Television
Down Coronation Street
By PETER FORSTER To judge from Mr. Derek Hill's ecstatic plug for Coronation Street in last week's Spectator, I have been defaulting in my duty as a citizen by not follow- ing every one of its twice- weekly episodes : 'the most extraordinary phenomenon in the his ory of British popular culture,' he called it, no less, which puts a lot of other things in their place. Mind you, Mr. Hill has a certain knack of getting hold of the wrong end of the stick—as' when, in the first issue of Contrast, he mounted a full-scale attack on Tonight by assailing just that quality of magazine variety which is Tonight's strength. As any member of that good, greying band of brothers would allow, there is a lot that can be said against Tonight, but Mr. Hill did not say it.
Similarly, after reporting for duty in Corona- tion Street last Monday, I am inclined to think that there is much to be said for the series in terms of other value than simple enjoyment, but hardly in the terms employed by Mr. Hill. In- deed, his one criticism is up to typical form: 'The pride in the deftness of the pace . . . is mis- placed.' In fact, it is precisely in the remarkable surge and impetus with which the narrative is kept zig-zagging from house to house along the Street that skill most shows. As for : 'You'll almost feel that these characters live just round the corner'—whose corner? When it comes to 'Coronation Street is consistently wittier, healthier and quite simply better than any of television's supposedly respectable series, not excluding Monitor,' I am still boggling at the chaotic comparison, though grateful to Mr. Hill for the delicious notion of Huw Wheldon and Ena Sharpies competing for the title of Best Character Performer of the Year.
No, it is a good, brisk soap-opera. It is not a work of dramatic art, and has no dramatic depth. It is produced with obvious affectionate sincerity, and has become vogue. The reason for the appeal of its working-class locale can surely be understood by reference to such earlier soap- operas as Mrs. Dale's Diary and The Archers. Mrs. Dale, all middle-class gentility, is rightly broadcast mid-morning and at tea-time, and so has caught the imagination of non-working, middle-class women able to listen; likewise The Archers in the early evening has brought country air to those home from the office. It should sur- prise nobody that television, now the most popular medium with the masses, has made a hit with a working-class formula.
Also the details of observation in Coronation Street are pleasingly exact—as in that dead-right flowered dress worn by the pub landlady last Monday. Detail is also a strong suit with the BBC's Maigret series, not only in the location shooting in Paris but in such studio reconstruc- tions as the Maigrets' bedroom, with its awful, heavy furniture. I still find this series sluggish, and the read-between-the-lines economy of Simenon's style is not for me conveyed by those anti-climactic climaxes or by Rupert Davies's interminable pipe-lighting pauses. And I still can- not be convinced by a Paris full of cockney character actors. But at least Maigret's success shows that there is a market for adventure serials different from the mid-Atlantic formula.
A little desperately, amid the welter of old feature films which (according to Captain Brownrigg, of A-R) are just what the public wants, I tuned in to the BBC's revival of Verneuil's light comedy, Affairs of State, a country-house intrigue, complete with french windows and the Prime Minister on the telephone. Despite camera-work which seemed designed to spare us the sight of the top of Mr. Roland Culver's head, it all came off beautifully, and Miss Zena Walker gave the best rogue-in-porcelain per- formance for years.
Previous page
