seems inclined to rely upon incident and plot development, and there's only a tentative awareness that the `boring' aspects of living which are so carefully pruned can themselves contain a limitless amount of drama and humour.
Coronation Street isn't in Salford or Stock- port or Blackburn, though it might just as well be. In it, or around the corner, are seven terrace houses, a secondary modern school, a cafd, a draper's, a church; a- pub, a raincoat factory, a cinema, a fish-and-chip shop, a mission hall and a corner shop. `You could do a history of the entire human race with that lot,' says Granger. The characters have a Dickensian variety and complexity which allows for endless permuta- tions in their relationships, and everyone con- cerned with the programme is hugely possessive about them all. Granger recalls the occasion when a new writer had Elsie Tanner behave a little laxly. `How dare you speak about her like that?' thundered voices around the conference table. 'Generous-hearted she may be, but loose- living? Never!'
The first twelve episodes were by Tony Warren, a twenty-four-year-old Granada staff writer who had been urging the idea, the location and the characters on the company for some time. Since then more than twenty-five writers have con- tributed scripts, but Warren is the one person indispensable to the series. He was, he says, 'an upper-working-class baby in a sunshine semi.' A colleague, searching for a description, remarked that he would make Firbank seem square.
No one behind Coronation Street ever tries to feed the public what they seem to want. The first requirement is that the writers themselves love what they are doing. Granger, a former theatre critic of the Financial Times, declares that nothing he has ever done has given him the sheer pleasure of Coronation Street. `We are all besotted with it to an almost disgusting degree,' he says.
He hopes that the quality of the writing, already superior to any rival series, can be im- proved still further, and mentions plans to see that the characters are more firmly in touch with contemporary affairs. The danger, as he points out, is that topical comment might seem to come from the writers rather than from the characters. As it is, Kenneth Barlow has already been on two CND demonstrations, and there have been agreeably rude remarks about Sunday newspapers and even detergent commercials.
Intellectuals generally pay their tributes to popular culture only when the examples they select are dead or dying. When anything is as impudently alive and kicking as Coronation Street, `popular' becomes a dirty word. It would be sad if the Clancy Sigals (`TV is a tragedy) and Doris Lessings (The monster is too strong for the best of us') made us ignore the break- through which is under our noses until some future Hoggart resurrects it in fifty years' time for respectful minority nostalgia. For Corona- tion Street is consistently wittier, healthier and quite simply better than any of television's sup- posedly respectable series, not excluding Monitor. And I'm not sure that it isn't even mare sophisticated.
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